By Soren Kirk Jensen, Senior Advisor, CoST

Nordic and Baltic OGP Member Meeting in Edinburgh

On April 30, a group of Nordic and Baltic OGP member countries convened in Edinburgh to share lessons about fiscal openness, including around infrastructure investments. This event represents an opportunity to reflect on the outcomes of five years of engagement with the Scottish Government around this issue. This serves as a good example of a process where CoST tools and standards have been impactful, even though the government has not yet signed up for CoST membership.

CoST’s Engagement in High-Income Countries

Initial Efforts and Research

In 2016, CoST embarked on an effort to understand the usefulness of its standards, tools, and approaches in high-income countries. CoST had previously found most traction in developing and emerging economies, posing a challenge given the universal scope of risks and challenges in delivering public infrastructure projects.

Case Study of Scotland

Among other countries, Scotland was chosen as a case study. The resulting research, published in July 2018, found that Scotland disclosed significant levels of data for projects with a threshold above £20 million in line with the CoST infrastructure data standard but less for projects below this threshold. Moreover, the data was scattered across various systems and sites, making it hard to access and understand. These factors reduced the quality of transparency as they limited the extent to which it could inform meaningful stakeholder engagement.

Findings and Recommendations

The study also found that while the Scottish government was committed to stakeholder engagement, it was not systematic and depended entirely on the project owner. Hence, participation was not considered to go much further than mere information sharing. One area where Scotland performed excellently was its comprehensive, long-term strategic planning vision for infrastructure development. This was reinforced shortly after the publication of the case study through the establishment of the Infrastructure Commission.

The case study presented a number of recommendations, which were subject to discussion with different stakeholders in the months following its publication. As often is the case with policy changes, it took time before real uptake could be noticed. However, it established a strong benchmark for continued engagement. A strong partnership was also forged with CoST’s strategic partner, the Open Government Partnership (OGP), in Scotland. An early spinoff came when CoST was invited to give testimony at an evidence session with the Scottish Parliament in March 2019.

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, engagement slowed down. However, in April 2021, things picked up as a long-standing dialogue was initiated between CoST and the Infrastructure & Investment Division of the Scottish Exchequer, at the behest of OGP Scotland. This coincided with high-level developments such as the Infrastructure Commission having concluded its work, the publication of a new Infrastructure Investment Plan for 2022-2026, and Scotland’s third OGP Action Plan 2021-2025 with a commitment to fiscal openness and transparency.

Key Developments

Within the Infrastructure and Investment Division, a key development was the lowering of the threshold for projects included in regular reporting from £20 million to £5 million in line with the recommendations of the case study. This resulted in significantly expanded coverage of projects for which data is regularly disclosed.

Scottish Government’s Infrastructure Investment Plan, February 2021: “We newly propose to lower the reporting threshold to £5 million for projects and £20 million for programs to provide even greater transparency… These changes are being made in response to efforts to further enhance the transparency of our reporting. In doing so, we have been guided by international best practice, including the recommendations of CoST and the OECD.”

Ongoing Dialogue and Future Steps

Key Issues

Dialogue with the Infrastructure and Investment Division has since revolved around the following key issues:

1. Developing participatory approaches and multi-stakeholder engagement to improve and standardize approaches across infrastructure teams, feeding into the engagement process for the first Infrastructure Needs Assessment approach.
2. Reviewing existing infrastructure data collection, looking for improvements and how to link this with commitments to fiscal transparency under the OGP action plan.
3. Systematizing data and using it in the project prioritization and appraisal/evaluation process.

Katherine White, Deputy Director, Infrastructure & Investment Division, Scottish Government: “Scotland’s approach to infrastructure continuously aims to learn from, and apply, international best practice. Since 2018, CoST’s approach on Disclosure, Assurance, Social Accountability and Multi-Stakeholder Working has helped to shape the improvement program for infrastructure planning and delivery in Scotland. Through the Open Government Partnership and CoST’s participation in the Planning, Infrastructure and Place Advisory Group in Scotland, we are strengthening international connections and drawing on CoST expertise to enhance the approach Scotland will take to developing and reporting on its long-term infrastructure priorities and projects.”

CoST’s Role in OGP Fiscal Commitment Advisory Group

In parallel, CoST joined the OGP fiscal commitment advisory (later oversight) group. The advice provided was aligned with the ongoing dialogue with the Infrastructure and Investment Division and resulted in some of the details of the fiscal openness commitment drawing on CoST core features such as improvements in structuring, standardization, and visualization of infrastructure investment data and development of a multi-stakeholder approach to inform long-term development as well as developing the next Infrastructure Needs Assessment. It was also decided to use infrastructure expenditure in a pilot for the new fiscal transparency platform.

Audit Scotland Report, September 2023: “The Scottish Government should ensure that its public reporting on infrastructure projects allows consistent monitoring of individual projects and programs, including the benefits associated with them and where costs or timescales have increased.”

Current Status and Future Discussions

Efforts continue to implement the OGP commitments and strengthen infrastructure data disclosure. To sustain the advice provided, an update of the level of infrastructure transparency in Scotland was undertaken in April 2024. This exercise, with certain limitations in scope, indicates that the level of transparency remains high albeit with a slight decline and lack of progress on publishing the few key missing data points. More importantly, there remains a stubbornly high level of fragmentation of the data. Still, with almost full availability of the data points required for proactive disclosure, Scotland represents a lighthouse in terms of infrastructure transparency. However, efforts remain to be made in improving the accessibility and usability of the data to improve the extent to which the data can be effectively used to inform stakeholder engagement and accountability.

Upcoming OGP Nordic+ Meeting

These issues will be discussed at the OGP Nordic+ meeting in Edinburgh at the end of the month, serving as inspiration for Nordic and Baltic countries as well as existing and new members of OGP local on how to strengthen infrastructure governance.