On the Limits of Transparency

One of the problems with "transparency" is: who cares?  The data may be out there or available, but unless there's someone with enough interest in the submit to dig into it and make a story out of it, there's little impact.  Part of the solution can be auditors/IG's.  See this piece from the World Bank blog.

To cite one example, we did a big, RCT study on what reduces corruption in community programs. Whereas my entire team thought that increasing participation and transparency would be most effective, in actual fact increasing the frequency of locally publicized audits had far greater effects.