Open contracting around the globe – a webinar series of best practice

A webinar series showcasing open contracting case studies of turning public procurement into a digital, data-driven government service driving accountability, competition, innovation, and sustainability.

Please join GW Law School’s Government Procurement Law Program and the Open Contracting Partnership for a three-part webinar series on open contracting around the world. 

The series, led by some of the world’s leading experts, will examine how different nations have implemented the principles of open contracting to turn public procurement into a data-driven, user-friendly, digital public service. We will share how to engage stakeholders across government, business and civil society to collaborate on reforms, ensure procurement data is machine-readable and fully publicly available, and publish open data & create tools to drive systematic change. 

To accommodate different time zones around the world, the series will proceed in three parts: 1) Asia and Oceania, 2) Americas, and 3) Europe/Africa. Each session will be approximately 90 minutes.

Additional reading and resources

Open contracting is about publishing and using open, accessible and timely information on public contracting to engage citizens and businesses to fix problems and deliver results.

Please review the following resources for an introduction to what open contracting is and its impact.

About open contracting and the Open Contracting Data Standard 

• A quickstart guide to open contracting and how we think different about public procurement. 
• A guide to on implementing open contracting approaches into their legislation to modernize public procurement, supporting reforms that put transparency, efficiency, and equity at its core.
• A video series introducing the Open Contracting Data Standard and the key use cases for implementing open contracting data. 

Benefits and impact of open contracting interventions

The Skeptic’s Guide by the Open Government Partnership provides a summary of the benefits of open contracting interventions. 

For country case studies, review OCP’s impact stories.

Evidence of the results emerging from open contracting interventions. Some highlights:

A study of more than 3.5 million government contracts across Europe shows that publishing more information about contracts decreases the risk of single bid tenders. This matters because single bid contracts are both a governance risk and are over 7% more expensive. Publishing five more pieces of information about each tender would save Europe up to 3.6 billion Euros.

A World Bank survey of 34,000 companies in 88 countries found that competition was higher and kickbacks were fewer and smaller in places where transparent procurement, independent complaint procedures and external auditing are in place.

The U4 finds that greater domestic competition on procurement markets and greater transparency is likely to improve economic welfare.

Open contracting generally aims to centralize and digitize procurement processes, creating greater reliability and integrity by distancing decision-makers from bidders as well as creating efficiencies of scale by combining the collective buying power of governments. Allowing commercial entities to have access to the entire catalogue of available tenders creates obvious advantages as far as competition goes. It levels the playing field, reducing the advantages of incumbency as established players lose their ability to obtain new contracts by capitalizing on existing relationships with officials, writes Michael Karanicolas in The Costs of Secrecy: Economic Arguments for Transparency in Public Procurement.

This expert report by the Center for Global Development covers evidence of reduced prices, increased competition and better services when contracting is opened up.

The case studies featured in our series include: 

• The Philippines has introduced some of the most ambitious open government commitments, delivering exceptionally strong early results. These commitments have spread citizen participatory audits, enhanced good governance at the local level, and boosted transparency in the extractives sector.
• Indonesia’s auditors are using data-driven oversight to clean up its corruption-prone procurement sector, halving rejection rate of complaints submitted by citizens and increasing cases resolved and response times. 
• In Uganda, a systemic reform designed to change the legal framework, build entrepreneur capacity, improve data, and advocate for greater awareness of the problem and interventions is improving access for women businesses and a citizen monitoring system integrates citizen monitors into the public procurement process.
• Rwanda’s new open contracting portal is promoting effective and inclusive procurement, as well as addressing red flags to increase integrity. 
• In México, Nuevo León infrastructure projects are now more transparent and more competitive leading to a transformation of its e-procurement system. 
• The Dominican Republic is using open data, better processes & collaboration to fight corruption, monitoring all procurement processes carried out using the country’s electronic procurement system in real-time using 21 targeted red flags. It has debarred more than 60 suppliers for violations, and reduced unresolved complaints and canceled tenders.
• In Chile, a community of civic actors used open data as evidence to advocate for change, and a new law was introduced that allowed the country’s biggest medicine buyer to deal directly with private pharmacies and cap retail prices. This slashed the agency’s drug spending and saved the government over $9 million in the first year. Savings are now directly passed on to citizens. Its fully public “Public Contracting Observatory” service detects, prevents, and fixes irregularities in government contracting procedures. 
• In Lithuania, levels of green procurement uptake across Lithuanian public institutions have increased to 94% by value and 93% by total procedures within two years implementing open contracting strategies. 
• Following the UK’s Procurement Act, the government is structuring new notices, adding identifiers, and bringing all the information together on a central digital platform. Vital information for looking at patterns of competition and fairness is now being collected for the first time.