European Union: Access Info issues a citizen-friendly Guide on Access to EU Documents and calls on members of the public and civil society organizations to exercise their rights and file access to documents requests.
Resource Governance Index: The Revenue Watch Institute will unveil a new “ Resource Governance Index,” a collection of research, rankings and analysis that measures the quality of governance in the oil, gas and mining sector of 58 countries, at events in Washington May 15 and London May 16.
FOI Timelines: The historically important events in the development of FOI laws are captures in two timelines, one for Uganda by Green Watch and another on South Africa by ODAC.
Aid Transparency: A comprehensive tool that tracks Chinese development finance was released April 29 by AidData, a partnership between Brigham Young University, the College of William and Mary, and Development Gateway. The online database platform tracks development finance flows to the continent from 2000-2011. See video presentation here. The online platform at china.aiddata.org enables users to quickly filter, manipulate, and visualize the data. The dataset also serves as a crowdsourcing tool. Users can contribute to the project-level data by providing additional information about specific projects, such as media reports, documents, videos, and photographs, as well as suggest new projects which were previously unidentified.
FOI History – India/U.S.: A comparison of the origins of the U.S. FOI law and the Indian RTI Act is the focus of an analysis by Sudhir Kuma Suthar of B B Ambedkar University.
Abstract (abbreviated):
Comparative analysis of these acts shows that the US Freedom of Information act has successfully achieved the objective of developing a more accountable and transparent political system. The structures and processes evolving under the Freedom of Information act effectively provide information related to the policy making and implementation. The RTI Act in India on the other hand suffers from structural contradictions and deficiencies. The Indian act establishes parallel bureaucratic paraphernalia for the implementation of the RTI act increasing bureaucratic hassles in providing information. This has further resulted into failure in effective policy implementation and monitoring. The successful implementation of the act in the US on the other hand has led to developing efficient, transparent and accountable governance.
Transparency Research: S.G. Grimmelikhuijsen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Utrecht University Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance has written a thesis on transparency and trust in government.
Abstract (abbreviated):
By using an experimental method this study moves beyond normative or correlational research on transparency. In doing so, causal inferences regarding the relation between transparency and trust are allowed. Several objects of transparency and dimensions of information are being put to the test in three experiments. The experiments show that transparency is merely a ‘hygiene factor’: it does not contribute to higher levels of trust and it can even lead to lower levels of trust if people are disappointed with the degree to which government is transparent. This conclusion challenges current overly optimistic assumptions concerning the effect of transparency on trust.
Extractive Industries: A report by Diarmid O’Sullivan examines the impact of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in Timor-Leste and Liberia. Download the full report here.
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