ComGAP: Teaching a Culture of Transparency

Access to Information is a big topic these days. It is for the World Bank, with its own ATI strategy kicking in this week, on July 1. It's a big topic elsewhere too: The Philippine Congress just killed a Freedom of Information Bill, the Parliament in Liberia is taking up it's review of a Freedom of Information Act after a two year hiatus, and the New York Times reports on the positive effects that India's Right to Information Law has on the poorest castes.

Legislation, however, is only one side of the bargain. As we have argued many times on this blog, legislation could be mute if there is no culture supporting the law. If governments don't want to reveal information, how is a law going to make them? If citizens don't want to request information, how is a law going to encourage them? It's not only about transparency legislation, it's also about a culture of transparency.

In our forthcoming book "Accountability Through Public Opinion: From Inertia To Public Action", edited by Sina Odugbemi and Berkeley Professor Taeku Lee, Laura Zommer presents a case study on how university students are trying to shift a culture of secrecy to a culture of transparency. Zommer teaches at the University of Buenos Aires, where she led a project that required communication and social science students to make use of Argentina's national and local freedom of information provisions. Students officially request information from government offices, which fulfills a two-fold objective: "from the pedagogic perspective it seeks to familiarize students with a tool that will be of value in their studies and careers. From the institutional point of view, it aims to exercise and strengthen governmental organisms’ mechanisms of receiving and answering freedom of information requests," writes Zommer. Between 2004 and 2007, students submitted more than 800 requests for information, covering a wide range of topics from the right to health care to the number of kidnapping victims to government funding for swimming programs.

The results of this project are quite telling. For one, many of the requests were met by officials pointing out that the requested information was indeed available online on their department websites. This shows two things, Zommer argues: "a certain general lack of knowledge about what information the government has at the disposal of citizens, and, on the other hand, that information published on official websites is not simple for the average citizen to find and that the government lacks a proactive attitude towards publicizing public information." Many requests didn't receive any reply. The Chief of the Cabinet of the Ministers’ office sent a photocopy of the chief of the cabinet’s pay stub to the student who asked about this official's salary, neglecting to obliterate the official's private bank account number - there is such a thing as too much information. The results of this monitoring exercise were published in La Nación. After that, the response rate from the government offices increased significantly.

This is a notable example for the interrelation between legislation and national culture. Only if both go together there can truly be transparency that will empower citizens to hold their government accountable. Too many Access to Information laws may mask a culture of secrecy, where access to information is all on paper, but not happening in the real world.

- June 29, 2010 by Anne-Katrin Arnold

.................

Source: blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/teaching-culture-transparency  (accessed on 30.06.2010)