Government secrecy is becoming an increasingly popular field of inquiry in academic circles, with several upcoming conferences and journals devoted to the subject.
The journal “Research in Social Problems and Public Policy,” edited by Susan L. Maret, has issued a call for papers on “the problem of government secrecy,” including theoretical and comparative treatments.
The Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University’s Washington College of Law will address “Transparency in the Obama Administration: A First-Year Assessment” on January 20, 2010. A webcast of a program last month on “The State of the State Secrets Privilege” is now available here.
A two-day workshop on “Open Government: Defining, Designing, and Sustaining Transparency” will be held at Princeton University on January 21-22, 2010.
The journal “Social Research” will host a conference on “Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy” (in which I will participate) at the New School in New York City on February 24-26, 2010.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.