As an ethic that spansscience,engineering,business, and thehumanities,transparency is operating in such a way that it is easy for others to see what actions are performed. Transparency impliesopenness, communication, andaccountability.
Transparency is practiced in companies, organizations, administrations, and communities.[1] For example, in a business relation, fees are clarified at the outset by a transparent agent, so there are no surprises later. This is opposed to keeping this information hidden which is "non-transparent". A practical example of transparency is also when a cashier makes changes after a point of sale; they offer a transaction record of the items purchased (e.g., a receipt) as well as counting out the customer's change.
Ininformation security,transparency means keeping the arcane, underlying mechanisms hidden so as not to obstruct intended function—an almost opposite sense. It principally refers to security mechanisms that are intentionally undetectable or hidden from view. Examples include hiding utilities and tools which the user does not need to know in order to do their job, like keeping the remote re-authentication operations ofChallenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol hidden from the user.
In Norway and in Sweden, tax authorities annually release the"skatteliste","taxeringskalendern", or "tax list"; official records showing the annual income and overall wealth of nearly every taxpayer.[2]
Regulations in Hong Kong require banks to list their top earners – without naming them – by pay band.[3]
In 2009, the Spanish government for the first time released information on the net worth of each cabinet member, but data on ordinary citizens is private. Currently, elected officials have to disclose their net worth on a yearly basis.
An unwritten norm requires that American politicians release their tax returns, in particular those running for the office of president. During the2016 presidential campaign,Donald Trump refused to release them, breaking a 47-year-old custom, but still got elected.[4][5][6]
Radical transparency is amanagement method where nearly all decision making is carried out publicly. All draft documents, all arguments for and against a proposal, all final decisions, and the decision making process itself are made public and remain publicly archived. This approach has grown in popularity with the rise of theInternet.[7] Two examples of organizations utilizing this style are theLinux community andIndymedia.
Corporate transparency, a form of radical transparency, is the concept of removing all barriers to—and the facilitating of—free and easy public access to corporate information and the laws, rules, socialconnivance and processes that facilitate and protect those individuals and corporations that freely join, develop, and improve the process.[8]
In 2025 theAustrianCourt of Audit argued that mistakes had been made in granting neither Austria'sministry of energy nor regulatoryE-Control full access to gas contracts agreed upon betweenOMV and RussianGazprom[9][10] in 2006.[11]
Accountability and transparency are of high relevance fornon-governmental organisations (NGOs). In view of their responsibilities to stakeholders, including donors, sponsors, programme beneficiaries, staff, states and the public, they are considered to be of even greater importance to them than to commercial undertakings.[12] Yet these same values are often found to be lacking in NGOs.[12]
TheInternational NGO Accountability Charter, linked to theGlobal Reporting Initiative, documents the commitment of its membersinternational NGOs to accountability and transparency, requiring them to submit an annual report, among others.[13][14] Signed in 2006 by 11 NGOs active in the area of humanitarian rights, the INGO Accountability Charter has been referred to as the "first global accountability charter for the non-profit sector".[15] In 1997, theOne World Trust created anNGO Charter, acode of conduct comprising commitment to accountability and transparency.[16]
Media transparency is the concept of determining how and whyinformation is conveyed through various means.
If the media and the public knows everything that happens in all authorities and county administrations there will be a lot of questions, protests and suggestions coming from media and the public. People who are interested in a certain issue will try to influence the decisions. Transparency creates an everyday participation in the political processes by media and the public. One tool used to increase everyday participation in political processes isfreedom of information legislation and requests. Moderndemocracy builds on such participation of the people and media.
There are, for anybody who is interested, many ways to influence the decisions at all levels in society.[17]
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The right and the means to examine the process of decision making is known as transparency.In politics, transparency is used as a means of holdingpublic officials accountable and fightingcorruption. When agovernment's meetings are open to thepress and the public, itsbudgets may be reviewed by anyone, and its laws and decisions are open to discussion, it is seen as transparent. It is not clear however if this provides less opportunity for the authorities to abuse the system for their own interests.[18]
When military authoritiesclassify their plans as secret, transparency is absent. This can be seen as either positive or negative; positive because it can increasenational security, negative because it can lead to corruption and, in extreme cases, amilitary dictatorship.
While aliberal democracy can be aplutocracy, where decisions are made behind locked doors and the people have fewer possibilities to influence politics between the elections, aparticipative democracy is more closely connected to the will of the people.[citation needed] Participative democracy, built on transparency and everyday participation, has been used officially in northernEurope for decades. In the northern European countrySweden,public access to government documents became a law as early as 1766. It has officially been adopted as an ideal to strive for by the rest of EU, leading to measures likefreedom of information laws andlaws for lobby transparency.
To promote transparency inpolitics,Hans Peter Martin,Paul van Buitenen (Europa Transparant) andAshley Mote decided to cooperate under the name Platform for Transparency (PfT) in 2005. Similar organizations that promotes transparency areTransparency International and theSunlight Foundation.
A recent political movement to emerge in conjunction with the demands for transparency is thePirate Party, a label for a number of political parties across different countries who advocate freedom of information, direct democracy, network neutrality, and the free sharing of knowledge.
21st century culture affords a higher level of public transparency than ever before, and actually requires it in many cases. Modern technology and associated culture shifts have changed how government works (seeWikiLeaks), what information people can find out about each other, and the ability of politicians to stay in office if they are involved insex scandals. Due to thedigital revolution, people no longer have a high level of control over what is public information, leading to a tension between the values of transparency andprivacy.[19]
Scholarly research in anyacademic discipline may also be labeled as (partly) transparent (oropen research) if some or all relevant aspects of the research are open in the sense ofopen source,[20]open access andopen data,[21] thereby facilitatingsocial recognition andaccountability of the scholars who did the research andreplication by others interested in the matters addressed by it.[22]
Somemathematicians and scientists are critical of using closed sourcemathematical software such asMathematica formathematical proofs, because these do not provide transparency, and thus are not verifiable.[23] Open-source software such asSageMath aims to solve this problem.[24]
In the computer software world,open source software concerns the creation of software, to which access to the underlyingsource code is freely available. This permits use, study, and modification without restriction.
In computer security, the debate is ongoing as to the relative merits of thefull disclosure of security vulnerabilities, versus asecurity-by-obscurity approach.
There is a different (perhaps almost opposite) sense oftransparency in human-computer interaction, whereby a system after change adheres to its previous external interface as much as possible while changing its internal behaviour. That is, a change in a system is transparent to its users if the change is unnoticeable to them.
Sports has become a global business over the last century, and here, too, initiatives ranging from mandatory drug testing to the fighting of sports-related corruption are gaining ground based on the transparent activities in other domains.[25][failed verification]
Sigmund Freud, followingFriedrich Nietzsche ("On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense"), regularly argues that transparency is impossible because of the occluding function of the unconscious.
Among philosophical and literary works that have examined the idea of transparency areMichel Foucault'sDiscipline and Punish orDavid Brin'sThe Transparent Society. The German philosopher and media theoristByung-Chul Han, in his 2012 workTransparenzgesellschaft, sees transparency as a cultural norm created by neoliberal market forces, which he understands as the insatiable drive toward voluntary disclosure bordering on the pornographic. According to Han, the dictates of transparency enforce a totalitarian system of openness at the expense of other social values such asshame,secrecy, andtrust. He was criticized for his concepts, as they would suggest corrupt politics, and for referring to the anti-democraticCarl Schmitt.[26]
Anthropologists have long explored ethnographically the relation between revealed and concealed knowledges, and have increasingly taken up the topic in relation to accountability, transparency and conspiracy theories and practices today.[27][28][29] Todd Sanders and Harry West, for example, suggest not only that realms of the revealed and concealed require each other, but also that transparency in practice produces the very opacities it claims to obviate.[30]
Clare Birchall, Christina Gaarsten, Mikkel Flyverbom, Emmanuel Alloa and Mark Fenster, among others, write in the vein of "critical transparency studies", which attempts to challenge particular orthodoxies concerning transparency. In an article, Birchall assessed "whether the ascendance of transparency as an ideal limits political thinking, particularly for western socialists and radicals struggling to seize opportunities for change". She argues that the promotion of "datapreneurial" activity through open data initiatives outsources and interrupts the political contract between governed and government. She is concerned that the dominant model of governmental data-driven transparency produces neoliberal subjectivities that reduce the possibility of politics as an arena of dissent between real alternatives. She suggests that the radical left might want to work with and reinvent secrecy as an alternative to neoliberal transparency.[31]
Researchers at theUniversity of Oxford andWarwick Business School found that transparency can also have significant unintended consequences in the field of medical care. Gerry McGivern[32] and Michael D Fischer[33] found "media spectacles" and transparent regulation combined to create "spectacular transparency" which has some perverse effects on doctors' practice and increased defensive behaviour in doctors and their staff.[34][35] Similarly, in a four-year organizational study, Fischer and Ferlie found that transparency in the context of a clinical risk management can act perversely to undermine ethical behavior, leading to organizational crisis and even collapse.[36]
