President Biden’s Democracy Summit: Transparency as a tool to combat illiberal influence operations

This post is written by Victoria Welborn, senior programme manager at the National Democratic Institute.

• The context: The upcoming Summit for Democracy will provide an opportunity for the world's democracies to come together to address the biggest threats that democracies face.

• The problem: The work of foreign illiberal influence operations runs across the three themes of the summit and the role of transparency should be highlighted as a way to combat this threat.

• Why it matters: 2022 will be a critical year for putting policy into practice under the S4D framework and the role of government openness must be central in this concerted effort.

President Biden will host a Summit for Democracy on December 9th and 10th, but this summit will feature a new twist. The Summit for Democracy (S4D) will take place in two parts, the first will be held as a virtual convening on December 9th and 10th and then a subsequent in-person convening set to take place a year later. This unique format will provide an opportunity for participants to set goals followed by a year of action ahead of the second phase of the summit, which makes 2022 a crucial year for democracy.

Since (then candidate) Biden first announced his vision for a Democracy Summit centred on curbing corruption, countering authoritarianism and promoting human rights, speculation has run rife among the foreign policy and development communities. During the past year, countless webinars have been devoted to convening policy experts, diplomats and development specialists on the summit’s format, the timing, the guestlist, and most importantly, the agenda. That is because the scope of the summit sends as big of a message to the world as the summit itself, it forces a prioritisation in identifying the critical vulnerabilities in today’s democracies.

There is a common denominator that cuts across the summit’s three topics: the work of foreign illiberal influence operations, which are organised attempts by third party nations to manipulate another country’s information environment, disrupt markets and influence public policies. These sharp power tactics are employed by authoritarian governments in order to exploit fissures within democratic societies around the world. Illiberal influence operations are challenging to address due to their clandestine nature, shadowy alliances between domestic and foreign actors, and complex motivations that are often a hybrid of the commercial and the political. For example:

• Foreign-sponsored disinformation campaigns have been used to burnish the reputation of authoritarian politicians, discredit the opposition and sow divisions in ways that favour nondemocratic solutions.

• Illicit financial flows between corrupt actors serve to entrench authoritarian leaders, deplete public coffers, and fuel illegal activities including drug trafficking, illegal gold mining, and illegal logging.

• Civil society and other watchdogs have sounded the alarm regarding the human rights challenges associated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a government to government contracting that poses risks in terms of labour rights, suppression of dissent and weakening of judicial systems.

From the summit and beyond

While the summit will shed light on democracy challenges, it is equally imperative that change-making solutions are identified as a common goal that can leverage 2022 as a year of action. It has been well documented that government transparency is crucial for combating authoritarianism, curbing corruption, and protecting human rights. Increasingly, there is also awareness that government transparency is critical for fighting illiberal influence operations, which in turn further bolsters government transparency’s value to democracy and the S4D themes.

While transparency alone is insufficient to address sharp power tactics, it is an important first step. Governmental openness helps to build trust and diminish the public scepticism, sentiments and behaviours that allow illiberal influences to permeate. Taking evidence to action, when talking about resilience to information operations, for example, rather than starting with laws aimed at directly criminalising disinformation, as they often do not often address root causes that allow some disinformation campaigns to thrive, policymakers should also enact and enforce national laws that emphasise transparency and disclosure.

From a policy perspective, creating legislation that safeguards against illiberal influence operations is not a simple task because the issue runs horizontally across so many policy areas. However, the S4D can leverage government transparency as a starting point in addressing these rising threats, as well as an easily unifying commitment across an audience of diverse and complex democracies. Discussions on how transparency policies are enacted in particular countries must be context-specific, but openness and transparency should be reinforced as universal core principles as well as the practical policy measures needed to strengthen democracy and secure against illiberal foreign threats.

Reaching the summit

Coming on the heels of the S4D, the Summit of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), scheduled for December 15th-17th, has the potential to further boost momentum and showcase the consensus and results of government transparency. Founded by President Obama in 2011 and now including 78 countries globally, OGP member governments will work with civil society to develop new “action plans” throughout 2022. The intersection of the Democracy Summit’s goals and OGP’s member countries that are slated to develop action plans in 2022 is a meaningful opportunity for ensuring that the themes of the Democracy Summit are able to be set into motion within a framework for actionable change. Especially as 2022 acts as an interlude between the Democracy Summit’s initial virtual convening and the in-person follow-up meeting scheduled for late 2022.

The open government community not only creates a venue for countries to incorporate the commitments that will be produced in the first gathering of the Democracy Summit, but it leverages government transparency as a first step in tangibly addressing these challenges. This is why the Biden Administration should 1) incorporate government transparency as a key component in the Democracy Summit, including to counter the agenda of illiberal actors and 2) utilise the open government community as a catalysing force for the Democracy Summit goals. In the recent words of former Secretary of State and the current Chairman of the National Democratic Institute, Madeleine Albright: “The message from Washington must be that open government is the remedy for, not the breeding ground of, crooked, self-serving regimes.”

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