Description
“Open Government” is known to play a growing role in making governments more transparent by publishing data related for instance to statistics, public finance, or votes at the Assembly. Considering the circulation of knowledge and the new transnational social spaces built around it, “Open government” can be seen as a new transnational “issue area”. As we will show by focusing on the “Open Government Partnership”, a transnational mechanism launched in 2011, professionals and organizations from various fields (computing, human rights, public finance, etc.) are claiming expertise on this issue. Through a double case study of OGP reforms in Argentina and Tunisia, based on observations and interviews in both countries and during global OGP meetings, we will show that OGP actually consists in a new form of transnational governmentality that bypasses traditional mechanisms of representation to redefine it around three groups of “reformers”: researchers, government, civil society. Looking at the process of definition and evaluation of “OGP commitments” made at local and national levels, we will show that OGP is a new form of expertise that allows transnational “apolitical” elite groups to get a seat at the government’s table and to strongly engage in reforms.
