Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 18, 82–90 (2016)

Policymakers and the public generally consider transparency to be a good thing. This extends to reporting action on climate change. But disclosure is a complex activity, with different forms of transparency serving a variety of purposes.

Aarti Gupta from Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Michael Mason from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, explore what transparency means in the context of climate governance. They analyse what kind of disclosure governments and companies offer to comply with transparency obligations in mandatory and voluntary programmes.

They find a general move away from disclosure as a means to further public scrutiny (termed 'democratization'), and towards ends designed to inform investment decisions and improve agents' public image. They call this the 'technocratization' and 'privatization' of climate transparency.

This shift can undermine the legitimacy of particular programmes such as carbon trading, they warn, by limiting the potential of public bodies to intervene. So, in the case of climate governance, policymakers must be clear about the purpose that transparency serves — be it facilitating public scrutiny, or developing an evidence base on which to assess current and future policy.