This paper looks at the relationshipbetween the design of a law which aims to give individuals aright to access information held by public authorities, i.e.a right to information (RTI) law, and the successfulimplementation of that law. The legal framework involvesboth laws and subordinate legislation, such as regulations,which complement the law and are easier to amend, with theresult that there is likely to be a more dynamicrelationship between the design of regulations andimplementation challenges. There is also, of course, thequestion of how laws are interpreted by the courts, as wellas other players, such as oversight bodies, which can impactsignificantly on implementation of the law. A key issue forthis paper is the fact that there is, at least in manycountries, a law-implementation or policy-practice gap inthe sense that implementation of the RTI law issignificantly sub-optimal.1 No law is perfectly implemented,but the gap between the standards of the formal rules andwhat actually happens is often quite significant for RTIlaws. In some settings where observance of the rule of lawis low, RTI laws are almost entirely ignored and/or certainkey provisions in them are routinely ignored. This sort ofradical policy-practice gap makes it difficult to discusssensibly the relationship between legal design features andimplementation, which is the focus of this paper. The papertherefore focuses on contexts where there is a reasonableexpectation or an established record of medium to betterpractice in terms of implementation. A key focus is todiscuss ways to reduce the policy-practice gap through morecarefully tailored legal design.
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