The open governance challenge

(First published in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian - October 19, 2022)

There has not been a time when I have not been sceptical about purported official commitments to open governance in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean.

Such cynicism has spanned decades and straddled political administrations of all flavours and in different Caricom territories.

The long haul, for instance, has proven me correct on almost all early points of contention regarding our Freedom of Information Act. I never thought it would go far enough.

I had once been cautioned against being overly militant on the subject because introduction of the law had presumably been guided by “good intentions.” Something was better than nothing, after all.

Today, a majority of Caricom countries either have weak or ineffective access to information laws, and almost half have none at all. The T&T Act is among the better versions, as supported by successive court judgments, but lacks what I consider to be wider social and institutional traction.

Most Caribbean laws of the kind are typified by long lists of exemptions that cover areas such as national security, foreign affairs, and “government’s deliberative processes relating to commercial business affairs,” if you know what I mean.

Accordingly, I presume, non-disclosure agreements like those attached to the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines are probably not unconnected to this latter principle. (And, by the way, T&T was not the only country in the world, as argued by some politicos, to be subjected to such a requirement.)

But should this not have been challenged as a violation of the spirit of “good intentions?” I really don’t know. But I think that situation ought to have generated far more pervasive queasiness - not rooted in disapproval of everything being proposed to manage pandemic measures as was the discredited case in some quarters here.

While public information laws are being gradually introduced in our region, inadequate as they are, the real foundational challenge is to transform the socio-cultural norms and power dynamics to conditions under which our official default becomes openness and not secrecy.

Academics who write about these matters reference an inevitable “cultural transition” in the face of a “post-bureaucratic” era, characterised by the impact of technological change on organisational structures and administration. But it’s even more than that because of the pervasive, inherent nature of the malaise.

It’s everywhere, from the smallest community organisations to big NGOs, quasi-governmental organisations, and the entire institutional organism that makes our societies move from one point to another. My shorthand for this is “our culture of secrecy.”

I belong to two Caribbean media development organisations that have campaigned for the adoption of meaningful access to information laws in all Caricom countries – the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) and the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM).

There has been very little resonance among other regional civil society organisations, some of which have assumed that such efforts are the exclusive preserve of a self-centred mass media.

This has been one of the issue’s most tragic characteristics: a belief that mainstream media are, by design, a special beneficiary of publicly held data and information which politicians and public servants believe are their exclusive property.

Contrarily, there is sufficient evidence to suggest now that concerned citizens, activists and other sectors have been among the more prolific users of the law to get to the bottom of official secrecy.

There are now expert users of such law who have yielded often spectacular results, supported by judicial systems that have generally displayed an admirable appreciation for its value.

However, both proposed cybercrime and data-protection legislation have recently been found to conspire to roll back some of the benefits. There has been a general sense that politicians and senior public servants are overly keen on ensuring this remains the case.

Very recent developments in T&T, and I am deliberately not wading extensively through those murky waters here, have also stressed the importance of disclosure in a much wider span of public affairs.

In this respect, the free press has an important but not singular role to play in unearthing the concealed and providing both a conduit and public platform for information unearthed.

Achieving more however requires deeper and expanded legislated access to official information, the protection of whistle-blowers, and systems of governance appreciative of the fact that the more people know about the things that affect them, the more inclined they are to make informed decisions and take required, appropriate action.

Such are the challenges and benefits of open governance. We’re clearly not there yet.