After every scandal in the political and corporate world, there is the call for more transparency. In an outburst of criticism, various stakeholders request new reports, lists, policies, and laws. In many cases, the hype comes and goes, and nothing really changes. But sometimes, more "transparency" is indeed created. Does it help?

End of June 2016 commodity giant Glencore published, for the first time, how much it pays foreign governments. A total USD 5bn in taxes, royalties, and other payments go to governments of countries in which it runs mines. For a long time media and activists requested more transparency from commodity traders - and now no one seems to care.

To be fair, Glencore wasn't the first one to publish such figures. Rio Tinto, Anglo American, and BHP Billiton all published their figures before and received somewhat higher attention. Also, the timing wasn't too bad for Glencore in the midst of Brexit, and terrorist attacks in Europe (which should not imply that they actively took advantage of those events). However, without expert interpretation, the data published by Glencore doesn't mean a lot. There's no way to tell whether the USD 5bn is a large sum, or if those payments were justified.

And that's where the real challenge lies. Eventually, measures to increase transparency are often limited to creating new amounts of data, which in itself does not hold any meaning. In order to make use of data, it has to be turned into information. For this, data needs to be interpreted in a relevant context.

In that sense, the Glencore example exemplifies something about the "call for transparency" in general: it's not sufficient. Putting together reports for the sake of doing so will not improve the outcome, if decisions and actions are not based on the findings of those reports. Instead of simply asking for more and more transparency, we should be very specific what information will influence decision making (which also implies we know what problem we'd like to solve with a certain decision).

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Please share your comments and inputs (via comment function, twitter, e-mail, etc.). In my short write-ups I address topics that I am particularly interested in because they align with my values and beliefs. As such, they are always a reflection of my ideas, thoughts, and opinions. The only thing I am positive in that regard is that I do not have all the perspectives, all the knowledge, or all the facts - help me be better tomorrow.