What happens when transparency meets blame-avoidance?

Abstract

This article explores what happens when the much-discussed doctrine of transparency as a key to good governance meets the widely observed behavioural tendency of blame-avoidance in politics and public administration. It begins by discussing transparency as an idea and distinguishing different strains of the doctrine, proceeds to discuss blame-avoidance and to identify three common types of blame-avoidance strategy, and then explores what can happen when a widely advocated governance doctrine meets a commonly observed type of behaviour. The article identifies ways in which that conjunction can produce nil effects, side-effects and reverse-effects in the pursuit of transparency. It concludes that the tension between the pursuit of transparency and the avoidance of blame is at the heart of some commonly observed problems in public management, and suggests that something other than the ‘bureaucratic’ strain of transparency may be called for when those problems are serious.

Key words:

• Blame-avoidance
• bureaucracy
• open government
• organizational behaviour
• risk
• transparency

Notes

1 Paralleling Collier and Levitsky's (1997) well-known article on ‘Democracy with Adjectives’.

2 Slovic's (1993) observation that favourable traits require more confirmation than unfavourable traits (what he calls ‘trust asymmetry’) is a related observation, and Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and others have also observed human tendencies to incur greater risks when faced with a choice among potential losses than occurs when faced with a choice among equivalent potential gains.

3 For example, van de Ven et al.'s (2000) 720-page book on innovation research has no index entry for ‘blame’ and does not discuss how blame-avoidance relates to innovation; for a ‘Pavlovian’ (low-intelligence) model of innovation designed to avoid blame see Hood and Lodge (2005).