"The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) is the central scientific network within the massive set of bureaucracies that is responsible for Europe's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). While spending the past 25 years failing to sustain Europe's fish stocks, this management system also became adept at making the lives of its scientists miserable. Now it is being confronted by the complex challenge of an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management. If this combination of a multi-national bureaucracy, hard politics, and scientific uncertainty has made it impossible to maintain many individual fish stocks, how are decisions going to be made that consider everything from sea birds to climate change? The old political saw that "if you can't solve a problem, make it bigger" has never been put to a test like this! Yet ICES has begun to rise in an impressive way to the scientific challenge of providing advice for an ecosystem approach within the world's most cumbersome fisheries management system. This book lays out the results of extensive sociological research on ICES and the decision making systems into which it feeds. ICES is finding ways to provide effective advice in the many situations where scientific advice is needed but a clear, simple answer is out of reach. In spite of the difficulties, scientists are beginning to help the various parties concerned with management to deal with facts about nature in ways that are more useful and transparent"--Publisher's description.

The ‘open society’ has become a watchword of liberal democracy and the market system in the modern globalized world. Openness stands for individual opportunity and collective reason, as well as bottom-up empowerment and top-down transparency. It has become a cherished value, despite its vagueness and the connotation of vulnerability that surrounds it. Scandinavia has long considered itself a model of openness, citing traditions of freedom of information and inclusive policy making. This collection of essays traces the conceptual origins, development, and diverse challenges of openness in the Nordic countries and Austria. It examines some of the many paradoxes that openness encounters and the tensions it arouses when it addresses such divergent ends as democratic deliberation and market transactions, freedom of speech and sensitive information, compliant decision making and political and administrative transparency, and consensual procedures and the toleration of dissent. Contributors are: Ainur Elmgren, Tero Erkkilä, Norbert Götz, Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Johannes Kananen, Lotta Lounasmeri, Carl Marklund, Peter Parycek, Johanna Rainio-Niemi, Judith Schossböck, Ylva Waldemarson, and Tuomas Ylä-Anttila.

"The book provides a compact theoretical account of the hidden functioning logic of the ideal of transparency. Transparency as a concept has become hugely popular in legal discourse and beyond. The book argues that there are underlying optical, conceptual, and social reasons why transparency makes sense to us: it promises immediate seeing and understanding. That is why it can form a powerful metaphor of controllability: in the state, for example, the governed are able to monitor the inner workings of the governor through transparency practices. The modern push for transparency is premised on the notion that the truth about governance is key to its legitimacy, and transparency can provide legitimacy through access to truth. The book argues that this premise is false. Instead of accessing legitimacy by providing truth, transparency is labelled by either-or logic, which is referred to as 'the truth-legitimacy trade-off' in the book: transparency can provide either truth or legitimacy. Through this argument, the book questions the neutrality promise vested in transparency and claims that transparency is primarily a tool for creating appearances. The book consists of nine chapters divided into three parts: The Opacity of Transparency, The Promise of Transparency, and The Reality of Transparency. It combines legal and policy themes and research with interdisciplinary inputs, such as social philosophy and cultural and media studies, contributing to the growing literature on critical transparency studies"--

Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.

Transparency has become a global concept of responsible government. This book argues that the transnational discourse of transparency promotes potentially contradictory policy ideas that can lead to unintended consequences. It critically examines whether or not increased transparency really leads to increased democratic accountability.

Transparency has become a new norm. States, international organizations, and even private businesses have sought to bolster their legitimacy by invoking transparency in their activities. This growth in popularity was made possible through two interconnected trends: the idea that transparency is inherently good, and that the actual meaning of the term is becoming harder and harder to pin down. Thus far, this has remained undertheorized. The Transparency Paradox is an insightful account of the hidden logic of the ideal of transparency and its legal manifestations. It shows how transparency is a covertly conflicted ideal. The book argues that counter to popular understanding, truth and legitimacy cannot but form a problematic trade-off in transparency practices.

Jc Beall presents a new theory of 'transparent' truth. A prominent philosophical view of truth is as an entirely see-through device introduced for only practical (expressive) reasons. Beall's modest dialetheic theory shows how the notorious paradoxes associated with transparency can be dealt with.