3.1. Transparency Supply Joseph Stiglitz believes that “there is a natural asymmetry of information between those who govern and those whom they are supposed to serve” (IBRD and The World Bank, 2002). The provision of information about the state and its activities is a means to overcome this asymmetry and thus empower citizens, to support them in holding their government to account, to better prevent corruption and to improve the ability of citizens to access and to dictate the shape of services and the responsiveness of government. Working to improve access to good information is a necessary component of an accountability mechanism. Consequently, transparency and accountability initiatives have proliferated in recent years and helped enhance other social accountability mechanisms. As part of the general increase in demand for information, the communications potential offered by the Internet and mobile telephony has been seized upon as means to disseminate information quickly to citizens. Making government more transparent entails a choice between providing the right to information, which gives citizens a right to access any information held by the government (except in specified areas), or making government-led commitment to open government, which must then be implemented across departments and services (see TAI, 2010 for examples of their application). The critical element relative to the right to information is that control is placed at the disposal of the citizen rather than by the fiat of the government. The lack of control entailed by open government initiatives raises two problems: “Firstly, they’re not necessarily as strong [as the right to information initiatives]; and secondly, they assume to some degree that the government knows what the public wants” (Hogge, 2010, p. 19). The growth of these mechanisms is significant. The number of countries that have adopted access-to-information laws increased to 80 in 2012, compared with only 12 in 1990 (Calland, 2012). ICT clearly have an important role in implementing this right to information or other open-government commitments. The open data movement characterized by the Declaration of Principles of the Open Government Partnership urges the development of ICT as platforms for delivering information and online services.2 Promoting e-governance and the transparency of information through ICT is an important plank in the transparency scaffolding but must be understood in terms of the wider social environment and the capability and willingness of government to release data. Successful implementation of the right to information or open-government initiatives requires several elements. In their review of impact assessments of such reforms, Anderson et al (2010, citing various research) note that the digitization process has had a transformative impact in some contexts but not in others. Implementing commitments requires political, bureaucratic and user ‘buy-in’ (Hogge, 2010). Calland (2012) emphasizes the importance of a heavily professionalized civil society capable of maximizing the use of right-to-information legislation. At the level of specific government services and institutions, ICT has been used to increase the transparency of the delivery of particular services. Simply putting information on a website is the first stage of e-governance. At their most basic, they involve the use of websites as a ‘billboard’ (Torres et al., 2005). While this offers only one-way communication with no interaction, it nevertheless can have significant impact on social accountability. For example, in the context of the national budget, several governments dramatically improved the transparency of their budget by publishing it online, whereas before it had only been available to internal stakeholders (IBP, 2008). ICT also can provide information on the 22
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