Freedom of information legislation, state compliance and the discourse of knowledge: The South African experience

Darch, Colin; Underwood, Peter G.

doi:10.1080/10572317.2005.10762668

Cited by 25 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…2 However, despite its strong design, many have highlighted ongoing problems with implementation and compliance of PAIA (Darch and Underwood 2005;Dimba 2009;Neuman and Calland 2007;OSJI 2006). Andrew Puddephatt, then executive director of ARTICLE 19, said that "the South African legislation is the gold standard against which we measure other laws: we would be very disappointed were it to fall at the hurdle of implementation."…”

Section: Access To Information and Local Compliancementioning

confidence: 99%

Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act

Berliner

2016

Governance

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Institutional reforms often face challenges of poor compliance and implementation at the local level. I analyze these in a context where weak state capacity and limited enforcement make widespread compliance unlikely. South Africa's 2000 Promotion of Access to Information Act tasked the South African Human Rights Commission with monitoring and promoting compliance, but with limited resources and no authority to sanction. I argue that local political competition can generate endogenous incentives for compliance, even under conditions of weak capacity and limited external enforcement. Using data on 234 South African municipalities over 10 years, I find higher levels of compliance among more politically competitive municipalities. The results are not simply a function of differences between African National Congress–governed municipalities and others, and are robust to numerous controls for different forms of local state capacity.

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Section: Access To Information and Local Compliancementioning

confidence: 99%

Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act

Berliner

2016

Governance

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“…Open data, as with any effective government transparency system, requires the maintenance of effective record-keeping by government bodies (Darch, 2013). Darch and Underwood (2005) explain that an access to information culture in South Africa has failed to blossom because…”

Section: Political Willmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2016

AJIC

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The AfricAn JournAl of informATion And communicATion (AJic) issue 19, 2016 ThemATic issue: Knowledge governAnce for developmenT Published by the LINK Centre, School of Literature, Language and Media (SLLM) Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Johannesburg, South Africa www.wits.ac.za/linkcentre/ajic Published since 2000, The African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC) is a peerreviewed, interdisciplinary, open access academic journal focused on information and communication ecosystems in Africa, elsewhere in the developing world, at at global level. Accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), AJIC pursues its open access objective by publishing online, free to the user, under a Creative Commons licence, and by not imposing article processing charges on its contributors.

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“…One vital question is the coverage of private contractors. Only the South African PAIA specifically enables access to private bodies (Darch and Underwood 2005). The UK FOI can be extending via secondary legislation under section 5 of the Act.…”

Section: A) Extension Of Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, many of the "opaque and informal conduits" that the RTI Act seeks to end and International Journal of Open Government http://ojs.imodev.org/index.php?journal=RIGO close are "essential to allow the urban poor to survive" (207). Here the RTI Act resembles other legislation such as the Public Access to Information Act in South Africa, where legislation is caught within a network of complex social, political and cultural relation and barriers that hinder the operation of the Act (Darch and Underwood 2005).…”

Section: B) Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Access to Information in the UK and India

Worthy

2014

SSRN Journal

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International Journal of Open Government http://ojs.imodev.org/index.php?journal=RIGO supplemented by a variety of online transparency experiments using Open Data (Worthy 2013a). Access to Information laws (also known as Freedom of Information or Right to Information laws) now exist in 92 countries (Access Info/CLD 2013). They have been pushed as a key driver for improving government transparency and accountability, promoting more open cultures within public bodies and, it is hoped, increasing public participation and trust (Worthy 2010). In the developing world they are seen as a powerful anticorruption weapon and a means of securing wider social and political rights (Darch and Underwood 2010). While the idea of transparency appears simple, it conceals nuances and complex interpretations. According to Meijer "the specific form that government transparency takes-or does not-varies enormously. There is no uniform, standardized approach to transparency but an immense variety of sorts and types of government transparency" laws (2013, 2). The impact of FOI is "highly idiographic" and the "social and political contexts and specific histories of different countries" need to be taken into account (Darch and Underwood 2010, 7). Recent work has examined how transparency can move in different directions with different intentions, ranging from, for example, "mapping at high levels of aggregation" to localised, if not street level, "micro-level" openness (Heald 2012, 41). The dynamics are "complex because they entail interactions between a variety of actors, uncertain values and rapidly changing technology" and take place within "a variety of legal frameworks, in different cultural settings, and within complex national…policy contexts" (Meijer 2013, 1). These variations can lead to strategic uncertainty regarding aims, cognitive uncertainty as to policy options, and institutional uncertainty as transparency shifts rules and procedures (Meijer 2013, 3-4). Recent experimental research found that transparency in different policy areas can have very different effects on both institutions and public perceptions (De Fine Licht 2013: Grimmelikhaujsen 2012).

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Freedom of information legislation, state compliance and the discourse of knowledge: The South African experience

Cited by 25 publications

References 5 publications

Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act

Sunlight or Window Dressing? Local Government Compliance with South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act

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Access to Information in the UK and India

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