August 2007 Edition
NAOMI HOSSAIN, HAYDORY AKBAR AHMED
AND MANZOOR HASAN
THE Bangladesh Constitution does not have any statute that specifically recognises the people’s right to information or provides procedures for its implementation. The need to create a coherent legal framework for freedom of information has been felt for quite sometime in Bangladesh and a movement is already on An effective Right to Information (RTI) law should make access to information real. There must be defined bodies and procedures by which information can be sought, and all parties should be legally empowered and capable of ensuring the free flow of information to the people. While the right to information is crucial, the right to transparent governance is more expansive. It requires the government to ensure that people are able to know and understand the rules, procedures and practices by which they are governed.
We beleive that the right to information
and the right to transparent governance
go hand in hand.
Real-life examples have proved time
and again that transparent governance
improves the quality of governance. It
exposes and prevents corruption, increases
efficiency and performance, builds
public trust in public institutions, and
makes accountability possible. The right to transparent governance
would involve legal reforms to bring about
a right to information law that would
invigorate the role of the opposition in
Parliament, permit official disclosure, and
enable civil society and the media to
responsibly scrutinise and criticise official
and legal processes.
However, there have been concerns
that an effective RTI law will need to not
only tackle legal issues but also to put in
place implementation mechanisms and
processes. Information will have to be collected,
managed and disseminated in useful
forms. There are also issues of bureaucratic
and political cultures, both of which
feature a tendency towards automatic secrecy and centralised control of information.
Bringing about a right to transparent governance will require substantial investments
in the capacities of government (in particular) to collect, disseminate, and
manage information in the public interest. This may involve the development of
systems for monitoring government activities such as management information
systems; it should also focus on increasing computerisation of official records for
easy manageability.
Promoting a right to transparent governance will require a focus on re-orienting political and bureaucratic cultures towards rewarding behaviour which is more open, and penalising unnecessary secrecy. Reforms would include:
-
Cultural reforms to establish an ethos and standard for transparent and citizen oriented behaviour among public servants and representatives,
-
Institutional reforms within the bureaucracy and political parties to create incentives and rewards for openness, and to penalise unnecessary secrecy, information control and obfuscation, and
-
Organisational reforms that makes processes of appointment, transfer and promotion within the bureaucracy, and the criteria and process for selection of political party candidates crystal clear and above board.
An active undertaking to promote transparency among NGOs, the private sector and donors, particularly in their dealings with the government, is also a crucial element of transparent governance in Bangladesh, for which e-governance is the ideal tool. There are as yet no such identifiable pressures on donors and aid agencies to commit to minimum standards of transparency with respect to their dealings with domestic country governments. The donor emphasis on good governance within countries, however, provides a clear entry point for demanding greater transparency The poorest and most marginal should be able to access information about and understand the rules and procedures of governance. A striking lesson from the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) experience in India is that it is through active participation by the poor and marginal that the right to information can be activated and secured. There are valuable opportunities here for connecting a movement to establish a right to transparent governance with the important work done by NGOs in human rights and legal education among the poor.The campaigns by Bangladesh’s media and civil society have been playing a strong role in establishing a right to transparent governance. An initial strategy for establishing this right would be to continue to involve these actors in raising public awareness, creating platforms for political debates, highlighting and celebrating openness among government departments, individual officials, and politicians who push the agenda forward.
Efforts to improve transparency in the national budget process, for example, could be the centrepiece of such a campaign, building on strong successes in this crucial domain. Both the media and civil society have strong stakes in establishing a legal and practical right to greater transparency in governance: the effectiveness of their role, as well as the safety within which they can operate, will be greatly enhanced if such a right can be made real. What practical steps can be taken to defuse official resistance to greater transparency? There are two potential entry points. First, identify which groups and interests are relative winners and relative losers from more open governance. Some organisations, officials and groups of politicians are more likely to champion or at least not obstruct transparency reforms than others. A civil society-led campaign for a right to transparent governance should strategically select the following to work with. The Ministry of Finance is interested in knowing how line ministries spend their resources. Efficiency considerations may similarly encourage the executive to support efforts to improve information gathering by the government. A right to transparent governance will be meaningless unless government has information about its own operations. Successful ministries and programmes currently suffer from a lack of recognition for their achievements, just as much as failing ministries and departments benefit from the lack of transparency that conceals governmental failures.
Government successes in education and disaster management, for example, cannot be credibly promoted and celebrated under current conditions of secrecy. Failing sectors such as power and labour unrest in the readymade garment industry demonstrated the effects of a lack of transparency and accountability in 2006. Many people who lacked legitimate channels for their reasonable complaints about electricity supplies and unlawfully low wages resorted to mass action, often resulting in violence. Serious failures of governance provide entry points for stimulating greater transparency within failing institutions. Opposition parties always benefit from greater transparency, as this provides them with scope to scrutinise government action. Secondly, make transparency a key element of ongoing reforms. An exciting opportunity here is provided by recent modest gains in e-governance, which have demonstrated that there is both an appetite and a growing capacity within the government for supplying at least basic information and statistics on-line. Improving the use of technology for information management will in itself improve the prospects for more open governance. The fruits of greater transparency in government are likely to take time, and will grow through an interactive process of building accountability at the local and national levels. In Bangladesh, the media and civil society can continue to play an important role by documenting small successes in improving transparency in governance.
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