A broader and more important question for transparency advocates is this: what is the problem for which transparency is the solution? One natural answer to this question is that transparency is the solution to the particular challenges of democratic government. Governments exercise enormous power—including the power to put people in jail and seize their possessions. Democratic governments are also supposed to express the will of the people. Transparency can both check power and help to make government responsive. A quite different answer to this question, however, is that many large organizations in society—not just national governments, but also corporations, social service agencies, and public service providers—create harms and risks to individuals, and transparency is a general method that can help citizens understand these harms, protect themselves, and press organizations of all kinds to behave in more socially responsible ways.
From this second perspective, should transparency enthusiasts invest their energies in open government or in creating an open society in which organizations of all sorts—in particular, private corporations—are much more transparent? The answer to this question depends on a sober evaluation of the social facts on the ground; where do the risks and harms to citizens come from? In societies where government is the major force, where it has few mechanisms for public accountability, and where other organizations are, by comparison, innocuous—China, Iran, and nations with still-embryonic forms of democratic governance where the boundary between public and private spheres is opaque and often corrupt—transparency should aim primarily to make government more open.
The United States and other industrialized democracies, however, possess quite a different organizational ecology. Governments at the federal, state, and local levels are large and powerful, to be sure. But the well-being of citizens—their employment; the purity of the food they eat and the air they breathe; whether their waterways are fishable and swimmable; their housing prices, mortgage rates, and credit charges; the reliability and safety of transportation; even the very soundness of the economy—also depends on the actions of large and often secretive organizations in the private sector, such as banks, manufacturers, and other corporations.
Therefore, a very substantial part of the energies of transparency advocates should be redirected toward making corporations and other organizations in society meet the same standards increasingly demanded of open government. This shift requires the transparency movement to reorient itself in several substantial ways. Government assumes a different role in the political imagination. Rather than a looming specter of threat that society must tame through transparency, government becomes an ally of society whose strength is required to make businesses transparent. In many cases, private and civic organizations will not disclose information voluntarily, and the force of law and policy—and the kind of authority that can come only from government—will make them do so. Complementing a citizen’s right to know about general processes within government, measures to create an open society produce information that is geared at reducing specific risks and harms, such as health threats, pollution, and economic risks.