In the first essay of this series I explored how transparency is never neutral. I established that there isn't one transparency. Rather, every live stream, every conference, every open-access paper, will conceal and reveal aspects in its own unique way. It shows that transparency serves both as an idealized goal and as a means to pursue it. In both instances it is abstract enough to encompass the norms and values of a majority of policy makers, while simultaneously concealing the plurality of choices that are made to construct it.
In today's essay I want to part the performative from the ideological notion. In other words, the means from the goal. Because paradoxically we use the same word, transparency, to describe both.
Throughout the past week, the Supervisory Body (Article 6.4) has seen how existing structures and decisions are being uprooted. In part by countries not currently represented in the Supervisory Body, and by the current members themselves.
Clearly the ideal of transparency is a unifying factor, but its pursuit appears to divide those creating it.
Zooming out, possibly the divisive factor, across the UN and its conferences lies in the unwritten rules negotiators abide by. Bourdieu coined the term Habitus: the set of norms and rules that frame an individual's agency. Importantly, he described that the more visible our actions become, the more carefully we adhere to those norms and unwritten rules. Reproducing rather than revealing the structures that shape what can and cannot be done.
According to French Theory, transparency creates conformity. Because all those observed will abide by the same set of unwritten rules. But as the members of the Supervisory Body, and the various Expert Panels grew up in highly distinct cultural settings, the mentioned norms will be highly distinct. And likely they collide.
Compromise, core to diplomacy, and even more core to the UN, moves out of reach, when negotiators are constrained by their Habitus.
With a backdrop of the globalized world, transparency becomes numbing then. To those watching, as the mass of shared information is impossible to consume within a lifetime. And to those being watched. The decision-makers find themselves in a modern version of Foucault's Panopticon, bombarded with contradicting norms and unwritten rules to abide by.
While the ideal of transparency is celebrated at COP30 — a value both ambiguously democratic, "enlightening", and highly individualistic — the structural problems that it gives rise to remain almost unnoticed. The invocation of transparency functions less as actual enlightenment and more as ritual. The pursuit of transparency and specifically its proclamation, appears to legitimize the institutions pursuing it (COP30, Supervisory Body, etc.), while distracting from the means used to achieve it.
As we follow decisions and negotiations, distributed across screens and time zones, we unknowingly legitimize the current system — one, where visibility tends to substitute for access, and performance for participation.
Possibly, transparency remains a noble goal, but it is too ambiguous to serve the globalized world as a generalized tool to build a better future. Of course we need good data, accountability, participation, and access, but a transparent sheet of glass, a window might not be enough to achieve all that.
Now looking back through the window of transparency, thin sheets of metal oxide appear — museum glass. Because what the observer does not see, is their own reflection.