Sources of Transparency: Information Systems in International Regimes

Scholars and practitioners alike have stressed the important role of transparency in promoting international regime compliance and effectiveness. Yet many regimes fail to create high levels of transparency: governments and nongovernmental actors regularly fail to monitor or report on their own behavior, the behavior of other actors, or the state of the problem these regimes seek to resolve. If more transparency often, if not always, contributes to regime effectiveness, then identifying the sources of transparency becomes an important research task. Regime transparency depends upon both the demand for information and the supply of information. Specifically, regimes can seek “effectiveness-oriented” information to assess whether regime members are collectively achieving regime goals or “compliance-oriented” information to assess whether particular actors are individually fulfilling regime commitments. The incentives and capacities that relevant actors—whether governments, nongovernmental organizations, or corporate actors—have to provide such information depend on whether the regime's information system is structured around self-reporting, other-reporting, or problem-reporting. Although many of these factors are determined by characteristics of the actors involved or the structure of the problem, regimes can increase transparency by enhancing the incentives and capacity actors have to contribute to a particular regime's transparency.