51 © The Author(s) 2020 Š. Laboutková et al., Transparent Lobbying and Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36044-3_3 CHAPTER 3 Transparency in Democratic Decision–Making 3.1 TRANSPARENCY AND GOOD GOVERNANCE Before dealing with transparency, it is necessary to briefy discuss one important and infuential general concept in the theory of decision- making. In the last 30 years, the concept has also proliferated into the topic of lobbying. It is the concept of good governance (Addink 2019; Vymě tal 2008). Good governance is used as the miraculous cure for many diseases of current complex societies. On the one hand, it offers a lot of opportunities on how to tackle many problems; on the other hand, it may lead to signifcant bias in some areas. The question arises whether good governance may be at all universally applied around the world without any deep refection of its original background and cultural heritage. The concept—and its widespread use—is relatively recent. Characteristics and features of what actually are “good practices” were not conceptual- ized until the 1980s. The origins can be found in managerial disciplines in the 1970s. It was the era of the New Public Management and New Public Administration, when scholars started to describe how to tackle problems and conficts connected with motivating and managing people, resources, concepts, or ideas. A decade later, international institutions—facing severe crises of public fnance and state budget defcits, mostly in Latin America, global economic and natural resources crises, proliferation of new tech- nologies and growing importance of international corporations, and redefnition of the role of international organizations—decided to set up common standards for avoiding similar situations in the future. These