Open government and transparency: building a conceptual framework

The idea of open government has spread across Latin American countries causing confusion and ambiguous interpretations. The concepts of “open government” and “transparency” have been used as synonyms and have created false expectations, but mostly they have been used to implement public policies and government strategies to accomplish the goal of creating a more open government. The purpose of this research is to provide some theoretical elements to clear this confusion. In order to achieve such goal, related papers of academic journals over the past six years have been reviewed and classified on three main paths of knowledge. From this point a concept of open government is proposed and discussed. The aim of this paper is to contribute with a theoretical framework that supports research on open government, transparency and accountability