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The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World resources

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against the need of citizens to know whether their leaders are living lives of suspicious luxury on meager public-sector salaries. And because information is related to power, reason is only part of the debate over how far disclosure should go and when secrecy should reign. The battles over the right to know versus the right to withhold also reflect bitter struggles over existing patterns of politi- cal and economic privilege. This book contains numerous, wide-ranging stories from the battlefront: the grassroots campaigns waged in India under the slo- gan “The right to know is the right to live”; China’s top-down effort to “informationize” its economy; the ongoing international NGO campaign to improve the disclosure policies of intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and the International Mon- etary Fund (IMF); the continuing tensions over whether security is best promoted by secrecy or by greater openness. These stories epitomize the enormous range of policy choices now facing national governments, international organizations, corporations, and citi- zens’ groups. What laws should govern the rights of citizens to have access to government-held information, and how can those laws be meaningfully implemented? To what extent do international orga- nizations, corporations, and citizens’ groups have an obligation to reveal information, and to whom? Who is entitled to know what? And what good does disclosure do? To start the book off, this introduction defines “transparency” and lays out the theoretical reasoning behind the claim that publicly useful information is generally underprovided. Then it provides the historical context, for the fight to know has a long and significant past. Finally, it lays out the plan of the rest of the book. The Meaning and Purposes of Transparency Although the word “transparency” is widely used, it is rarely well defined. There is no consensus on what the definition should be or how transparency should be measured. Such problems are not unique to the transparency phenomenon. For example, many politi- cal scientists have made valuable contributions to our understanding of domestic and international politics without being able to pinpoint precisely the meaning of so fundamental a concept as “power.” But  introduction: the battle over transparency

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