Freedom of Information and the Developing World: The Citizen, the State and Models of Openness
Woodhead Publishing Ltd, December 2009, Pages: 336
Rather than simply summarising the state of play in African countries and elsewhere, this book identifies and makes explicit the assumptions about the citizen’s relationship to the state that lie beneath Freedom of Information (FoI) discourse. The book goes on to test them against the reality of the pervasive politics of patronage that characterise much of African practice.
Readership: Social activists, library and information science professionals, African studies specialists; publishers, legislators, politicians. Students of: law, politics, sociology and information science at the final year/postgraduate levels.
Key features:
- develops a discourse about the concept of FoI
- discussion of the human rights claim appropriates the concepts of Hohfeldian analysis for more radical purposes in support of the idea that the state has a duty to implement FoI practices
Introduction
Developing countries and freedom of information
- The claims for freedom of information
- Freedom of information and economic development
- Freedom of information and its impact on democratic practice
- Freedom of information and the elimination of corruption
- The protection of other rights
The diffusion problem and the semantic shift
- Introduction: the dynamic of diffusion
- The diffusion of social and legal norms
- Historicising freedom of information: Anders Chydenius and the Swedish Age of Liberty
- Historicising freedom of information: Article 19 and semantic shift
- Information access rights in the wider context
Compliance and the impulse to secrecy
- Bureaucracy, information and power
- Sociological accounts of bureaucracy
- Surveillance and privacy
- Politicians, bureaucracy and ignorance
- Material and ideological pre-conditions
- Are models of compliance useful?
- Covering the tracks: pre-emptive destruction
Freedom of information as a human right
- The ‘rights’ nature of access to information
- The object of the freedom of information claim
- Characteristics of human rights
- Form and function in a freedom of information right
- Ideology and struggle in rights discourse
- The Claude Reyes case: a turning point?
- The state’s duty to respect, protect and fulfil
Struggles for freedom of information in countries in transition
- The relationship between access rights and other virtues
- The Philippines: case law and access to information
- Transparency to stimulate investment: Guangzhou and Shanghai
- Freedom of information in a different America: Guatemala, Bolivia and Brazil
- Russia: access rights in a transitional authoritarian society
- Conclusion
Struggles for freedom of information in Africa
- Zimbabwe: through the looking glass
- A prolonged struggle: secrecy and corruption in Nigeria
- Oil, secrecy and law in Angola
- Mozambique: the development of ‘informal’ access rights
- South Africa: an incomplete transformation
- African countries are not ‘basket cases’
From adversarialism to FoI 2.0
- The way we live now
- Direct action against authoritarian states
- Developing a culture of access: ‘FoI 2.0’
- Information warfare as a threat to FoI 2.0
Dr Colin Darch is based at the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town as a researcher, and his current research interests include the role of intellectual property laws in relation to development issues in less developed countries, the functioning of such research quality controls as peer review in the LIS environment, and FoI issues in Africa.
Professor Peter G. Underwood is Director of the University of Cape Town Centre for Information Literacy and Professor of Librarianship at the University of Cape Town, having occupied this position since 1992. Prior to this he spent twenty years as Lecturer in the Department of Information and Library Studies, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of many books and articles.
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