Transparency and Administrative Law: A Critical Evaluation

Transparency as a concept figures in many different spheres of public life ranging from architecture, the arts, media, markets, democracy, regulation, and public administration. Indeed, the Global Language Monitor assessed it to be one of the ‘top’ words of 2009 behind ‘Twitter’, ‘Obama’, and ‘vampire’, but above ‘bonus’, and ‘unemployed’. 1 Due to this fact, there is a danger that discussions about it are vague, touch on every intellectual neurosis of the contemporary age, and proceed from the architecture of modern parliamentary buildings, onward through the problems of corruption (with a minor detour on MP expenses), towards a discussion of audit and new public management (and the problems for higher education), pause briefly to consider Facebook and other forms of social networking, and finally terminate with a philosophical musing about what reality television tells us about contemporary society. 2 In this article my focus is a far narrower one – on the interface between transparency and administrative law. With that said, this article is not about a particular regime or a particular line of cases. 3 Rather, my concern is to show how transparency mechanisms are not just tools for administrative lawyers but also extend the province of the subject, contribute to its architecture, and provide new sources of conflict and dispute. The consequence of this is that administrative lawyers and administrative law scholars need to think more carefully about transparency and their own body of expertise.