2017 was a challenging year for champions of open governance, including for those of us enduring at close quarters the democratic reversals and increasingly closed governance of a Trump-led US administration. Political transitions and turbulence around the world have posed challenges to the open governance agenda, including in several of the founding members of the Open Government Partnership. There have also been, not unrelatedly, growing questions about whether and how open governance can help to address poverty, inequality and social marginalization, and the day-to-day problems that people face as a result. And, more parochially, the challenge of working out whether and how organizations such as ours – working on global development issues, from a base in the US – can most effectively support progress towards more open governance in far away places, remains.

In 2017, Global Integrity stepped up to meet each of these challenges head on, both through our work in particular countries and through our global advocacy.

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