The Impacts of Open Government Initiatives to Deal with COVID-19: A Learning from Local Government

Many previous studies have confirmed that collaboration and transparency are the best ways to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The state must involve other actors such as local governments and civil society in drafting laws, implementing COVID-19 programs, and exercising controls. This article examines the experience of the City of Semarang in applying the principles of open government in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. This article is qualitative research that combined a systematic literature review and data collected from an in-depth interview, scientific journal, report, and website related to the article’s topic. This article focuses on the government city and the local civil organisation's efforts to initiate open government initiatives and implement them in its agendas to deal with the pandemic COVID-19. The article concludes that the two actors has agreed to implement open government initiatives in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as those principles has positive impacts handling the pandemic. This article also notice that various factors are still hampering the implementation of open government. For future research agenda, it is important to analysis how to deal with the obstacles.