BackOn Wednesday, September 30th, 2015 a Webinar on “Information as a Tool for Regulation: How Can Transparency Work for You?” will be held from 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. EST. Elena Fagotto, Director of Research of the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard Kennedy School, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation will speak about the complex matter of transparency as an policy intervention.
Nutritional labels, hospital report cards, auto safety ratings, financial reporting, sex offender registries. What do these disparate policies have in common? They are all examples of targeted transparency, an approach to reduce risks and improve the quality of services and products by disclosing information to the public. The idea behind transparency is that injecting more information in the market can empower the public to make better choices, reducing certain risks, and in turn creating incentives for information disclosers to produce healthier foods, deliver better hospital care and safer vehicles. Transparency seems like a simple and straightforward idea, yet it is much more complex than it appears.
The Transparency Policy Project has analyzed scores of disclosure policies to understand what makes transparency an effective and sustainable policy intervention. We have learned that sometimes the public doesn’t use the information, and that certain segments of the population find it harder to comprehend and act on it. Sometimes transparency can result in unintended consequences, from vigilantism against sex offenders, to discrimination against more complicated patients. In some cases, transparency forces organizations to learn about their performance and adopt corrective measures even before consumers respond to the new information. We have also discovered promising transparency systems that resulted in risk reduction and better products, and we have identified some elements that successful transparency policies have in common.
These are some of the questions that will be discussed at the webinar:
- How does targeted transparency work?
- What are some of the common obstacles to transparency?
- Can we design more effective transparency systems?
- How are insights from behavioral economics shaping targeted transparency?
- What is the future of transparency?
Discussants:
- Laura Neuman, Carter Center, OGP Access to Information Working Group (Co-convener)
- Ben Worthy (TBC), Lecturer in Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
This Webinar is bein ssonsored ay the OGP Support Unit, the OGP Access to Information Working Group and the World Bank.
This session’s recording will be available on the OGP website, as well as in the World Bank’s E-Institute portal where you can also find the recordings of all the other OGP Webinars.
To JOIN the session on Wednesday September 30, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. EST, please go HERE and login 5 minutes before the webinar is scheduled to start
Source: Open Government Partnership
