1. Introduction
Urban governance scholarship increasingly treats transparency as a cornerstone of legitimate, accountable local government, yet its relationship with power has rarely been examined systematically. Policy discourse often frames transparency as a neutral technical instrument for enhancing public trust and administrative accountability. This study argues that such framing overlooks how the design, institutionalization, and implementation of transparency mechanisms are embedded in the power relations among the diverse actors populating urban governance—the state, local institutions, the private sector, civil society, and elites. Governance, understood as a process through which state and non-state actors implement policies within, and are shaped by, formal and informal rules of power, situates transparency within contested boundaries between disclosure and concealment rather than in a vacuum. Given persistent ambiguity about the real effectiveness of transparency initiatives in producing accountability, reducing corruption, and improving services, and the absence of a systematic account of how power imbalances distort participatory transparency efforts, this study asks the following questions:

Research Questions
1. How does formal power shape the design, institutionalization, and implementation of transparency mechanisms in urban governance?
2. What role does informal power play in strengthening or weakening these mechanisms?

2. Literature Review
Transparency requires legal legitimacy and social acceptance, both constituted within power relations; classical accounts frame it as a check on power, while recent work shows it can itself be absorbed into power relations (Flyverbom, 2015; Wood & Aronczyk, 2020). Power is defined as “the production, in and through social relations, of effects that shape actors’ capacities to determine their circumstances and fate” (Barnett & Duvall, 2005, p. 4), spanning both agency-centered “power over” (Lukes, 2005) and diffuse, Foucauldian “power to” (Foucault, 2003; Flyverbom et al., 2015b).
2.1. Formal and Informal Power in Urban Governance
Formal power derives legitimacy from law and bureaucratic institutions (Gordon et al., 2009), while informal power rests on social networks and interpersonal ties that often parallel formal structures (Ud Din Ahmed et al., 2020). Classic studies (Hunter, 1953; Dahl, 1961; Flyvbjerg, 2002) show how elite and informal relations shape urban outcomes despite formal rules, situating transparency at the intersection of both forms of power (Ayres, 2020).
2.2. The Concept of Transparency
Transparency, rooted in the ideal of open governance, is widely framed as an antidote to illegitimate concealment (Henriques, 2007; Oliver, 2004) and a power resource in public-sphere interactions (Meijer, 2013), yet it is never fully neutral (Valentinov et al., 2019) and requires contextual, “sociological” analysis (Pozen, 2020). Existing systematic reviews (Buijze, 2013; Cucciniello et al., 2017) have not examined how formal and informal power jointly shape transparency in urban governance, the gap this study addresses.

3. Methodology
The study employed a systematic review complemented by a qualitative meta-analysis, constructing an evidence-based, cross-contextual picture rather than relying on isolated case studies. Literature was retrieved from Scopus on 3 November 2025 using a Boolean combination of three keyword clusters (transparency, power, and urban governance) with no geographic restriction, limited to English-language research or review articles in the social sciences published between 2005 and 2025. Study selection followed the PRISMA protocol: an initial pool of 8,909 records was reduced to 3,416 after eligibility screening, then to 53 following title, abstract, and keyword review, and finally to 36 studies retained for meta-analysis after removing duplicates and irrelevant studies. VOSviewer was applied to the broader corpus of 3,416 records to map keyword co-occurrence, publication trends, and geographic distribution, offering contextual background rather than testing the power–transparency relationship directly. The 36 selected studies were then re-examined through open, axial, and selective coding to identify categories describing how power shapes transparency.

4. Results
Bibliometric analysis showed accelerating publication growth since the mid-2010s, particularly after 2017, alongside a discursive shift from treating transparency as a technical anti-corruption tool toward analyzing it as a field of power. Research remained concentrated in Europe (43%), Asia (22%), and North America (20%), led by the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and China, while South America (2%) and Africa (7%) remained marginal—reflecting a knowledge–power relationship in which the dominant discourse and metrics of transparency were formulated primarily from developed-country experience.
Qualitative meta-analysis of the 36 studies identified three pathways through which formal power shaped transparency: resistance and concealment (39%), including classifying information, using technical language, or shifting decisions to closed meetings; control and surveillance (33.3%), whereby transparency monitored citizens rather than empowering them; and reproduction and consolidation of power (33.3%), where selective disclosure served incumbent interests. Informal power operated through three roles: social pressure and civic movements (25%), acting as catalysts for accountability; brokerage and informal networks (25%), which mediated information yet could also obscure decision-making; and lobbying and behind-the-scenes relations (14%), moving decisions into unobservable arenas.

5. Conclusion
The success or failure of transparency initiatives depends on more than the existence of formal rules. Policymakers should distinguish procedural transparency (access to information about processes) from substantive transparency, the genuine disclosure of decisions and underlying interests. Unilateral reforms detached from their institutional ecosystem seldom achieve their intended effects, and civil society and local media require strengthened capacity to interpret and transmit information, since transparency without independent interpreters remains undigested data. Transparency should thus be understood as a “field of contestation” among the state, local institutions, civic networks, and stakeholders competing to define visibility, accountability, and meaning, shaped simultaneously by legal structures, institutional capacity, legitimating logics, and informal networks.