Transparency, accountability and empowerment in sustainability governance: a conceptual review

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a conceptual examination of the power-effects of transparency, as information disclosure, on those making accountability claims against actors deemed to be causing significant environmental harm. Informed by Lukes’s ([2005]. Power: A radical view (second edition). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.) multi-dimensional theory of power, I review recent scholarship to interrogate four hypotheses positing empowerment for accountability claimants arising from the disclosure of sustainability information. Across public and private governance forms, academic research suggests that information disclosure promotes the communication of the sustainability interests of affected parties, and in some cases enhances the capacity of these parties to evaluate justifications provided by relevant power-wielders. However, evidence is weaker that disclosure of sustainability information empowers accountability claimants to sanction or otherwise steer those responsible; and there is little support that transparency fosters wider political interrogation of the configurations of authority producing environmental harm. Differentiating between behavioural and non-behavioural understandings of power allows an evaluation of these research findings on the power-related effects of information disclosure.

KEYWORDS:

• Transparency
• accountability
• power
• sustainability
• governance

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Aarti Gupta, Ingrid Boas and Peter Oosterveer for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also benefitted greatly from the detailed constructive comments made by three anonymous referees: many thanks also to them Peter Feindt for editorial guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Michael Mason is an Associate Professor in Environmental Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research includes work on accountability and transparency in global environmental governance, and on environmental politics in areas of contested sovereignty (focused regionally on the Middle East).