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Many governments are working toward a vision of government-wide transformation that strives to achieve an open, transparent and accountable government while providing responsive services. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the concept of transparency-by-design to advance open government.

The opening of data, the deployment of tools and instruments to engage the public, collaboration among public organizations and between governments and the public are important drivers for open government. The authors review transparency-by-design concepts.

To successfully achieve open government, fundamental changes in practice and new research on governments as open systems are needed. In particular, the creation of “transparency-by-design” is a key aspect in which transparency is a key system development requirement, and the systems ensure that data are disclosed to the public for creating transparency.

Although transparency-by-design is an intuitive concept, more research is needed in what constitutes information and communication technology-mediated transparency and how it can be realized.

Governments should embrace transparency-by-design to open more data sets and come closer to achieving open government.

Transparency-by-design is a new concept that has not given any attention yet in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which governments build social media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) into e‐government transparency initiatives, to promote collaboration with members of the public and the ways in members of the public are able to employ the same social media to monitor government activities.

This study used an iterative strategy that involved conducting a literature review, content analysis, and web site analysis, offering multiple perspectives on government transparency efforts, the role of ICTs and social media in these efforts, and the ability of e‐government initiatives to foster collaborative transparency through embedded ICTs and social media.

The paper identifies key initiatives, potential impacts, and future challenges for collaborative e‐government as a means of transparency.

The paper is one of the first to examine the interrelationships between ICTs, social media, and collaborative e‐government to facilitate transparency.

The study investigates the influence of financial transparency on citizens' trust and revenue paying behaviour of citizens of local governments in sub-Saharan Africa. It relies on the theories of stewardship and public choice in explaining the relationship between financial transparency, trust and willingness to pay.

The study applied a Partial Least Square Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) to survey data of 404 respondents selected from four Metropolitan and Municipal Assemblies of Ghana to test the hypotheses of the study.

It establishes the fact that financial transparency positively influences trust of citizens in local government and their willingness to pay taxes and levies. The study also found that both financial transparency and trust are low in the local governments of Ghana.

The study emphasises the importance of financial transparency in improving trust and willingness to pay. Thus, local governments are encouraged to seek innovative ways to enhance the quality and access to financial information by the citizens.

While prior studies focus on the measurement and determinant of financial transparency, this study links financial transparency to revenue mobilisation in the local government of sub-Saharan Africa.

We are in an information age, and the relationship between government governance and market efficiency has become closer. When examining the behavior of governance, the study of government transparency is very important. This paper examines the environmental governance performance of Guangdong province, the most developed coastal region in China.

DEA method is adopted to calculate the environmental governance efficiency by considering the expected output and the nonexpected output. Then Tobit regression was used to analyze the relationship between fiscal transparency and environmental governance efficiency.

Through a quantitative study of empirical data of Guangdong province from 2001 to 2017, it is found that fiscal transparency does have a significant positive impact on the efficiency of local environmental governance. Therefore, it is suggested that all regions in Guangdong should be more transparent in administration, intensify industrial transformation and upgrading, and better govern the regional ecological environment.

This paper examines the environmental governance performance of Guangdong province, the most developed coastal region in China. Guangdong has developed economy and people’s living standards are high, so the market and residents are particularly concerned about the government performance in environmental governance. Therefore, it is an important issue to explore the relationship between environmental governance and government transparency in Guangdong.

The purpose of this paper is to apply Moore’s public value model into the context of e-government research by examining online financial transparency as both an organizational goal and as a driving force for financial sustainability and public officials’ corruption. The empirical context comprises the state governments in the USA.

Structural equation modeling is used to examine the relationship between specific contextual factors of the authorizing environment, financial sustainability, public official corruption and online budget transparency.

The results show that contextual factors like population explain online financial transparency, while financial sustainability and corruption had moderating and negative effects.

Governments that struggle with issues of financial sustainability and corruption will rely more on online financial transparency. Transparency increases detection of public corruption.

The effects of financial transparency and financial sustainability on corruption have been studied separately. This study fills the gap of understanding the effects of both on corruption as one phenomenon.

The study aims at examining the level of financial transparency of local governments in a sub-Saharan African country and how financial transparency is affected by democracy in the sub-region.

The study applied a panel regression model to data collected from public accounts of 43 local authorities in Ghana from 1995 to 2014. Financial transparency was measured using a transparency index developed based on the Transparency Index of Transparency International and the information disclosure requirements of public sector entities under the International Public Sector Accounting Standards.

The study finds the low level of financial transparency among the local governments in Ghana, creating information asymmetry within the agency framework of governance. Further, evidence from the study suggests a strong positive relationship between democracy and financial transparency in the local government.

Deepening democracy is necessary for promoting the culture of financial transparency in local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps in entire Africa.

There is a need for the local governments and governments, in general, to deepen democracy to ensure proactive disclosure of the financial information to the citizens to improve participation trust and eventual reduction in corruption. Effective implementation of the Right to Information Act would also help promote financial and other forms of transparency in the sub-region.

The study contributes to the public sector accounting literature by linking democracy to financial transparency in the local government. Hitherto, studies concentrate on how entity level variables impact on the level of financial information flow in the local government without considering the broader governance infrastructure within which local governments operate.

The purpose of this paper is to extend and validate the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) for investigating the effect of transparency on the adoption of e-Government in Indonesia from the perspective of citizens.

A comprehensive review of the related literature leads to the development of a transparency-focused conceptual model to better understanding the adoption of e-Government. Structural equation modelling is used for analysing the data collected from the citizens in Indonesia.

This study confirms that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions and transparency are the critical factors for evaluating the citizen adoption of e-Government in Indonesia. In addition, transparency is found to be the strongest factor that influences the decision of Indonesian citizens to adopt e-Government.

From the theoretical perspective, the use of the UTAUT model is extended by incorporating the transparency factor that is vital to the adoption of e-Government in developing countries such as Indonesia.

In terms of managerial and policy implications, this research offers the Indonesian Government suggestions on how the adoption of e-Government can be improved.

This is the first study that extends and empirically validates the UTAUT model with transparency for evaluating the adoption of e-Government from the perspective of citizens in Indonesia. It demonstrates how the transparency factor can be incorporated to better understand the adoption of e-Government in such a context.

Literature about transparency in public-sector organizations has been attracting the attention of scholars for the last two decades. This study reviews the existing literature with the intention of creating a description of the state of the art, categorized by geographical areas, levels of government, topics, and methodologies.

The authors have developed a structured literature review following a rigorous protocol. The initial search was launched on 25 April 2022 on Scopus and Web of Science, resulting in 3,217 articles. After removing duplicates and studies that did not meet all the inclusion criteria specified in the review protocol, the final sample includes 956 articles from 1991 to 2021.

The analyses show a considerable increase in studies since 2005, especially in the last two years, when 30% of the publications have been produced. Most of the studies analyze the national/central level of government. Many authors compare different countries, while other scholars focus on specific countries, overall, the USA and the UK. The local level of government has also been widely studied, especially in the Spanish and Chinese contexts. The most frequently used methodologies are quantitative and empirical techniques, and the most common topics are those associated with accountability.

This study uses a huge sample (956 articles over the period 1991–2021), which has never been used before, to examine the literature on transparency. The structured literature review facilitates the identification of gaps that can be filled by future studies. These include analyzing transparency in specific geographical areas like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, studying transparency at different levels of government, especially at the regional and federal levels, and providing comparative studies and case study collections.

The purpose of this paper is an investigation of internal transparency in government budgeting.

A case study which uses mixed methods – documentary analysis, some observation and elite interviews.

Politicians do not want transparency. Despite the way in which the idea of transparency in government is beyond open challenge, this study reveals the manner in which politicians can inhibit and limit transparency through political will and action.

These findings raise serious challenges for policymakers who design government budgeting systems. They should raise concerns among other interested parties, including the media, the electorate and oversight bodies.

Are government budgets rigorously scrutinised? This evidence suggests not. This has major implications for accountants in government and for those who seek to use this information.

This research needs to be extended beyond the case of a government body – the Scottish Parliament – which was designed for and committed to transparency in its activities. For those public service organisations which have no such commitment, is public accountability achievable?

This study uses a novel lens of three levels of transparency as devised by Biondi and Lapsley (2014). It focuses on an emergent field of internal transparency in government budgeting.

Explore the factors making emergency procurement more prone to corruption by advancing explanations for when rules and transparency are relaxed allowing corrupt practices to emerge. Describe institutional factors, such as corruption syndrome (Johnston, 2005, 2015) and legal system, and their impact on procurement rules changes.

A qualitative event study using publicly available data offer a timeline and explanation of government procurement control mechanisms and transparency roles in emergencies by comparing two countries. Argentina and Canada had very similar and advanced food procurement systems prior to COVID-19, but they took different stances when the pandemic broke out.

Legal systems and corruption syndrome are linked, where Civil Law is related to Elite Cartels (Argentina) and Common Law with Influence Markets (Canada). The study contributes to understand the role of transparency to minimize the opportunity for direct purchases (electronic trails of decisions, justifications and approvals). Judicial system's actions favor corrupt practices and are aligned with elites despite the civil society outcry.

Research on corrupt practices has limited access to primary data due to fear of reprisals. Informal conversations revealing glimpses of corruption were used to identify publicly available documents. Numbers play a role in emergencies and performativity theory literature is enriched by providing an example of different interpretation of information when frameworks differ between civil society and courts.

A comparative analysis that evidences the role of pre-existing institutional and social conditions shows when emergency situations will be used as an excuse to relax procurement control and transparency mechanisms which in turn facilitate corrupt practices.