Speaker
Description
Public sector transparency bears a significant importance in the underlying processes that foster advancing democratic governance, building trust in public systems and institutions, all while mitigating negative phenomena such as corruption and misinformation. Current developments reveal a straining concern for core themes surrounding public trust and comprehension of public systems, while unveiling the effects of imperfections in their intrinsic principles.
Transparency is a core pillar of public governance soundness, part of its backbone, alongside accountability, rule of law, integrity, efficiency, effectiveness, digital capacity, participation or stakeholder engagement, responsiveness, inclusiveness and social equity, sustainable outcomes and effective control. De facto, transparency is a multifaceted and ambiguous concept, which conveys the level of visibility of governmental processes, decisions and finances coupled with the extent to which the before mentioned aspects are made accessible and coherent to the general public. OECD views transparency and openness as foundational values of governance. In order to concretize the concept of transparency, an array of indicators are employed: budget disclosure, access-to-information compliance, open data availability, procurement disclosure and financial reporting quality.
The present paper aims at providing a viable assessment framework of public sector transparency and subsequently connecting it to topical implications and effects regarding corruption and democratic participation. By consequence, the proposed methodology introduces a composite multi-criteria assessment index, designed for the empirical operationalization of public sector transparency by aggregating sub-indexes across complementary analyzed dimensions. Furthermore, the advanced index normalizes the data and facilitates future comparative studies. The index is then applied on the available data for Romanian municipalities, contextualized and contrasted against the current state of the scientific literature on the topic.
The study confirms the initial expectations in that the general baseline of transparency has improved in Romanian public institutions, specifically considering formal regulatory alignment juxtaposed with enhancements in digital disclosure protocols. Ultimately, the resulting findings suggest the need for building a culture of transparency which surpasses mere formal compliance, unveiling challenges in implementing open government initiatives. Moreover, there is a great opportunity and value for instrumenting strong accountability mechanisms, through genuine and independent avenues for holding public actors accountable. Finally, we emphasize the need for improved analytical accuracy, highlighting areas that require theory development and empirical research, from which we stress the need for citizen engagement data, thorough quantitative impact assessments and longitudinal analysis of reforms.
