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Freedom of Information and the Developing World: The citizen, the state and models of openness

Colin Darch and Peter G Underwood, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Chandos Information Professional Series

 - 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

Rather than simply summarising the state of play in African countries and elsewhere, Freedom of Information and the Developing World 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.

ISBN 1 84334 147 6
ISBN-13: 978 1 84334 147 5
December 2009
336 pages  234 x 156mm  paperback  
£49.50 / US$85.00 / €60.00

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About the authors

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.

Titles which may also be of interest:
Libraries and Society
The Politics of Libraries and Librarianship
Global Information Inequalities
Librarianship and Human Rights
Globalisation, Information and Libraries

Contents

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