Sustainable Transparency using ICT

As an international issue, transparency came to prominence after World War I in the post-war negotiations. It took considerable time for many nations to pursue transparency. In the mid-1980s, only 11 nations had freedom of information laws, but by the end of 2004, 59 nations. Transparency and the right to access government information are now internationally regarded as essential to democratic participation, trust in government, prevention of corruption, informed decision-making, accuracy of government information, and provision of information to the public, companies, and journalists, among other essential functions in society.

Government transparency generally occurs through one of four primary channels (Piotrowski, 2007):

1. proactive dissemination by the government;
2. release of requested materials by the government;
3. public meetings; and
4. leaks from whistleblowers.

Traditionally, there are three types of anti-corruption approaches (Shim & Eom, 2009):

1)   Administrative reform. Administrative reforms are the most commonly used approaches, primarily through the enhancement of the quality of government bureaucracies to ensure that a watchdog agency or structure exists to officially monitor government behavior. Another common element of administrative reform is the creation of merit based hiring and promotion for government positions, which feature formalized rules of conduct, accountability, and responsibility, sometimes learned from corporate approaches.

2)   Law enforcement. Law enforcement approaches often compliment administrative reforms to ensure that an appropriate system for punishing corruption is in place. While administrative reform lowers opportunities to take bribes, law enforcement greatly increases the potential costs and punishments for taking bribes.

3)   Social change. The social change approach is based in the idea of reform through social empowerment of citizens by allowing them to participate in institutional reform movements and by cultivating a civil, law-based society as a long-term deterrent to corruption. By changing cultural attitudes that have been accepting of corruption, citizens can ultimately protect themselves from corruption.

ICTs offer countries a new approach to creating transparency and promoting anti-corruption. ICTs can reduce corruption by promoting good governance, strengthening reform-oriented initiatives, reducing potential for corrupt behaviors, enhancing relationships between government employees and citizens, allowing for citizen tracking of activities, and by monitoring and controlling behaviors of government employees.

To successfully reduce corruption, however, ICT-enabled initiatives generally must move from increasing information access to ensuring rules are transparent and applied to building abilities to track the decisions and actions of government employees. Taxes and government contracts are areas where e-government has been seen as a clear and successful solution to corruption problems in many nations, including such examples as:

•       India: putting rural property records online has greatly increased the speed at which the records are accessed and updated, while simultaneously removing opportunities for local officials to accept bribes as had previously been rampant. The Bhoomi electronic land record system in Karnataka, India, was estimated to have saved 7 million farmers 1.32 million working days in waiting time and Rs. 806 million in bribes to local officials in its first several years. Before the system, the average land transfer required Rs. 100 in bribes, while the electronic system requires a fee of Rs. 2.

•       United States: has creating sites that allow access to the data of government expenditures, for stimulus dollars (www.recovery.gov), general funds (www.usaspending.gov), and information
technology funds (www.IT.usaspending.gov) sites, which are intended to promote public monitoring of government spending for faster identification and elimination of wasteful projects.

•       Chile: the ChileCompra e-procurement system has been used to allow government officials and citizens to compare the costs of bids to and services purchased by the government. The system saves approximately $150 million US annually by preventing price fixing or inflation by corrupt officials and contractors. In addition to reducing corruption, this system expanded the number of small businesses that could participate in the government bidding process.

•       Greece: Beginning October 1st 2010, all Ministries are obliged to upload their decisions on the Internet, through the «Cl@rity» program. Cl@rity is one of the major transparency initiatives of the Ministry of the Interior, Decentralization and e-Government. Henceforth, the decisions of the public entities can not be implemented if they are not uploaded on the Clarity websites, each document is digitally singed and assigned a transaction unique number automatically by the system.

The question is to create sustainable practices for transparency. Key factors that may influence the extent to which ICTs can create a permanent culture of transparency include:

•       ICT access. The wider access to ICTs in a society, the greater connections between different parts of a society. More social interconnectedness means greater ability of members of the society to work together to promote social benefits like transparency.

•       Trust. Research has shown that the provision of greater access to government information and increased transparency through the use of ICTs increases trust among citizens.

•       Empowerment. As detailed above, using ICTs to increase citizen engagement makes the citizens empowered to participate in openness initiatives and to promote cultural support for transparency.

•       Social capital. The social networks and affiliations within a society that can collaborate to promote social good – known as social capital - benefit from increased access to information through ICTs.

•       Bureaucratic acceptance of transparency. Any ICT-enabled transparency initiatives will be far more likely to have a broad cultural impact if they are embraced and actively used within the government bureaucracy. Further, this acceptance must be demonstrated to citizens.

Comments welcome.


Nikhil Agarwal
nikhil.agarwal at cgpworldwide.com


acknowledgement: Thanks to Michalis Tolkas at University of Edinburgh for his inputs.