Common arrangements, partnerships between governments, there are many types and sizes in the Netherlands. These legal arangements are used to organise waste treatment, employment or safety. Local representatives complain about the lack of transparency and accountability in these schemes. With OpenGR we open this black box.

Local authorities sometimes provide services on a joint basis with other authorities. Most of these arrangements have boards made up of appointed members. Common arrangements are used when several authorities are considered too small (in terms of either geographic size or population) to run a public service effectively by themselves. Typical services run these arrangements include regional archives, waste disposal, security or safety regions.

OpenGR is a tool that helps local council members, civil servants, local municipal auditors and others to get grip on the many joint rules of local and regional governments in the Netherlands.

Of some 147 common arrangements with annual expenses exceeding 20 million euro, budgets and annual accounts can be found on openspending.nl. The budgets and annual accounts of common arrangements collected via de regional authorities can be found via DocumentCloud’s API.

The data unlocked for OpenGR can be found on Open State Foundation’s Github. Here you can find data that was retrieved after a formal FOIA and re-use request. We also have published the data (after a re-use request of government data) that forms the basis of regioatlas.nl. On this website the government collects sub-local government cooperations and regional divisions but no information on common arrangements.

OpenGR