Tackling climate change and the associated environmental crisis is one of the most significant challenges facing governments, who must demonstrate their ability to meet complex, interconnected and long-term policy challenges, including negotiating difficult trade-offs. To ensure the efficient and effective implementation of the proposed responses, it is necessary to rethink modes of governance by demonstrating innovative approaches at all levels of government, enabling greater transparency in public action and meaningful public engagement to create consensus and secure the support of as many people as possible.
The growing interest in citizen participation in responding to environmental challenges resonates with the OECD's long-standing work on open government as a means of strengthening the relationship between citizens and their governments, improving the design and delivery of public policies and services, ensuring citizen engagement, and enhancing the legitimacy of decision-making and government accountability. The integrated implementation of open government principles – transparency, accountability, and citizen and stakeholder participation – has the potential to bring the green transition within reach of citizens and stakeholders, thereby enabling understanding and ownership of the issues as well as active participation and contributing more broadly to society's resilience to climate change and its consequences.
At both national and local levels, governments are realising the importance of actively involving citizens and stakeholders in the design and implementation of reforms to ensure a fair and equitable green transition. The importance of informing and involving citizens has also been emphasised in several international frameworks supporting climate action, such as the Paris Agreement, the Aarhus Convention and the Escazú Agreements.
The report Open Government for the Green Transition: Panorama of Practices Towards Meaningful Citizen Participation provides governments with a set of practical reform levers to support their efforts for change. Developed in cooperation with the French Development Agency (AFD), it serves as a collection of good practices identified in OECD member and partner countries, demonstrating how open government practices are being mobilised to truly (re)engage citizens in the green transition. Through initiatives aimed at improving access to environmental information and green open data, the strategic use of public communication drawing on innovative practices and tools, and a wide variety of citizen participation mechanisms and processes deployed at various levels of government – from global to micro-local – this report highlights the opportunities and levers to activate throughout the policy cycle to ensure meaningful citizen participation in the green transition, promote full ownership of the issues and the responses provided, and empower citizens to become key actors in the transition.
The practices highlighted throughout this report serve a dual purpose: on one hand, to showcase particularly innovative initiatives in the area of citizen participation related to the green agenda, helping to identify key success factors; on the other hand, they are intended to inspire other actors (governments, civil society, citizens, donors) to implement similar initiatives in a variety of contexts, thereby contributing to the dissemination of successful experiences.
This report is part of the OECD's Reinforcing Democracy Initiative (RDI). It is at the intersection of the key objectives set out in the second pillar, "Strengthening representation, participation and openness in public life", and the fourth pillar, "Gearing up government to deliver on climate and other environmental challenges", and the related action plans. It also contributes to the OECD's horizontal project "Net Zero+: Building Climate and Economic Resilience", which capitalises on the OECD's multidisciplinary reach to help governments drive the rapid transformational change needed to tackle climate change.
This Review, anchored in the OECD Recommendation on Open Government (2017), draws on the work of the Open Governance Unit (OGU), the OECD Working Party on Open Government (WPOG), and the Innovative Citizen Participation Network (ICPN) as well as on the recent work of the OECD Public Communicators Network (PCN) on public communication and the green agenda, data from the OECD Deliberative Democracy Database, and data from the OURData Open Data Index. It is, therefore, part of the work of the Innovative, Digital and Open Government (INDIGO) division of the Directorate for Public Governance (GOV) on the green agenda. It benefited from good practices collected through an online survey conducted in the first quarter of 2024, which invited submissions of examples of initiatives that mobilise open government principles around climate and environmental issues.
This report was approved and declassified by written procedure by the Public Governance Committee (PGC) of the OECD on 8 April 2025.