Seeing Like a Slum: Towards Open, Deliberative Development

Abstract

The international development community is increasingly committed to making information and data available transparent. Proponents of this phenomenon believe that transparency will lead to development success, especially by empowering the poor. This paper addresses a deficit in this excitement by emphasizing the predominance of local context and power relations in the usefulness of transparency for development. It argues that transparency is most promising when accompanied by changes in the institutional arrangements of power such as those supported by theorist of deliberative development.

Keywords: open data, open development, transparency, open government, ict4d