By Toby McIntosh
“Dark Openness,” a recent article by a Swedish research fellow, raised a provocative question – whether “our toolbox of openness and participation” is being “actively turned against us” by “the wrong people.”
The author, Dieter Zinnbauer, suggested a response – that the transparency tools should be re-anchored “around a set of deeper, clear, non-negotiable normative values.”
His essay was given top billing in the newsletter of The Trust, Accountability, and Inclusion Collaborative, the think tank supported by philanthropies interested in governance topics. Zinnbauer is a “Visiting Fellow” at the Copenhagen Business School.
Eye on Global Transparency approached leading activists and thinkers on transparency for their reactions, asking:
- Do you agree with his assertion (and evidence) that transparency has been coopted? and
- What’s your take on his prescription that transparency needs a normative reset?
Most expressed some degree of support for Zinnbauer’s basic thesis, but were less pessimistic.
Several stressed that populists’ use of social media has undermined public perceptions of transparency.
And instead of seeing a need for new values, their emphasis was on better defining, defending and promoting transparency.
Below EYE provides the perspectives given by two top open government activists and two scholars whose work focuses on transparency.
EYE invites others to send their comments to mcintosh.toby@gmail.com
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Zinnbauer’s Concerns Grew at OGP Conference
Zinnbauer wrote his short article (567 words) after attending the October 7-9 summit of the Open Government Partnership, held in Spain, reporting that the mood was “understandably pretty gloomy.” He observed that participants were not recognizing the threat he described, “at least not at the level of urgency required.”
ZInnbauer surfaced his concerns earlier this year, in a January article titled, Plutocracy 2025. He wrote that plutocracy “is not only behind the scenes, but also a full-frontal brash attack right on the public stage.” He wrote that “a large portion of the power in this power grab is the result of the very brash openness and public exaggeration that it is celebrated with.” This sort of power might deflate under close scrutiny, he said, but “when openness becomes a sword, the world becomes confusing for good governance and transparency advocates.”
He concluded:
Backstage plutocracy is alive – comfortably thriving in the shadow of and with even less scrutiny than before – while front-stage plutocracy thrives on its public notoriety. Sunlight as a useful infectant.
In his recent essay, Vinnbauer said, “The weaponization of the openness agenda is already underway.”
He cited three examples, beginning with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document with an agenda for President Trump, that Vinnbauer said, “completely usurps the language of transparency, inclusiveness and openness for sinister purposes….” Second, he said US corporations’ funding of ballot initiatives is “… torpedoing democratically legitimated legislation.” Third, he said that “businesses not investigative journalist or interested citizens are the most frequent user of freedom of information requests, increasingly joined by far-right culture warriors that seek to harass and discredit researchers that may produce inconvenient evidence on climate etc.”
Vinnbauer cautioned, “We need to envision what could come down the pike pretty soon, to ask hard questions about how to populist-proof, hate-protect and authoritarianism-insulate our beloved tools.”
Doing so “will require us to recall and re-anchor these approaches really firmly around a set of deeper, clear, non-negotiable normative values, a process that might also lay open painful fissures and differences among ourselves and within an open government movement that has come to see itself as generously cross-partisan.”
Head of OGP Agrees About the Risk, Makes Suggestions
Aidan Eyakuze, the OGP’s Chief Executive Officer, began his reply by saying, “Yes, the risk is real.”
Eyakuze cited several examples of “politically-motivated prosecutions based on the misuse of transparency considerations.” And he pointed to the use of anti-corruption rules to weaken organizations that hold the powerful to account.
“So, the answer is not less openness, but smarter openness that strengthens rule-based governance, protects civic space, builds trust, and keeps integrity and fairness at its core,” wrote Eyakuze.
Regarding the idea of a “normative reset,” Eyakuze put the agenda in terms of taking action to demonstrate the value of transparency, writing:
Transparency needs a moral compass. It’s not just about disclosure, but about strengthening democracy, inclusion, and trust. A normative reset means reclaiming openness as a force for fairness and human dignity, reconnecting it to the values that make societies resilient and prosperous. In addition to normative reset, transparency also needs buttressing through demonstrating its positive instrumental value to citizens, communities and countries. We shouldn’t avert our gaze from the difficult times ahead. But neither should we fix our stare there. Doing so would only sap our energy and discourage us from the optimism and collaboration that open government requires.
Three Ideas to Deal With the Tension
Also upbeat was Alasdair Roberts, a long-time scholar on transparency, now Professor of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, whose next book, coming out soon, is titled “Against Centralism: How Concentrating Political Power Makes Things Worse.” (See a preview, the preface.)
While agreeing that the tools of openness “are being used by people for purposes that are indifferent or hostile to the project of democratic empowerment,” Roberts saw two bits of good news:
The good news, Part One: These tools haven’t been “appropriated.” They
remain available for people interested in advancing the democratic
project.
The good news, Part Two: This problem isn’t new. We’ve been aware for
a long time that the concept of transparency can be used by actors
with different motives. That is why the concept is so durable.
Noting Zinnbauer’s concern that businesses are the most frequent filers of freedom of information requests, Roberts commented that this “has long been recognized” and added, “Ironically, they constitute a powerful constituency for workable FOI laws.”
“How do we deal with these tensions?,” Roberts asked. His answer:
First, we keep our eye on our end goal: democratic empowerment.
Second, we design tools so that they tend to promote that goal and discourage antithetical usages.
And third, we have to keep an eye on actual practice, observing how tools are actually used — by whom and for what purpose.
Fenster Says Populism Threatens Transparency
US law professor Mark Fenster anticipated this discussion in a February 2021 article entitled Populism and Transparency: The Political Core of an Administrative Norm in the University of Cincinnati Law Review. Fenster teaches at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. His 2017 book is The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information.
In 2021, Fenster wrote that “the rise of right-wing populism, reminiscent of older forms of militaristic authoritarianism, threatens transparency’s ascent.” His article mostly explored transparency in Donald Trump’s first term, in which, Fenster said, “He appeared transparent.”
In his 2021 article Fenster observed:
Trump frustrated his opponents with his failure to meet transparency’s technocratic rules and normative expectations that at least in theory are subject to the neutral rule of law and to widely-held and generally applicable norms. But his supporters not only found those rules and expectations irrelevant, they may have even enjoyed the degree to which his administration frustrated laws enforced by his opponents and the bureaucratic “deep state” and that were utilized by the mainstream press to criticize him. This is clear hypocrisy.
More broadly, Fenster wrote:
Whereas transparency advocates promote laws and norms as the means for the public to protect itself, populist movements offer themselves as the force that can protect the public from the elites who currently control the state. Populism thus simultaneously includes and is in tension with transparency ideals; and transparency advocates speak in a populist register without necessarily viewing the state as the instrument of an organized elite.
Summing up another way, Fenster said, “Transparency includes both populist and technocratic strains that pull in opposite directions and unravel each other, rendering each impossible to fully achieve.”
Fenster in 2021 was looking at Trump’s first administration, which he said “did not successfully destroy or abandon transparency as an administrative norm.” But he concluded:
At the same time, his emphasis on a more personal, affective notion of transparency via public rallies and social media threatens rebalancing transparency towards a populist, more explicitly political mode of transparency. This shift may have long-term, disfiguring effects on open government law and norms, and especially on executive branch compliance with it.
Fast Forward to 2025
Four years later, and with Trump president again, Fenster told EYE that Zinnbauer’s views “are well-taken though shouldn’t be perceived as responding to a new phenomenon.”
He added:
Transparency and accountability of government actors were always both designed for and utilized by corporate actors to fight back against the administrative state and to make certain that lobbying and influence had their intended effects. The press and public were of course also among transparency’s intended beneficiaries, but always within limits and with broad exemptions that limited disclosure.
Assessing the second Trump presidency, he saw two challenges to transparency norms:
The Trump presidency challenges transparency and open government in new ways.
First, the administration’s brazen willingness to ignore legal mandates and violate longstanding governing norms has gone beyond the typically frustrating approach to openness and accountability in which his predecessors have engaged.
But second, the President’s blithe lying about his own commitment to openness — alongside Elon Musk’s utterly bullshit claim that DOGE was “maximally transparent” — shifts the popular understanding of transparency away from official accountability and towards direct communication via social media and supportive mass media.
Fenster concluded:
The fact that his supporters believe him reveals that the concept is, and perhaps has always been, too abstract and open-ended to do the work its proponents claimed it could.
OGP’s Masseen Gives Advice for Team Open
Long-time OGP staff member Paul Maassen took a vacation after the busy OGP conference in Spain attended by more than 2,000 persons. He went to Nepal, and began his reply to EYE jokingly with “Enlightened by the Himalayan snows (-:)
Masseen brings the perspective of having worked in many countries to support OGP stakeholders. He joined OGP in 2012 and is currently the Chief, Global Programs. OGP began in 2011 and now includes 74 countries and 150 local governments.
“At the start of OGP social media held a big promise still of bringing us closer together, opening up government,” Maassen observed, adding: “But already back then we said the same tools and approaches could be used to push for an agenda of ‘open’ and an agenda of ‘closed.’ That tension will always be there.”
What to do? Maassen wrote:
Team open just has to be smarter, faster and deliver better results. Social media got hijacked by corporate interests and did not deliver on its promise. The opposite even, it created bigger fissures. AI is the next one, again, could be used for good or bad. Our push should be for public interest AI, not corporate interest AI.
“For me big tent is a strength not a weakness,” Maassen said, and he questioned the need to modify laws, saying:
Tighter definitions might push us back into silos and weaken our ability to connect to other stakeholders. Connecting the procurement people to the BO [beneficial ownership] people to the lobby people to the money and politics people made big steps possible on fighting corruption and nepotism. Connecting FOI law folks and open data community created much stronger push for (proactive) disclosure and useful transparency.
“I don’t think the answer is necessarily redefining or reanchoring values,” according to Maassen, “For sure it won’t be enough.”
He explained:
The values are clear. Perhaps we should work on language used and more clear definition of what we mean with transparency and participation for example. Make clearer distinction that for us it’s about transparency with a purpose (and not to favour a political agenda/faction or just as ‘the right thing’). Or that participation needs to follow certain criteria and conditions to be meaningful and fair. We should be more clear that in 15 years we have moved to a point where what we ask for is more than a principled ask. It has been proven it gets better government, better services etc.
Maassen said “… our priority should be to get much better at showing that this agenda – if done properly – gets better results and impact.” He elaborated:
For that we need committed political leaders and civil servants. Avoiding co-optation will be hard. We need to be better sales persons for what we have shown to work, build in quality assurances and safe guards where we can for our agenda and approaches and keep building bridges to others as much as we can.
