Since Alan Hudson took on the role of Executive Director at Global Integrity, one of the things at the top of his list has been to lead the process of reviewing and revising our strategy. There’s more work to be done, but we’re headed in the direction of building on our core competence – our innovative, systematic and rigorous approach to generating high-quality data about governance – to develop an approach to working with country-level partners to facilitate country-level learning for country-level action. This will entail the following three elements:
- Cross-country research, including governance assessments, to generate data that will inform and stimulate learning and discussions about policy options at country-level;
- Working with partners at the country-level to facilitate learning processes that are designed to engage with, and to help shape, the country’s political dynamics;
- Working with partners to feed the findings from our cross-country research and in-country engagement into policy processes at national, regional and international levels.
An important element of developing and implementing our revised strategy will be to work out how we can build on a number of areas of work where Global Integrity already makes a distinctive and valuable contribution to the open governance agenda.
Our Annual Report sets out the various things we have done in the 12 months to March 2015. On the research side, this includes projects focused on money in politics, open government, fiscal governance in Mexico, and assessing governance across Africa and throughout the USA. On the policy and advocacy side, we’ve been engaged on issues including open government, learning and adaptation, measuring governance and integrity, the post-2015 development framework and open data. And on the software side, we’ve been learning about the challenges of making civic tech sustainable.
In future years, our Annual Reports will be a key element of the process through which we reflect on the implementation of our strategy – what we do, how we do it and what results we’re achieving. For now, our Annual Report – setting out where we are – provides an essential complement to our strategy thinking. Next up, how we’re going to get from where we are to where we want to be.