Making Transparency Work

Gupta¹ and Mason² provide a valuable service in highlighting the complex and contested nature of transparency as a tool of governance. In an era in which information flows and information technology play such fundamental roles, and in which norms about who has the right to know what are so rapidly changing, transparency clearly deserves its place as, in Gupta's words, "a key concept of our times."

In a slightly earlier version of her paper, Gupta concentrates on the operational uses of transparency in "governance by disclosure." She asserts that all such initiatives reflect a "procedural turn" in environmental governance that assumes that the right process will lead to the right results. She further asserts that all such initiatives share the assumption that information empowers. But these are two very different rationales for greater disclosure, and there is no reason to assume that both are operating in all cases.

Indeed, Mason's response is largely an argument that what really matters is who gets to determine what constitutes the "right" process and the "right" results. And he is quite correct. Disclosure policies can be designed to serve purely technocratic ends, making governance more efficient and possibly more effective without allowing any real shift in power. A public revelation that a local factory has spilled toxic substances into the local environment may force a cleanup, without allowing the local populace any say in whether that factory continues to operate and without creating any accountability for corrupt local officials who had previously allowed the factory to operate without adequate safeguards.

But Mason goes overboard in assuming that what we have seen so far with disclosure-based environmental governance is solely a procedural turn with no impact on power, that indeed it's merely another way of reinforcing existing power structures. He claims that there is an unexamined normative agenda of "scaling back of mandatory environmental regulation (nationally and internationally), the privatization of environmental resources, and the framing of information disclosure options in terms of individual lifestyle choices." Disclosure can be framed as an alternative to mandatory regulation. But it can also be a form of mandatory regulation, or more likely one of several regulatory tools simultaneously employed. And it can also be used to empower, as India's experience leading to its sweeping 2005 right-to-know law attests.³ That law arose out of multiple grassroots movements in many Indian states, driven primarily by demands of disempowered actors for information that would enable them to protect their rights.

The Indian case is one of many examples of a broader normative shift that Mason does not include in his list: a sweeping turn toward greater disclosure in many countries and corporations. Twenty years ago a mere handful of countries had any kind of freedom of information laws, but now some 70 do and the number continues to rise. Not all are meaningfully implemented, but a significant number are, and several (particularly the Indian and South African laws) are far more sweeping in their assertions of citizens' rights than anything seen in the industrialized democracies. Although disclosure-based regulation emerged largely in the environmental field (notably with the US Community Right to Know Act in the mid-1980s) and has gone furthest in that field, part of the normative context that needs to be considered is this shift toward greater openness.

For that reason, the discussion is enriched if we look beyond the literature that deals strictly with environmental governance to see what other strands of scholarship have to contribute. Most notably missing from the Mason article and the earlier Gupta piece is any reference to the works of Mary Graham and her colleagues at Harvard, who have systematically explored exactly the kinds of analysis that Gupta in particular says is needed on the conditions under which disclosure has its varied effects.⁴

Mason is kind enough to cite my introduction to the recent edited volume The Right to Know. But a deeper look into the book would uncover chapters that deal exactly with the broader normative questions Mason raises. Richard Calland's chapter on the private sector, for example, goes into...