Publish What You Pay Indonesia, EITI Indonesia Secretariat, and Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs attended OGP Openness in Natural Resources Working Group Peer Exchange (ONWRG) in Madrid-Spain, October 4-5, 2016. This peer exchange aimed to brainstorm and share ideas, tools and material around transparency and accountability in natural resources; identify needs and ways to create an environment for the release and use of natural resources open data on government platform; strengthening capacity and share on how members can addres challenges in Open Government Partnership (OGP); as well as discuss next steps for ONRWG, new commitment cycle and focus for 2017. The workshop was attended by Government and Civil Societies from around 7 countries who has involved in the working groups included Indonesia, Meksiko, UK, Colombia, Tunisia, Liberia and US.
The workshop was started by sharing OGP commitment in the area of natural resources and open data, mains challenges and the solutions which offered among countries on addressing the problem to maximize the impacts. Three mains issues which discussed in the sessions were : (1) open contracting; (2) environmental disclosure; and (3) beneficial ownership transparency. Then, in the last sessions, there are tools sharing in open data-principle/charter and its utilize in the natural resources and environmental sectors. Maryati Abdullah, National Coordinator of Publish What You Pay Indonesia shared Indonesia’s experience on how EITI working groups worked on mainstreaming the beneficial ownership transparency (which also endorsed by EITI standard) into the national policy and Government’s agenda to maximize the state revenue and tax collections.
In generally, the lessons learnts from the peer exchange workshop tell us on how important of enabling environment on freedom/access to information and civic engagement to enforce the openness commitment in the natural resources on addressing the land, forest and environment problems to mitigate climate change for achieving sustainable development. Where, the OGP and Open Data platform can be used to accelerate and enlarge the quality of engagement and reform in the natural resources governance improvement. Last but not least, the workshop recommended for each countries to work on country level priorities (such us contract disclosure, beneficial ownership transparenc, and environmental disclosure) which giving opportunity to improve the quality of public participation and civic engagement – including utilization of open data platform in openness of the natural resources commitment. The participant also committed to continue peer exchange and sharing the skill and learning on improving the natural resources governance through OGP Open Working Group on Natural Resources.