(In)visible European Government Critical Approaches to Transparency as an Ideal and a Practice

1. Introduction: European Government Transparency beyond the Slogans

Päivi Leino-Sandberg, Maarten Hillebrandt and Ida Koivisto

PART 1

2. Transparency as a Critical Research Agenda: Engaging with the EU Institutions on Access to Documents

Päivi Leino-Sandberg

3. What is the Purpose of Regulation 1049/2001? An Empirical Analysis of Member State Positions  

Liisa Leppävirta

4. Interpretive Approaches in Transparency Studies: Gaining New Perspectives on Old Problems

Marlen Heide and Sofia Wickberg

5. Learning Through Rejection: Studying the Informalisation of EU Readmission Policy with Access to Documents Requests

Milka Sormunen and Davide Gnes

PART 2

6. The Human Face of Legal Transparency? Performance in Action

Ida Koivisto

7. Toward Radical Transparency

Clare Birchall

8. Escaping the Transparency Trap: In Defense of Playacting

Emmanuel Alloa

9. Algorithms and the Open Society: New Approaches to Information, Transparency and Accountability

Alexander Ingrams

10. Government Transparency: Dispelling the Myth

Dorota Mokrosinska

PART 3

11. “Off paper”: The Transparency Dilemma in EU Institutions

Stéphanie Novak

12. Transparency as Enabling Citizen-participation: The Quality of Public Information on EU Decision-making Processes

Alexander Hoppe

13. Access to documents and the EU agency Frontex: Growing pains or outright obstruction?

Melanie Fink and Maarten Hillebrandt

14. The Council Presidency, brought to you by Coca-Cola: Transparency about Commercial Sponsoring

Gijs Jan Brandsma

15. EU Agencies and Lobbying Transparency Rules: A Case Study on the Islandization of Transparency?

Emilia Korkea-aho

16. "Mediated Transparency": The Digital Services Act and the legitimization of platform power

Marta Maroni

17. Epilogue: Against transparency. For engaged publics

Deirdre Curtin

Biography

Maarten Hillebrandt is Assistant Professor of Public Management at the Department of Public Administration and Organisational Sciences, Utrecht University (Netherlands).

Päivi Leino-Sandberg is Professor of Transnational European Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of its Master's Programme in Global Governance Law (Finland).

Ida Koivisto is Associate Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki (Finland).

"...The volume greatly enriches academic debate by contributing to a more nuanced understanding of transparency. It lays groundwork and provides a valuable resource for future critical engagement with transparency in the EU."

Luca Knuth, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and Kiel University, Germany. Review in Review of European Administrative Law (REALaw), 2025, 1 (april)/ 1

"...This volume makes an important contribution to ongoing debates on government transparency in our democracies, taking into account the new challenges brought about by an age of expanding technologies and growing suspicion towards representative politics... The focus on European governance in the title of the volume should not discourage lawyers and scientists from other fields from picking it up..."

Rita Guerreiro Teixeira, University of Helsinki, Finland. Review in International and Comparative Law Quarterly. 2024;73(3):811-813. doi:10.1017/S002058932400023X

"...Given the complexity of the book's topic, the editors made a good decision to invite authors covering a variety of disciplinary fields, allowing a multifaceted approach to get insight into transparency as an ideal and a practice in (in)visible European government... This [book] offer us insight into the characteristics of ‘transparency’ related to European government... I recommend this book not only to scholars but also to the broader public who are aware of the necessity to look beyond the obvious..."

Eugène Loos, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Book Review. Information Polity, 30(2), 158-159. https://doi.org/10.1177/15701255251333589 (2025)

"...[A]n important contribution to the ongoing debate on transparency and Governance in Europe. This publication provides a rich and multidimensional picture of transparency in Europe ... and address[es] this fundamental rule of law principle from different angles and perspectives, while taking into account new challenges caused by the introduction of technologies... The book is refreshing as it forces to rethink the purpose and content of transparency invited by terms such as the ‘transparency trap’, ‘political myth of transparency’ or even ‘tyranny of transparency’..."

Evelien Brouwer, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. ‘Book Review’ in European Public Law 31, no. 4 (2025): 587–588.