Hidden in plain sight: why enhancing transparency in risk regulation requires effective communication processes

Abstract

Transparency has become a core principle of contemporary risk regulation, with policymakers across democratic societies introducing an avalanche of new policies. These policies aim to make diverse regulatory objects—such as data, documents, deliberations, and enforcement actions—more ‘visible’ to external audiences as a way of building trust, promoting accountability, reducing risk, and achieving many other goals. This paper first addresses the substantial conceptual confusion surrounding contemporary transparency policies by introducing an original typology that distinguishes between what policymakers seek to make more transparent (objects), how (mechanisms), for whom (audiences), and why (objectives and goals). These distinctions help to resolve longstanding ambiguities in transparency policymaking, while providing a much-needed framework for comparing and evaluating policy effectiveness across risk regulation contexts. Employing the typology, the paper then offers a communication-based critique of popular transparency policies that rely on disclosing, revealing, or opening-up complex regulatory events and processes in the form they were originally produced. The central critique is that such ‘light-handed’ policy mechanisms often fail to enhance transparency, or achieve key policy goals, as they rest on an overly simplistic conception of complex communication processes. Specifically, they are underpinned by a highly distorted transmission model of communication that neglects the many reasons why risk regulation may be opaque or ‘non-transparent’ to external audiences well beyond inaccessibility or secrecy. The paper concludes by explaining how these insights can help navigate the fragmented literature, inform risk research, and strengthen policymaking.