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This chapter examines the formation of a cross-movement coalition involving labor, environmental, and community organizations in New Jersey during the 1980s. The New Jersey Right-to-Know Coalition developed in response to community and worker concerns about the risk of contaminant exposure from New Jersey's sizeable chemical industry. Building on the political momentum from a related campaign in Philadelphia, environmental and labor activists in New Jersey made a crucial decision to join forces in their push for regulatory reform of the state's hazardous-material management system. Through this collaboration, they achieved a more sweeping reform than either movement could have achieved on its own. However, this cross-movement coalition experienced significant political challenges when some members attempted to expand the discursive frame and policy goals from the right to know to the right to act.

The Toxics Release Inventory, created in the aftermath of the Bhopal poisonous gas tragedy in India, is a cornerstone of the environmental right-to-know program in the U.S. TRI is the nation’s first program to use information as an explicit tool of public policy. The program incorporates several novel features, but does not require companies to reduce toxic pollution. However, the “report card” aspect of publicly-available information has spurred substantial reductions nonetheless.

In this chapter, Ann Florini and Bharath Jairaj present a comparative analysis of diverse national contexts shaping uptake, institutionalization and effects of transparency. The chapter documents the democratization impulse underpinning a global spread of right to know and freedom of information laws, and its institutionalization in the specific national contexts of the United States, India, South Africa, Mexico, Indonesia and China. Even as democratization is identified as a key driver of transparency’s uptake across these contexts, alternative drivers, such as a marketization and privatization impetus for disclosure, are also present. The authors thus conclude that local context matters in institutionalizing and securing desired effects of governance by disclosure. Another key finding is that, across the contexts examined, the private sector remains relatively immune from stringent disclosure, with implications for the transformative potential of governance by disclosure.

In the UK FOI policy developed in a series of phases. This chapter covers the first stage of the development covered the first eight months, from Labour entering power in May 1997 to the publication of the White Paper Your Right to Know in December 1997. At this point, FOI appeared to avoid the ‘symbolic’ trap and overt conflict so frequently seen elsewhere. A small, well-connected group of crusaders inside government took advantage of their own power and used a favourable context to neutralise opposition, with a rapid process lending momentum to a far-Reaching policy. Their efforts resulted in a hugely symbolic White Paper, rapidly formulated, that offered one of the most radical FOI regimes yet seen in the world. The vision was of a political redistribution of power opening up even the very centre of government decision-making (Terrill 2000). However, doubts remained over the policy, its workability and the levels of support for it in government.

The unfolding of electoral governance has shown that the powers of Parliament and the ECI remain overlapping and therefore contested, owing to the ambivalence in the Constitution on their relative powers. The precise areas of uncertainty and dispute exist around the competing claims of Parliament and the ECI over the power to govern and the responsibility to govern, respectively. While these contending claims apparently relate to the first level of electoral governance, that is, the level of lawmaking, since this is the level where Parliament is pre-eminent, the tension over unclaimed power manifests itself mostly at the levels of rule application and rule adjudication. This chapter explores areas of contestation over the question of ‘purity’ of the electoral space and democracy, and pertains to the right to know, political corruption and electoral finance, disqualification of members, regulation of electoral funding and expenditure, disenfranchisement of convicted offenders, and charge-sheeted candidates, among others.