However, we agree that the issues I raise should not be allowed to become an excuse for limiting transparency. Perhaps the folks you are dealing with are more unscrupulous than I realise?

You are absolutely right that data are necessary but not sufficient; and that how the information is used will determine the effect.

Development Initiatives became involved in this because we use data; our own use is primarily to do with holding donors to account. We also help other organisations, including many southern NGOs, to use existing aid data. So we think all the time about how to ensure the data are put out in a way that is actually useful to people.

We’ve also tried very hard to ensure that the emerging IATI standard actually addresses the needs expressed to us by southern stakeholders – and to ensure that these include civil society, parliamentarians and the media, and not just developing country governments.

I’m glad that there wasn’t someone sitting in the Treasury saying that we had to work out how data was going to be used before we released it. It is true that how the information is used will determine what effect it has, but the job of the governments is to get the data out there, and to let others decide how they want to use it. The questions you are asking are all intellectually valid, but they must not be allowed to become an excuse not to publish the information that donors have.

Owen

They also leave me wanting to emphasise that “transparency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for effective accountability”. As does Tim Berners-Lee’s motto of “Raw data now!” or AidInfo’s “Liberate the data” (although I acknowledge that those slogans are slightly catchier – in a geeky way – than “necessary but not sufficient … blah blah”)

Anyway, three sets of issues:

1) To make sense of “raw data”, one needs a theory. I think that this sometimes gets forgotten as if one can just make sense of massive influxes of data, without some framework of/for understanding. A variant of this problem is when the theories that are shaping how “raw data” is selected, connected and interpreted are left unexamined as if they were value-neutral. At risk of straying into one of my gripes about mainstream economics, I’ll leave that one there …

2) To make the “raw data” or transparency deliver something useful – policy and practice that is better because it is based on better evidence, for instance – requires that there are structures and processes in place, let’s call them “accountability systems”. So – as well as not neglecting those – when people are trying to “liberate the data”, it’s important that they also think about how the data might best be used and whether that might make a difference to what data is liberated and how. I expect that the AidInfo initiative is doing this, and would be interested to know more.

3) I guess this is related to 1 and to 2 and at the moment I won’t say much about it, but it’s important to understand the political economy of data. That is, to get your head round the system of data flows and to contribute to making it work better, you need to understand the political economy and the power dynamics of the production, distribution and consumption of data. It ain’t – despite the pretense of those who talk about evidence-based (rather than informed) policy – a politics free or value free system; to understand it – and change it – requires a clear recognition of that. If information/evidence/data is “the currency of accountability” (Droop, Isenmann, Mlalazi, 2008 – OPM paper), then a political economy perspective ought to have considerable value.

Ooops, sounding like a marxist again

PS: I am coining a new term. Bloggybacking. Currently with only one google hit in the whole googlyverse. Promoting one’s own blog on the back of someone else’s better known efforts. Thanks Owen. And others!

How time flies…