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Freedom of information acts (FOIA) aim to improve the public’s opportunities to access official information from public authorities and hence to increase the level of transparency. Thus, it is important to know whether and to what degree the effects intended by establishing FOIAs are achieved and how their implementation could be improved. Hence, this article presents the evaluation of the Hamburg Transparency Law (HmbTG)– Germany’s first FOIA that binds authorities to disclose government information proactively. The purpose of the paper is to provide a valuable example of how evaluating FOIA might produce useful information for policymakers and public authorities. The analysis results, based on a mixed set of methods (i.e. standardised surveys, statistical secondary data, qualitative expert interviews, and criteria-driven document analysis), lead to the conclusion that the HmbTG was very effective in providing the direct access. On the other hand, it was found that strategies for implementing the law varied considerably between authorities, yet proactive disclosure was overall implemented effectively. Moreover, this law shows some weaknesses to be improved in the future. Besides providing practitioners with valuable insights into how a transparency law may be implemented, the evaluation of the HmbTG also provides researchers with ideas how FOIA evaluation might be conducted comprehensively.
Governments and energy operators are often confronted with local residents’ protest against the construction of new high-voltage overhead transmission lines, negative risk expectations, and a lack of public support. A frequently discussed strategy for dealing with these issues is to build underground cables instead of overhead lines. So far, however, there is not much empirical evidence of whether substituting overhead lines by underground cables actually reduces protest or affects public risk expectations and attitudes. This study contributes to filling this gap by comparing residents’ risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior observed at two grid expansion sites in Germany by means of a quasi-experiment. At the time when the data were collected, both grid expansion projects–an overhead line project in Lower Saxony and an underground cable project in Hesse–were at the same stage of the legally defined planning and approval procedure. After controlling for various potential confounders, we obtained results revealing that there are no differences in the risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior of residents interviewed at the two project sites, or only marginal ones. Hence, our findings do not support the assumption that building underground cables necessarily improves the situation with regard to risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior.