About one-third of the papers presented at the 4th Global Conference on Transparency Research, held June 4-6 in Lugano, Switzerland, are about access to information laws, seen from many viewpoints.
FreedomInfo.org has risked simplification in very briefly summarizing some of the papers, daring to enter a world of academic language including such phrases as “legislative homologation” and “logic of encapsulation,”
Only about have of the papers are posted on the conference website. Some include warnings such as “Work in progress: please do not quote!”
That warning adorns a paper on the role of classification of documents in Belgium by Frankie Schram from the University of Antwerp. Schram doesn’t think classification should limit application of the freedom of information law.
Other aspects of transparency addressed during the two-day conference included lobbying, social media, open data and climate change.
On the later topic, Aarti Gupta of Wageningen University and Michael Mason of the London School of Economics and Political Science wrote that “the transformative potential of transparency is being compromised by an increasing privatization and marketization of disclosure initiatives in the climate realm.”
FreedomInfo.org has posted separately an article on a paper about the lack of access to information in Indonesia regions.
Research in Spain by Joaquim Filipe Ferraz Esteves de Araújo of the University of Minho in Portugal and Francisca Tejedo-Romero of University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, report, among other things, that “many municipalities increased the levels of transparency as a way to legitimize the actions of political leaders toward citizens.” They also found empirical evidence that economic factors have a significant effect on the level of transparency, particularly unemployment and investment. “We can say that the factors that best explain the variation in the level of transparency are associated with political factors,” they concluded, “We have also confirmed the positive relationship between the size of the municipalities and the level of transparency.”
Grisel Salazar Rebolledo, a doctoral student from the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico, sought to explain reasons for variations in the mechanisms of access to public information. “This paper argues that, beyond recent reforms, the presence of a strong political opposition, specialized NGOs, and independent media is closely related to the verification of the conditions linking transparency and better accountability.”
Alasdair Roberts, of Suffolk University Law School, wrote about arguments “that habitual calls for more transparency are actually compounding problems of dysfunctionality within American federal government.” These complaints are “misguided,” he says because they “depend upon a misconception about the purposes served by transparency in government, and about the role of transparency reforms within the larger pattern of administrative development.” Roberts concludes: “The main trend has been the expansion of executive and bureaucratic power, which has generated demands for transparency in reaction. Critics of transparency dwell on the reaction and neglect the transformations that have triggered concerns about the exercise of federal power.”
Gregory Michener and Karina Rodrigues from Rio de Janeiro tested “whether self-identifying leads to discrimination in access to information” in Brazil. “Although we do find significant evidence of discrimination for female requesters lacking institutional affiliations and some evidence of longer response times for other ‘non-institutional’ identity profiles, our results are ultimately mixed and show that the proposition requires further testing.” Nevertheless, they suggest, “As a central policy implication, however, the paper marshals significant evidence to suggest that identity obligations may be stifling a more efficacious and broader use of FOI regimes.”
Sabina Schnell of Syracuse University proposed “a conceptual framework for assessing transparency that goes beyond a narrow focus on access to information.” The findings, based on research in Romania, “suggest that transparency researchers and advocates should pay more attention to issues such as increasing citizen participation, opening up decision-making rather than just data, strengthening the rule of law, and fighting corruption.”
Jeannine Relly, from the School of Journalism, University of Arizona, and Rajdeep Pakanati, from the Jindal School of International Affairs in India, reported on “preliminary insights gained from the interviews of 5 journalists” about the use of RTI in India. They learned that newspapers “have generally encouraged the use of RTI,” that journalists “continue to rely on official sources for information but they now have an additional tool,” that journalists rely on RTI activists for information, and that most of the respondents see “a change in the attitude of the present government in comparison to the previous government.”
Lorenzo Cicatiello of the University of Naples, Elina De Simone of Parthenope University of Naples and Giuseppe Lucio Gaeta of the University of Naples found “that transparency enhances the perception of institutions’ responsiveness to citizens’ actions (which is their external political efficacy), but also highlight that this effect is moderated by citizens’ level of education. In particular, while for better educated people the magnitude of government transparency’s effect on citizens’ external efficacy is substantial, the same effect is negligible for less educated citizens who appear to be `lost in transparency’.”
Maarten Hillebrandt from the University of Amsterdam studied transparency at the European Union Foreign Affairs Council, looking at institutional factors salient for the development of transparency policies and finding that transparency as gaining.
Amin Pashaye Amiri wrote that “it is not easy to conclude” whether the degree of transparency and good governance in a country where FOI is recognized as a constitutional right is a result of constitutional recognition of FOI in that country. “There may be other factors which had greater influence on the status of these two values in the country.”
Looking at “drivers of effectiveness” in implementation were Stephanie E. Trapnell of George Mason University and Victoria L. Lemieux of the University of British Columbia, who also work for the World Bank on this topic. Among their findings is: “There is no one strategy or approach to RTI implementation that works best in all contexts….” They observed: “Of all domains in RTI implementation, institutional capacity is primary, since without the mechanisms for disclosure, information will not be released effectively.” International pressure for more effective RTI implementation “only goes so far,” they said. “A strong implication from these findings is that a national coordinating strategy may be valuable for implementation.”
A “do not quote” paper by Ricardo Cruz-Prieto argues for the importance of good information for democracies and that analysis must be done on what happens to the information.
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