Think Piece

Photo: Unsplash

After T/AI completed five years of work last year, the T/AI steering committee began engaging in an effort to think through lessons learned from T/AI’s activities to date, identify promising frontiers for future work, and build new bridges between different sectoral and expertise “silos.” As part of that effort, in early 2016, we commissioned Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to collect and edit a series of short, forward-looking think pieces by leading scholars and activists on the future of the transparency and accountability movement. We commissioned the series for use at a T/AI steering committee retreat in March 2016, focused on defining a long-term vision of the collaborative going forward.

The prompt given to authors was, “Based on your understanding of how the field of transparency and accountability has evolved in recent years, what issues or areas of work would be especially important and fruitful for T/AI’s funders to address in the next several years?”

In the spirit of T/AI’s commitment to knowledge sharing and openness, we decided after our March retreat to disseminate this collection of pieces more widely, in the hope that this set of essays, which has greatly helped our own thinking and practice evolve, will also be of use to a wider set of people and organizations working on transparency and accountability issues. We hope these spark your own ideas and engagement and look forward to hearing from you as we develop our strategy for the next exciting phase of T/AI.