Democracies are under growing internal and external pressures, including political polarisation, the spread of disinformation and the rise of populism. Governments must act to preserve and strengthen their democracies, build trust in public institutions, and better serve their people – while managing the digital and green transitions and other policy challenges.
This report, The OECD Reinforcing Democracy Initiative: Monitoring Report - Assessing Progress and Charting the Way Forward responds to call from Ministers at the November 2022 meeting of the OECD Public Governance Committee at Ministerial level. The meeting, held in Luxembourg, established an OECD Global Forum on Building Trust and Reinforcing Democracy (Global Forum) as a platform to share knowledge about how to assess and improve public governance to meet the challenges facing democracies. Ministers also asked the OECD to monitor and analyse collective progress amongst OECD Members as part of its Reinforcing Democracy Initiative (RDI). This report maps progress against the five key pillars of the Initiative, in line with the Action Plans on Public Governance for Combating Misinformation and Disinformation; Enhancing Participation, Representation and Openness in Public Life, and its Annex on Gender Equality; and Governing Green, all adopted in 2022, as well as the Action Plans on Stronger Open Democracies in a Globalised World and on Digital Democracy, subsequently adopted in 2024.
The report offers many concrete examples of practices countries have adopted to tackle these challenges, including how to engage better with citizens, how to strengthen capacity to address complex policy challenges in open democracies, how to steer the green transition, and how to address gender gaps. It also tackles frontier issues, such as building pathways for effective digital democracy and working to strengthen information integrity in response to the challenges of mis- and disinformation. The report takes stock of work undertaken collectively through the OECD and identifies strategic directions for the future.
This report was approved and declassified by the Public Governance Committee on 9 October 2024 and prepared for publication by the Secretariat. Further information can be found at www.oecd.org/governance/reinforcing-democracy.