Five years ago, Brazil inaugurated a new civic and administrative paradigm. By implementing Access to Information (ATI) law (12.527/2011), the state officially went from holding a monopoly over "official documents" to serving citizens as a custodian of "public information". By providing citizens with the right to ask and receive governmental information (passive transparency), barring certain standardized exceptions, and obliging government agencies to publish standardized information such as expenditures, contracts, and administrative details on their respective websites (active transparency), ATI laws - also known as Freedom of Information (FOI) laws - help break down the "paper curtain" that separates citizens from the state. In the process, these laws can threaten to turn power structures on their head. In this Working Paper, the authors evaluated the impact of the law during the last 5 years in Brazil.
Please download below the working paper and its appendix.
Working Paper: Opacity to Transparency? Evaluating Brazil's Access to Information Law at 5 Years
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