Public Underweight

The laws governing transparency and accountability in government are deeply flawed, plagued by steep financial costs, high barriers to access, and widespread corporate capture. While legal scholars have suggested a wide variety of fixes, they have focused almost exclusively on legal solutions. They have largely overlooked a growing set of grassroots efforts that seek to reconstruct government information extralegally, rather than work through existing legal structures or remedy breakdowns in the formal transparency law regime. An array of bottom-up movements to circumvent the formal transparency law and challenge the government’s monopoly on information have sprung up around the country in recent years across a wide variety of substantive areas. Activists now rely on public sources of information and extralegal monitoring to track where ICE conducts immigration raids, observe police activity in communities of color, monitor air pollution near industrial sites, and collect data on bail decisions. I refer to these efforts as forms of “public undersight.” By ignoring these increasingly influential grassroots movements, transparency law scholars have overlooked important developments in the public’s ability to hold government actors to account. Fleshing out these extralegal forms of transparency enriches our understanding of government oversight and allows a more nuanced and complex view of the information ecosystem that sustains a liberal democracy to come to light. This Article aims to widen the aperture of the transparency law literature and bring the rise and effects of these extralegal movements into view. In doing so, it makes three contributions. First, it offers a descriptive account of the public undersight regime, defining the concept and chronicling the various efforts and movements that fall within its scope. Second, it offers a normative account. It highlights the ways that these extralegal efforts can remedy flaws in the transparency law regime and democratize public access to government. It also explores potential drawbacks and risks. Finally, the Article addresses gaps in the transparency law scholarship. It draws on recent works exploring extralegal activism and social movements to examine how these grassroots efforts can be used to expand our conception of public oversight and reimagine the task of government transparency and accountability. And it links the transparency law scholarship to the field of surveillance studies, using insights derived from the surveillance studies literature to illuminate the power of these grassroots transparency efforts to serve as a means of resistance—allowing communities long subjected to intrusive forms of government surveillance to co-opt the tools and techniques of the government and stare back

Towards transparent telepresence

It is proposed that the concept of transparent telepresence can be closely approached through high fidelity technological mediation. It is argued that the matching of the system capabilities to those of the human user will yield a strong sense of immersion and presence at a remote site. Some applications of such a system are noted. The concept is explained and critical system elements are described together with an overview of some of the necessary system specifications

Civil Society Actors as Catalysts for Transnational Social Learning

This article explores the roles of transnational civil society organizations and networks in transnational social learning. It begins with an investigation into social learning within problem domains and into the ways in which such domain learning builds perspectives and capacities for effective action among domain organizations and institutions. It suggests that domain learning involves problem definition, direction setting, implementation of collective action, and performance monitoring. Transnational civil society actors appear to take five roles in domain learning: (1) identifying issues, (2) facilitating voice of marginalized stakeholders, (3) amplifying the importance of issues, (4) building bridges among diverse stakeholders, and (5) monitoring and assessing solutions. The paper then explores the circumstances in which transnational civil society actors can be expected to make special contributions in important problem domains in the future.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 28. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Adding fuel to the flames: how TTIP reinvigorated the politicization of trade

It is a truism to state that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a politicized issue, yet the explanations that account for this politicization are mostly singular in nature. In this paper I add to this understanding theoretically and empirically by presenting a broad analytic framework that puts TTIP at the intersection of two evolutions. There is, firstly, a longer-term trend of increasing political authority of (European) trade policy that is (at least by several organizations and citizens) not considered legitimate. I argue that TTIP is an extension and an intensification of this perceived authority-without-legitimacy trend. Secondly, the particular explosive situation that has occurred since 2013 is furthermore the result of a specific combination of a favoring political opportunity structure, combined with pre-existing mobilization resources that have facilitated a large mobilization by civil society organizations. This explains the spike of politicization that is attached onto this longer term trend. Relying on several exploratory interviews, I try to uncover the determinants in the different categories

From commoditisation to de-commoditisation... and back again. Discussing the role of sustainability standards for agricultural products

Sustainability standards are flooding global agricultural markets. Standards however, are not recent: standards for the exchange of grain and tropical products emerged in the 19th century. The objective of this article is to analyze, in a historical perspective, the implications of the transition from traditional standards to sustainability standards on the commoditization/de-commoditization process. We show how early standards and grades contributed to the construction of the category of products called primary commodities and how, after a short attempt at de-commoditization (with the early fair trade and organic standards), sustainability standards tend towards re-commoditization. ...French Abstract : Dans de nombreux secteurs, les standards durables de produits agricoles envahissent le marché : café respectueux des oiseaux, coton biologique, produits forestiers extraits de forêts gérées de manière durable, huile de palme durable, ananas issus du commerce équitable, bananes éthiques, etc. Dans cette course à la respectabilité environnementale et sociale, les acteurs du secteur privé supplantent progressivement les autorités publiques dans la " qualification " des produits, notamment via la promotion d'écolabels volontaires ou la communication sur les conséquences sociales et environnementales de leurs activités économiques. Cet article se propose d'analyser, dans une perspective historique, la transition observée de standards traditionnels aux standards durables, et de montrer comment cette transition a modifié le statut des produits primaires exportés par de nombreux pays du Sud. Nous défendons l'idée selon laquelle la prolifération actuelle de standards durables risque de se mener à terme à la banalisation des enjeux environnementaux et sociaux et à la dilution de leurs exigences dans une version édulcorée des standards durables qui ne donnerait lieu à aucune prime de prix pour les producteurs tout en restreignant leur accès au marché.GRADES; TRADITIONAL STANDARDS; SUSTAINABILITY STANDARDS; COMMODITIES; FAIR TRADE; ORGANIC AGRICULTURE

Civil Society Legitimacy and Accountability: Issues and Challenges

University education rarely focuses its attention and imagination on teaching students how to turn a vision into reality; how to design, develop, and lead social change organizations. The author co-created the Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory (SE Lab) at Stanford University and then Harvard University as a model educational program designed to achieve this goal. The SE Lab is a Silicon Valley influenced incubator where student teams create and develop innovative pilot projects for US and international social sector initiatives. The lab combines academic theory, frameworks, and traditional research with intensive field work, action research, peer support and learning, and participation of domain experts and social entrepreneurship practitioners. It also provides students an opportunity to collaborate on teams to develop business plans for their initiatives and to compete for awards and recognition in the marketplace of ideas. Students in the SE Lab have created innovative organizations serving many different social causes, including fighting AIDS in Africa, promoting literacy in Mexico, combating the conditions for terrorism using micro-finance in the Palestinian territories, and confronting gender inequality using social venture capital to empower women in Afghanistan

Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: procedural mechanisms of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi-level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multilevel governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria— accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness— and points towards substantive institutional reforms.Published versio

Inflation targeting in practice: the UK experience

In this speech (given at the CFSresearch conference on the Implementation of Price Stability held at the Bundesbank Frankfurt am Main, 10. - 12. Sept 1998), John Vickers discusses theoretical and practical issues relating to inflation targeting as used in the United Kingdom doing the past six years. After outlining the role of the Bank s Monetary Policy Committee, he considers the Committee s task from a theoretical perspective, beforediscussing the concept and measurement of domestically generated inflation

The Hidden Side of Transparency among Government Agency Bloggers

This paper shows and discusses blogs as social action in a corporate context by investigating and seeking to understand organizational bloggers’ motivations and discursive behaviors in the contextual and cultural diversity of a\ud blog-setting. Providing empirical findings on the possibilities and limitations that are embedded in an organizational blog in a government agency context, traced\ud through focus group interviews of the organizational bloggers, the paper shows that culturally bound limitations exist and are exposed when implementing an open-source social technology like the weblog. People, even within the same organization, have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the transparency of the blog and the blog comments is managed differently by the internal bloggers. Through the discussion of the different cultural discourses at work in the blog, diverging roles and dilemmas that the blogging employees meet when engaging in corporate blogging are exposed and discussed. The aim of the paper is to discuss the social implications of these different cultural discourses in a corporate blog and how corporate cultural tensions emerge because of the blog. The paper pinpoints the problematic of transparency through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting self-censorship by bloggers as they operate in an environment that is increasingly transparent, and shows examples of\ud how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing\ud behavior due to self-censorship, as well as identification with the key actors in the group

The European Market for Organic Products: Growth and Development

The European Market for organic food has been growing rapidly in terms of both supply and demand during the 1990s. However, national markets develop in many different directions. In some countries the market share ist quiet high while in others a market for organic farming products nearly does not exist. This book detects and compares the national markets of the main organic products in 18 European countries - the 15 EU countries plus Switzerland, Norway and the Czech Republic - on the basis of the most comprehensive collection of data ever presented covering the period 1993 - 1997/1998. It is shown that European demand is far from being satisfied and the major efforts in organising a transparent international market and developing marketing strategies is necessary to realise this potential. This book is aimed at policy makers, the private sector, researchers and students in the field of economics and politics of organic farming