"Transparency" is the latest buzzword, but what does it mean, and what does transparency promise? Our own Mark Schmitt questions whether, when it comes to domestic spending, transparency for its own sake makes for good governance. "Much transparency … actually obscures important facts in a sea of data points," he writes.
The question of whether transparency in foreign aid poses the same problems or actually yields greater accountability is as important as ever, with money continuing to pour into Haiti after the January earthquake. TAP asked Karin Christiansen, director of Publish What You Fund and former policy manager for the ONE Campaign, about her group's push for better transparency in foreign-aid spending.
How does transparency help in foreign aid?
That comes down to what you mean by "transparency." It's not just about more information. For example, Haiti. Right now, there's a fair amount of information out there -- not necessarily enough, but quite a bit out there. One of the biggest challenges we've all got, though, is getting that data to talk to each other. When somebody's talking about water, does that mean sanitation or does that mean irrigation? This sort of basic sense of how to use data better; the way we talk about that particularly is that it needs to be comparable, timely, and comprehensive. Those are the real characteristics required of information so that it actually starts to generate transparency in a real sense rather than just huge volumes of information that are un-processable or not very accessible.
How exactly is aid transparency essential to the relief effort in Haiti?
Right now, there are people in desperate need of shelter. How do people maintain those houses or build new houses? How do people maintain the roads to those houses? If you build a health center now, there's somebody worrying quite hard about how we capture how many health centers have been built, therefore how many nurses are needed, therefore how many drugs are needed in the short and long term.
So getting all of that information is really important, but it's more about how you actually keep records of this information so we know that there are five health centers in this district, and if you want to keep them running, you're going to need this many nurses, in this many years' time you need to start training nurses and buying drugs to keep those places running -- otherwise these investments that we're making now won't be used in five years' time; they'll be derelict, and there won't be nurses to man them, and there won't be drugs going into them.
How do you envision outside groups using the data?
I've got lots of things that I would love to do both as a taxpayer and as somebody who's worked in developing countries, but I think one of the big ones that we need to get from this data is [how it] maps onto the budgets of developing countries -- whether it's Liberia or Uganda or Haiti [for which] we can actually map aid flows and start to look at the overall results, which suddenly means that we can start to say, "Hey, wait a minute, we're spending a huge amount on tertiary education, but where is the primary education? We've got a lot being spent on this district, but this district is not getting any money."
One of the things we're working hard on is encouraging people to look at how to improve the spending of money not just amidst scandals. There's a tendency sometimes -- I mean, there often are things that should be uncovered that's not to say that they aren't an important part of this agenda -- but what we want is to get more money, spent better.
So the accountability conversation should focus around getting the best out of the money, not just around some of the worst things happening.
What are the biggest challenges that partner countries face in spending money more effectively?
I think more data being available in comparable, timely, comprehensive ways -- publicly -- will make a lot of bureaucrats' lives about 20 percent easier, but there will be a handful of bureaucrats whose day it will make 100 percent worse.
We've got to build alliances between all of the people whom it will benefit by a significant amount. … The politicians tend to back this; politicians tend to want to know what's going on, but the data's not really there.
Publish What You Fund's Web site mentions the Obama administration's Open Government Directive as an example of data transparency in domestic spending. What do you think could be replicated from the Open Government Directive in foreign-aid transparency?
You have to be careful in making comparisons, but in some ways I think what we're really looking for is a kind of recovery.gov. Instead of it being Minnesota that the money's being tracked to, we're saying that Liberia is where the money is being tracked to and that we have a system where we can actually follow the money to Liberia.
A lot of this information is already out there; if you go have a good dig around the USAID Web site, you'll find quite a lot of information, and some of it is actually pretty up to date. It's getting a standard format out there that means that a lot of that can be automated instead of taking six months of research to actually get the information out.
