Open Recovery, Open Renewal.
That is the slogan of this year's Open Government Partnership Global Summit that kicked off on Wednesday hosted by South Korea in its capital Seoul.

"The mission of the 2021 OGP Global Summit is achieving recovery from COVID-19, and renewal beyond COVID-19. I believe recovery and renewal can be accomplished through the values of open government."

"The world is now faced with new challenges and adaptations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so I believe the summit is timely and will be the starting point for open recovery and open renewal through stronger alliance and cooperation between the government and communities."

"Open Government Partnership started with 8 founding members ten years ago now it has 78 member countries and thousands of civil societies. AND this year's summit was the first to be held online and in-person with more than 200 speakers."

Through 3 Plenary Sessions starting with Civic Space and Public Participation, then Anti-Corruption, and ending with Inclusive Digital Innovation representatives from governments and civil societies are sharing their achievements in open government so far.
In addition special sessions were held on the second day of the Summit which included "Recovery and Renewal from COVID-19 with experts in the field urging for a collective response to end the pandemic.

"It will cost the high income countries four to five trillion dollars in GDP if we are not equitable in the distribution of vaccine and the final consequence is biological and we are seeing this play out right now.
Failure to control pandemics generates mutants that will undermine the efficacy of vaccines like Delta and now like Omicron."

Another session was the Youth Summit and young leaders from around the world suggested ways for governments to allow citizens to have access to more information. Through talks like these the OGP in the last ten years have been able to co-create over 4-thousand open government reforms while narrowing the distance between communities and government and pushing against the rise of authoritarian and populist politics.

"The goal is to advance transparency and accountability, bolster citizens, engagement and harness new technologies to help strengthen governance. Today, those objectives are more important than ever."

The Summit will end late Friday night in South Korea.
All the talks can be watched in real-time or at a later date on OGP's Youtube channel.
Kim Do-yeon, Arirang News.

Reporter : tkim@arirang.com