Autonomous Public Agencies and Their Civic Defenders: Mexico's INAI

• In Event: Accountability and Performance

Abstract

In January 2021, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced his intention to eliminate the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Data Protection, stating, “If we have permanent communication, if the right to information is guaranteed, that is taken care of. And, if I may mention it, it is not necessary to have a whole apparatus that costs so much — a billion pesos ($50 million) to support the Transparency Institute.” (AP January 11, 2021). Civic leaders immediately spoke out in defense of this autonomous agency, proclaiming it a necessary watchdog, critical to the balance of power, a bulwark against the threat of hyperpresidentialism.

This paper provides an assessment of the INAI in its function as an autonomous public agency, bringing explicit consideration of the role of organized civil society into our understanding of such accountability institutions and their development. Most assessments of regulatory agencies in the public administration literature focus on questions of bureaucratic power, budgetary independence and operational autonomy, leaving the influence of civil society out of the equation. But there is every reason to believe that civil society is important, as the case of INAI illustrates.

My analysis relies on INAI institutional reports and communications, statements and publications by civic associations and interviews with representatives of INAI and other autonomous public agencies and Mexican civic associations conducted in 2008, 2013 and planned for mid-2021. I argue that deep and consistent involvement of civic associations in the work of autonomous agencies is critical to their functioning and efficacy. The present study is relevant to the political debate unfolding in Mexico in 2021, and to similar debates playing out in other countries. It is part of a larger project examining the development of various autonomous public agencies in Mexico and throughout Latin America over the past thirty years.

Since 1990, the Mexican state, pushed by civic activists, has progressively sought to institutionalize accountability in several critical areas for democracy: human rights, elections, governmental transparency and the fight against corruption. It has done so in part by establishing autonomous federal oversight agencies. These include the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH), created in 1990 and endowed with full legal autonomy in 1999; the Federal Election Institute (IFE), established as an autonomous agency in 1990 with significant enhancements to its powers in 1996, and reformed as the National Election Institute (INE) in 2014; the Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (IFAI), created in June 2003 as the first of its kind in Latin America, granted autonomy in 2013 and later reformed as the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI); and the National Anticorruption System (SNA) created in 2016.

These institutions are part of a global trend in expansion of autonomous public agencies that began in the 1980s (Ballinas 2011). Autonomous public agencies (APAs) are funded by the state, but have independent authority to work in specific issue areas and are structurally disaggregated from central ministries. They have independent and legally recognized functions, often guaranteed in the Constitution. They have budgetary and administrative independence. They are supposed to be insulated from political pressures, and are often create to signal credible commitments to citizens and sometimes international audiences. Yet these agencies have limitations including susceptibility to political influence, failure to significantly protect and advance rights in the areas of their competence, costliness, elitism and more.

In Mexico the INAI, in particular, has been viewed as a model for the region and beyond. The current debate about the future of INAI provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the serious challenges that hamper attempts by a state to institutionalize accountability, and the role that civic actors can play in defense of the same.

Author

• Sharon F. Lean, Wayne State University