Opening Governance: IDS Bulletin

This issue of the IDS Bulletin brings together contributions from researchers and practitioners to discuss their approaches to the contemporary challenges of achieving transparency, accountability, and openness in government. Together these articles provide insights into the field of open governance, discussing what has worked and what hasn't.
As stated in the introduction, "Open government and open data are new areas of research, advocacy and activism that have entered the governance field alongside the more established areas of transparency and accountability." The articles in this IDS Bulletin "review recent scholarship to pinpoint contributions to more open, transparent, accountable and responsive governance via improved practice, projects and programmes in the context of the ideas, relationships, processes, behaviours, policy frameworks and aid funding practices of the last five years. They also discuss questions and weaknesses that limit the effectiveness and impact of this work, offer a series of definitions to help overcome conceptual ambiguities, and identify hype and euphemism."
The following articles are included in this issue:

• Introduction: Opening governance - change, continuity and conceptual ambiguity
• When does ICT-enabled citizen voice lead to government responsiveness?
• ICTs help citizens voice concerns over water - or do they?
• When does the state listen?
• 'You have to raise a fist!': Seeing and speaking to the state in South Africa
• The right of access to information: Exploring gender inequities
• Men and women of words: How words divide and connect the Bunge La Mwananchi movement in Kenya
• Test it and they might come: Improving the uptake of digital tools in transparency and accountability initiatives
• The dark side of digital politics: Understanding the algorithmic manufacturing of consent and the hindering of online dissidence

The IDS Bulletin is an open access (since 2016), peer-review journal exploring emerging international development challenges. It is published bi-monthly by the Institute of Development Studies, a global institution for research, teaching and learning, and impact and communications, based at the University of Sussex.