The impact of open data in the UK: complex, unpredictable, and political

This article examines the democratic impact of the UK coalition government's Transparency Agenda, focusing on the publication of all local government spending over £500 by councils in England. It looks at whether the new data have driven increased democratic accountability, public participation, and information transmission. The evidence suggests that the local government spending data have driven some accountability. However, rather than forging new ‘performance regimes’, creating ‘armchair auditors’, or bringing mass use and involvement, the publication creates a further element of political disruption. Assessment of the use and impact of the new spending data finds it is more complex, more unpredictable, and more political than the rhetoric around Open Data indicates. The danger is that the gap between aims and impact invites disappointment from supporters

Command, control and contestation: negotiating security at the London 2012 Olympics

Mega-event security is often characterised as an exceptional exercise in terms of scale, scope and form, and considered variously through macro-theoretical lenses citing the assertion of overarching disciplinary, neoliberal, colonial corporatist and other interest-based aspirations. Based on empirical analysis of the London 2012 Olympic security operation and of those who resisted it (including data drawn from interviews and participant observations with key security agencies and activists), this paper interrogates the complex, diverse and often fragmented contestations over space across the Olympic neighbourhood. Despite the professed unity of purpose among Olympic planners (such as the protection of sponsors' access to the marketplace), more detailed analysis reveals both the application and purpose of ordering processes as contested and sometimes contradictory realms. Here, the longstanding recognition that space is used in simultaneously diverse ways is reflected in its control. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of security different impositions of order - regulatory, exclusionary, disciplinary, suggestive and assuasive - are argued to exist simultaneously in the same broadly defined area

Examining the Use of Corporate Governance Mechanisms in Public-Private Partnerships: Why Do They Not Deliver Public Accountability?

The paper examines corporate governance mechanisms which aim to ensure financial accountability in the context of long-term Public-Private Partnership (PPP) contracts in Britain, and assesses the degree to which they provide taxpayers with control and accountability. The corporate governance arrangements are drawn from the private sector, and therefore downplay the traditional concepts of probity and stewardship, in part due to the British Treasury’s adoption of private sector financial reporting.The paper draws on Shaoul et al.’s (2012) framework governance-based reporting framework to critique the corporate governance mechanisms of structure, financial reporting, contracts and scrutiny in relation to British PPP projects. It shows that the way these mechanisms are set up means there is a lack of control by the public sector, thus rendering public accountability ineffective.<br/