Professor Suzanne Piotrowski's Newest Book Examines the Open Government Partnership's Successful Role in International Public Sector Reform

Professor Suzanne Piotrowski's newest book, The Power of Partnership in Open Government: Reconsidering Multistakeholder Governance Reform, co-authored with Daniel Berliner and SPAA alum Alex Ingrams (PhD'17), presents the Open Government Partnership as an example of a successful transnational multistakeholder initiative that has impacted policy and helped to produce progressive public sector reform. The open access publication is free to download from the MIT Press.

The Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative aimed at promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance, was started by the governments of eight nations at the 2011 meeting of the UN General Assembly, and by 2019, it had grown to 78 member countries and 20 subnational governments. Through document analysis, interviews, process tracing, and quantitative analysis of secondary data, this book charts the Open Government Partnership’s effectiveness and evaluates what this reveals about the potential of international reform initiatives in general. The authors call upon scholars and policymakers to reconsider the role of international institutions and to differentiate between direct and indirect pathways to transnational impact on domestic policy. They suggest the more nuanced and complex processes of the indirect pathway have considerable but often overlooked potential to shape policy norms and models, alter resources and opportunities, forge new linkages and coalitions, and to drive the substantial changes that inspire initiatives like the Open Government Partnership.

At Rutgers SPAA, Dr. Piotrowski is the director of the Transparency and Governance Center (TGC) and also currently serves as the chair of faculty development. She researches freedom of information, transparency, and open government issues with a strong focus on connecting with communities of practice, and writes widely on public management, accountability, and transparency.