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Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency
Open accessAbstract
Governments employ public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, these policies are frequently ineffective or counterproductive. Based on a comparative analysis of eighteen major policies, the authors suggest that transparency policies often produce information that is incomplete, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to the consumers, investors, workers, and community residents who could benefit from them. Sometimes transparency fails because those who are threatened by it form political coalitions to limit or distort information. To be successful, transparency policies must place the needs of ordinary citizens at centre stage and produce information that informs their everyday choices. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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“Over the last decades, transparency has evolved as a key element of environmental governance (Fung et al., 2007;Mol, 2010).”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Fung, A., Graham, M., & Weil, D.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Boston University (US)
- ORCID
- Fung, Archon
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 2007-03-05
- OpenAlex
- W1481162202
- Cited by
- 752
- References
- 299
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 33 · 2020: 93 · 2019: 87 · 2018: 45 · 2017: 44 · 2016: 56 · 2015: 51 · 2014: 68 · 2013: 61 · 2012: 47
- FWCI
- 43.58
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Administrative Law and Governance
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Regulation and Compliance Studies
- Social Sciences › Public Administration › Public Policy and Administration Research
- Keywords
- transparency policy, public disclosure, financial disclosure, nutrition labeling, school reports, information quality, political alliances, citizen empowerment, governance, policy effectiveness
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