The Transparency Fix: Advocating Legal Rights And Their Alternatives In The Pursuit Of A Visible State, Mark Fenster
Apr 2016
The Transparency Fix: Advocating Legal Rights And Their Alternatives In The Pursuit Of A Visible State, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
The administrative norm of transparency, which promises a solution to the problem of government secrecy, requires political advocacy organized from outside the state. The traditional approach, typically the result of organized campaigns to make the state visible to the public, has been to enact freedom of information laws (FOI) that require government disclosure and grant enforceable rights to the public. The legal solution has not proven wholly satisfactory, however. In the past two decades, numerous advocacy movements have offered different fixes to the information asymmetry problem that the administrative state creates. These alternatives now augment and sometimes compete with legal …
Seeing The State: Transparency As Metaphor, Mark Fenster
Dec 2009
Seeing The State: Transparency As Metaphor, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
When applied as a public administrative norm, the term and concept “transparency” has two intertwined meanings. First, it refers to those constitutional and legislative tools that require the government to disclose information in order to inform the public and create a more accountable, responsive state. Second, it is frequently used metaphorically to recognize and decry the distance between the public and the state, and to call for efforts to make the state thoroughly and constantly visible to the public. This article considers the implications of the latter meaning, and that meaning’s effect on efforts to develop and implement the technocratic …
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Dec 2004
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
The normative concept of transparency, along with the open government laws that purport to create a transparent public system of governance promise the world—a democratic and accountable state above all, and a peaceful, prosperous, and efficient one as well. But transparency, in its role as the theoretical justification for a set of legal commands, frustrates all parties affected by its ambiguities and abstractions. The public’s engagement with transparency in practice yields denials of reasonable requests for essential government information, as well as government meetings that occur behind closed doors. Meanwhile, state officials bemoan the significantly impaired decision-making processes that result …
