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Article Excerpt
Few concepts have come to enjoy more popularity in international policymaking circles than transparency. It has become the international community's standard response to accountability concerns at international institutions, appearing in the pronouncements of government and international officials, corporate executives, and activists alike. If "democracy deficit" is the catchphrase for global governance's problem, "transparency" is its buzzword solution.
Much of this rhetoric is simply a faithful recitation of the good governance canon. Most policymakers who advocate transparency do so from a general sense that "sunshine is the best disinfectant." Few can specify how--or even if--openness and disclosure actually alter the behavior of global actors to promote accountability.
Such knowledge would not be needed if transparency were nothing more than jargon, but the reality is that transparency mechanisms are used as substantive policy tools in a surprising range of areas. (1) They have a long history in the domestic realm; as Mary Graham has noted, governments have used transparency to regulate corporations at least since the creation of the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 1933. (2) Today, national and local governments in the United States and elsewhere--even in relatively closed political systems like China--require entities like companies, schools, and hospitals to publish a host of figures, covering such diverse topics as student test scores, medical accidents, and the release of pollutants. (3)
Transparency is also used by inter- and nongovernmental organizations (IGOs and NGOs). The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have sometimes made clear and accurate fiscal reporting a condition of their aid packages. The European Union requires candidate countries to adopt transparent policymaking procedures as part of its efforts to ensure that member countries meet certain democratic standards. NGOs, for their part, have pressured corporations into monitoring and disclosure arrangements in an attempt to improve companies' environmental and social conduct, a phenomenon some observers have dubbed the "NGO-industrial complex." (4) They have also demanded similar information from IGOs and nation-states. For example, in response to environmental and social concerns, the World Bank created an independent watchdog that investigates allegations of Bank wrongdoing and publishes its findings as factual records. The North American countries have, through the environmental side agreement to their free trade zone, created an international organization that investigates and publicizes countries' failures to enforce their own environmental laws.
Critics contend that transparency mechanisms like these are too "soft" to create real accountability, arguing that bad publicity is insufficient to make global actors change behavior. While such critiques often highlight important deficiencies in current governance arrangements, they assume that formal regulation generates higher compliance than informal arrangements. At the global level, however, this line of argument is often a dead end; the world is unlikely to see "hard" command and control regulation or administrative law applied transnationally in the near future. (5)
Given that policymakers and activists consistently advocate transparency, use it for important governance tasks, and are unlikely to replace it with more formal arrangements in the foreseeable future, it is surprising that we understand so little about how it works to promote accountability. The first goal of this article is to contribute to filling that gap by analyzing whether--and how--transparency is able to change the behavior of global actors, especially in situations where information users have no formal control over disclosers, and indeed may be significantly less powerful.
The first section borrows from Andreas Schedler to conceptualize accountability as the linkage of two components: the ability to know what an actor is doing and the ability to make that actor do something else. Transparency clearly speaks to the first, but can it, despite its "softness," provide for the latter?
The following section answers that question with a qualified "yes" by identifying three forces--market power, external discourse, and internal norms--that provide the enforcement component of Schedler's equation. The first fits with rationalist explanations of social behavior, while the latter two are best explained by ideational or constructivist approaches. Using one such model, Gunther Teubner's theory of reflexive law, I am able to develop a theoretic framework to explain how transparency enhances the regulatory effects of norms and discourse. I find preliminary evidence that all three forces can alter the behavior of global actors, but I also find that they are not available in all situations. Furthermore, the forces must be invoked by dedicated political actors, typically NGOs or socially responsible market actors, in order to be effective.
I then turn to the second goal of the article: to consider the implications of these findings for larger questions of global governance. Critical theorists and constructivist scholars of international relations have argued for a layer of issue-based, nonterritorial governance that transcends national boundaries. Territorial states, they claim, are ill adapted to confront transnational problems. Important stakeholders may be oppressed simply because they do not happen to live in the polity where decisions affecting them are made. Furthermore, transnational nonstate actors over which stakeholders have no formal authority may weigh heavily on their lives. To resolve such mismatches, some scholars have suggested transparency and participation as vehicles for building problem-based decisionmaking communities to supplement traditional governance arrangements. (6) I specify how transparency creates such communities by allowing stakeholders to self-select into ad hoc public spheres in which market forces, discourse, and norms can govern behavior. I conclude by summarizing the possibilities and limitations of transparency mechanisms in global governance.
Before proceeding it may be helpful to define a few key terms. An institution is transparent if it makes its behavior and motives readily knowable to interested parties. This definition covers both access to information--answering inquiries--and general disclosure--making unsolicited information available. A "transparency mechanism" is a policy that makes an institution more transparent. Finally, an "accounting actor" is an organization or individual that holds another organization or individual accountable.
Conceptualizing Accountability
Accountability, like art, is more easily recognized than defined. Though it is clearly a central aspect of normative democratic theory, several scholars have noted that the idea is "an under-explored concept whose meaning remains evasive." (7) Schedler, however, has outlined a way to think about accountability that helps explain the role transparency mechanisms can play. He sees accountability as the synthesis of two concepts: answerability--"the right to receive information and the corresponding obligations to release details"--and enforcement--"the idea that accounting actors do not just 'call into question' but also 'eventually punish' improper behavior." (8) In other words, A is accountable to B if B can (1) know A's behavior, and (2) exert pressure on A to influence that behavior.
The first component, answerability, is directly addressed by transparency. (9) "By demanding information as well as justification," transparency sheds "light into the black box of politics." (10) This process empowers accounting actors then to apply "enforcement." Voters who review representatives' records are able to use the information to either support them in the next election or vote them from office. A boss who installs a hidden camera by the water cooler is able to reprimand employees who linger there.
But is enforcement possible at the global level? Schedler notes that "academic writers are quite emphatic in stating that the capacity to punish forms an integral part of political accountability." (11) Voters are able to influence their representatives' behavior because they have constitutionally granted electoral power over them. Similarly, employers have contractual power over employees. In contrast, NGOs have no such formal authority over corporations. Likewise, the lines connecting global institutions to the people affected by their projects and decisions are often so long and thin as to be considered negligible. Absent formal enforcement, can transparency alone promote accountability?
Existing analyses of transparency mechanisms leave this question largely unanswered, even when studying "informal" enforcement, perhaps because they come primarily from the domestic literature where the question of enforcement is less problematic. (12) Archon Fung et al. describe a "transparency action cycle" in which disclosure generates new information that changes the perception of information users, who alter their behavior accordingly. This shift is then perceived by the discloser, who responds appropriately. (13) For example, a report highlighting pollution at a factory (new information) causes neighbors (information users) to complain to the media and local officials, which in turn causes the company (the discloser) to alter its behavior. This model provides a useful sketch of how transparency mechanisms operate, but it glosses over the crucial question of how mere information allows information users to alter disclosers' behavior. What changes in information-users' behavior cause changes in the discloser's behavior? In order to design effective transparency mechanisms, particularly at a transnational...
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