Slipping on transparency
- October 25, 2021
- min reading time
- Jeroen Medema
- Thijs Kraassenberg
Transparency: You can’t help but be in favor of that! At least, that’s how it seems when you follow debates in which the word ‘transparency” comes up. Yet putting it into practice isn’t so simple for environmental managers. At the National Environmental Management Day (LOMD) on October 4, Thijs Kraassenberg and Stefan Szepesi led two workshops on the theme “Slipping on Transparency.
Transparency has something sticky about it. Once the theme emerges, you can't just leave it behind. Often, it's also an umbrella term for all sorts of related matters, directly or indirectly. Clarity, reliability, trust, predictability, accessibility, etc.
When you peel back the layers of transparency, you encounter different layers of questions:
What is it What information is available, to what extent, and where is the boundary of information that will and will not be shared?
The how What steps are involved in information sharing, and what communication processes or methods are applicable?
The with which Through which channel is information made accessible and is the target audience best reached?
When What timing for sharing information is applied, when is early enough?
The why: What facts and considerations underlie a decision on whether or not to share certain information?
When we apply transparency, what positive effects can this have on environmental management and, consequently, directly or indirectly, on the task?
Transparency in the public domain
- Publication
We see six categories of positive effects:
- Increasing the credibility of the project/task.
- Increasing understanding of each other and each other's interests.
- Preventing surprises.
- Expanding the solution space: Sharing information invites the sharing of additional insights/ideas from stakeholders or experts.
- Improving equality; stakeholders can more easily overcome an information deficit, leading to affluent stakeholders who are on a more equal footing and are less likely to seek another arena to engage in conflict.
- Making the outside perspective accessible: the project team can become more aware of what's going on and how the project is perceived.
But we also see six categories of adverse effects:
- Blocking reflection: transparency causes parties involved in a sensitive case to be less open with each other about themselves, the situation, or the interaction.
- Deeper trenches: parties dig in their heels faster because transparency carries the risk that the base will feel that they are not fighting “hard” enough for their interests.
- Fewer experiments: less is being tried out because it is possible to reconstruct in detail afterward who made unfortunate decisions at what time.
- Calculated behavior: conversations and written notes are pre-sorted for disclosure; tomorrow's Public Access to Government Information Act request casts its shadow on today.
- Reduced activity: stagnation due to transparency. The consequences cannot yet be foreseen, actions are not being taken, and (impending) transparency is causing paralysis.
- Finger-pointing: it is more attractive to leave a paper trail of finger-pointing so that when unfavorable information comes out, the reconstruction can show that your own party had long warned of the risks; the atmosphere at the table thus becomes much grimmer, more closed off, and therefore less constructive.
If transparency is viewed as a situation where all information is always available to everyone, this approach definitely has quite a few drawbacks. While openness between parties can yield many benefits. Especially if it fits a pattern and contributes to predictability and trust in what needs to happen between them. Sometimes it is even crucial to be able to make progress. We will need to carefully consider and design transparency in such a way that it aligns with the different levels at which contact occurs regarding the subject we are working on.
Our colleagues Jeroen Medema and Thijs Kraassenberg have a paper on transparency written, in which we delve deeper into this topic and also describe the conditions under which transparency can work.
