Countering Illiberal Influences through Open Government
Monday, September 12, 2022
Around the world, authoritarian governments are mounting a persistent challenge to liberal democracies and institutions by compromising political parties, spreading disinformation, and exerting pressure through secretive loans and investment deals.
Against this backdrop, the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) produced a series of three policy briefs identifying concrete openness and oversight measures that governments can use to build resilience against covert, foreign-sponsored influences. OGP members can use these briefs as guides to develop future action plan commitments to strengthen the resilience of their national systems.
- Foreign political finance brief: Covert foreign political finance is often secretly channeled to parties and candidates through proxies to interfere in political and electoral processes. This brief was developed in partnership with Transparency International.
- Foreign debt opacity brief: Global sovereign debt is at a 50-year record high. Opaque lending arrangements often use national wealth and public goods as collateral, creating preferential treatment for authoritarian governments.
- Foreign-sponsored disinformation brief: Foreign-sponsored disinformation operations have become a feature of political life around the world and a threat multiplier in other domains.