On October 2, 2018, Tbilisi City Hall approved the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Action Plan for 2018-2020. This is the second action plan approved by Tbilisi under the OGP sub-national pilot program, which includes 14 other cities around the world.

The First Action Plan

Tbilisi City Hall approvedits first Action Plan in 2017 with five commitments:

- Multi-Purpose Mechanism of Open Government and Civic Participation – Information and Civic Activities Portal (Smart Map)

- E-Petitions in Tbilisi Municipality

- Participatory Budget Planning Mechanism

- Interactive Accessibility to Budget Spending and Introduction of Civic Control Mechanisms

- Civic Control and Accessibility Mechanisms for Municipal Services

Unfortunately, most of these commitments were not fulfilled. IDFI was actively involved in developing the first and second action plans. Introduction of e-petitions was originally suggested by IDFI and later successfully implemented with the organization’s involvement. The E-Petition’s Portal is up and running, allowing citizens to raise initiatives and vote on them.

The Second Action Plan (2018-2020)

Tbilisi City Hall began working on the second OGP action plan in 2018. To this end, the city hall set up a 24 member working group, half of which were representatives of civil society and donor organizations. The process of elaboration of the action plan included several workshops were the City Hall, non-governmental and international organizations presented and discussed their initiatives.

The resulting document is composed of five commitments, some of which were carried over from the first action plan:

- Multi-Purpose Mechanism of Open Government and Civic Participation – Information and Civic Activities Portal (Smart Map)

This commitment involves creating a multi-purpose web-portal with an interactive map that will inform citizens about ongoing works / activities in the city and enable them to provide feedback.

- Participatory Budget Planning Mechanism

The commitment involves creating a web-portal that informs citizens about the municipal budget and its priorities, and enables them to participate in budget planning and vote on individual priorities.

- Mechanism for Improving Citizen Engagement and Municipal Service Accessibility

The commitment involves creating a web-application displaying the most commonly used electronic municipal services. At the initial stage, the web-application will include services of the City Hall’s Environmental, Transport and Supervision Departments.

- Tbilisi Municipal Strategy for Integrity and Transparent Governance

Initiated by the USAID Good Governance Initiative (GGI), the commitment involves the elaboration of transparency, accountability and integrity standards by Tbilisi City Hall in the form of a strategy. The City Hall will also elaborate and implement an action plan aimed at promoting integrity and transparent governance in its system.

- Improving E-Transparency in Tbilisi City Hall

Initiated by IDFI, the commitment involves improving e-transparency of the City Hall by: 1. updating its website based on a concept developed by IDFI with the support of Open Society Foundation; 2. updating the City Hall’s public information webpage in order to simplify access to information; and 3. creating an open data webpage that will offer public information held by Tbilisi City Hall in a machine-readable format.

IDFI welcomes the approval of the 2018-2020 Action Plan and urges Tbilisi City Hall to take into account the challenges that arose during the implementation of the previous action plan. Strict adherence to the deadlines set by the second action plan will be crucial in ensuring the effectiveness of the implementation process.