roup profits. And it should not seek to prevent investors from making bad bargains.” Current Thinking The modern approach is well-expounded in Fung, Graham and Weil’s 2005 ‘Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency.’: “Instead of aiming to generally improve public deliberation and officials’ accountability, targeted transparency aims to reduce specific risks or performance problems through selective disclosure by corporations and other organizations. The ingeniousness of targeted transparency lies in its mobilization of individual choice, market forces, and participatory democracy through relatively light-handed government action.”
I shall return to accountability and factual information later and rest content here with simply noting that one possible definition of neo-liberalism is: “the elevation of market-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of state endorsed norms.” In several of their working papers Fung et al suggest that transparency systems are “government mandates that require corporations and other organisations to provide…” while also subsequently recognising that transparency may develop independently as part of a competitive commercial strategy; this will be discussed more fully later in the context of trustworthiness. If regulatory intervention were a necessary condition
for transparency to become effective, this would carry implications for the operations of the Transparency Task Force. Data, Information and Knowledge It is as well to begin tackling these where, when and how questions by first considering some of the key aspects in elementary terms, starting with the relation between data, information and knowledge. In an uncertain world, we use models to parse data into information and noise, and the model chosen will determine the information that can
Fung et al. describe targeted transparency as emerging from right-toknow policies: “While rightto-know policies required simply that existing government reports and other documents be made available to the public, targeted transparency required that government agencies, companies, and other private-sector organisations collect, standardise and release factual information to inform public choices.” Edition #2
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June 2016 | www.transparencytaskforce.org | The Transparency Times
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