Availability: Public consultation data

The following indicator is under consideration for this pilot edition of the Barometer: To what extent is public consultation information available as open data?

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Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g. attending an office to inspect it)

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL for where this data can be found

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL for where this data can be found

Elements

Part 1: Data structure and openness.

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

• Relevant notice and policy documents are available as a docket or collection in conjunction with the specific regulation. (No, Partially, Yes) Relevant documents include, for example, notice of intent, justification, proposed regulation, supporting documents, final regulation.

Part 2: Data fields and quality assessment.

• The data includes notices of intent. (No, Partially, Yes)

• The data includes proposed regulations. (No, Partially, Yes)

• The data includes a full set of public comments generated through public consultation processes. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Are comments available for downloading in bulk, via an API or other means?

• The data includes reasoned responses to public comments. (No, Partially, Yes)

• The data includes final regulations and justifications. (No, Partially, Yes)

• The data includes details of challenges to regulations that have passed through public consultation processes, as well as the results of these challenges. (No, Partially, Yes)

Part 3: Barriers to data availability or quality.

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where a separate indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information, your local knowledge, and any broader research you may have done for this theme.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

• The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for all, or most, localities.
  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

Increasingly, countries draw on public consultation processes to inform law- and rulemaking. In practice, not all implementations of these processes have lived up to expectations. This indicator focuses specifically on the availability of data that public consultation processes for executive rulemaking—including regulations, bylaws, and rules, sometimes known collectively as secondary legislation—generate.

Such data includes the relevant regulations and comments themselves as well as administrative data regarding the performance of a country's public consultation processes. Such administrative data may be required by law or simply provided by governments as part of good practice.

To assess the performance of a public consultation process, data should include notice of intent, comments, and the various drafts of the regulation under consultation, as well as information on: number of comments submitted; the provision of reasoned responses; and challenges to regulations that have undergone public consultation processes and the results of these challenges.

Note: Countries may also use public consultation processes in conjunction with parliamentary legislation or proposed projects, particularly extractive projects with likely environmental impacts. If your country doesn't use public consultation processes in conjunction with regulatory matters, but does for projects or parliamentary legislation, please explain this briefly in the free text justification and assess here the dataset that applies to project-based or legislative public consultation.

In some countries, national public consultation processes for rulemaking are run through a unified system, while in others such processes are run by individual executive agencies. If there are multiple forms of public consultation processes operating under different frameworks, you should focus your assessment on the most common domestic form.

If there are notable variations in the assessment you would make for other common forms of public consultation processes, please briefly comment on this in the free text justification.

Research Guidance

Starting points

• Sources:

  • Reports published by a broader registrar's office, reports from individual agencies that engage with public consultation processes. (Note: some countries provide different sets of data through a broader registrar's office and individual agencies.)
  • National statistical offices or the appropriate governmental agency that houses statistical information.

• Consult:

  • Government officials who manage public consultation processes for their agency or department.
  • Officers of civil society organizations that actively mobilize public comments.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• How is the data organized? Is there a docket or similar mechanism for coordinating disparate types of data all related to the same piece of regulation?
• What information does the data provide? For example, does it include notice of intent, proposed regulations, public comments, reasoned responses, final regulations and justification, challenges?
• Are the comments available for downloading in bulk? For example, through an API or other mechanism?
• Is there evidence of missing data, assessed first against the related governance framework, if that exists, or in the context of the datasets in front of you?
• Is there evidence that the availability of this data was affected by COVID-19?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries public consultation processes have been established by individual states, regions, or cities, and consequently administrative data about their performance may be published at various levels of government.

To assess countries where public consultation processes are organized sub-nationally, researchers should analyze the administrative data associated with the strongest examples of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice.

Indicator Justification

Fundamental to democracy is the authority of the public and the involvement of the public in the act of governing, through voting as well as other forms of political participation. Public participation is well-recognized under international law as a fundamental human right, articulated in detail, for example, by the UN OHCHR in Guidelines for States on the Effective Implementation of the Right To Participate in Public Affairs (2018). Increasingly, as the OECD’s 2020 Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave details, such political participation includes public consultation in law- or rulemaking processes. Public consultation on law- or rulemaking aligns with SDG 16.7, and is a component within Transparency International’s decision-making dimension of political integrity.

As with right-to-information frameworks, public consultation frameworks fundamentally govern flows of information between members of a public and public officials. Similarly as well, it's important to collect and publish performance data on public consultation practices to assess their efficacy.