Vigilância civil acerca da transparência pública : vulnerabilidades mapeadas em iniciativas de monitoramento

Abstract

The development of public transparency legislation in Brazil turned the debate on opening government information into a target of academic studies in the past few years. This research highlights a new facet in this discussion based on a movement that arises directly from the civil sphere: digital monitoring initiatives that use these same laws to watch their governments. In this sense, the observation of this study is in how these initiatives reveal government failures, and how, consequently, they display public vulnerabilities in this scenario. The general objective was to analyze civil surveillance initiatives that develop projects linked to public transparency, understanding their actions and discursive practices. First, the main theories from Brazilian and international literature that highlight the logic of government transparency and its practical relationship with monitoring carried out by the public were debated. Finally, a threedimensional empirical analysis was developed that highlights the practices of civil surveillance daily, contrasting its formats, purposes, and approaches that demonstrate vulnerabilities, potentialities, and problematic currents of public transparency. The main results point to the construction of a resembling discursive ethos in the four selected initiatives, including complaints that focus mainly on the difficulty of applying legislation and the development of tools that can overcome obstacles when accessing public information.