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Beyond transparency: A consideration of extraction's full costs

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Abstract

This special section Beyond Transparency: Rethinking the Government of Extraction examines the relationship between international transparency discourse in the extractive sector, and the persistent association of unaccountable government, socioeconomic injustice and ongoing environmental hazards associated with extractive firms and their operations. Our critical analyses of transparency- situate the discourse and practice within the overall turn-of-millennium regulatory capture of states in the global North - including Canada, the US and the UK - by oil and mining industry interests. Contributors probe how transparency regimes have been applied to oil and extractive sector ‘host states’ in the global South, in particular Nigeria, while the rent-seeking practices that these regimes seek to expose are rarely tied to corporate malfeasance in the North. We employ this introduction to consider global transparency discourse and regulatory regimes in the light of the full cost of extraction. Since the turn of the millennium, we argue, attention to extraction's full costs have been largely overshadowed in policy discourse via global transparency regimes, notably the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.

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... It should be noted that in practice, transparency is mainly defined in terms of the "lack" of governance emanating from Southern states (Bracking, 2009) and colonized peoples and is ultimately part of the global regulatory stranglehold of Northern states by oil and mining industry interests (Zalik, 2020). Zalik (2020) also addresses the neglect of ecological costs in the EITI regime. ...
... It should be noted that in practice, transparency is mainly defined in terms of the "lack" of governance emanating from Southern states (Bracking, 2009) and colonized peoples and is ultimately part of the global regulatory stranglehold of Northern states by oil and mining industry interests (Zalik, 2020). Zalik (2020) also addresses the neglect of ecological costs in the EITI regime. In June 2019, the International EITI board published its amended standards, explicitly incorporating a provision for environmental impact reports for the first time. ...
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Ken Saro-Wiwa led the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), an ethnic-based organisation formed primarily to advance the interests of the Ogoni people, especially vis-à-vis Nigeria’s oil-industry. Ken’s leadership of MOSOP resonated globally for the peaceful approach to claims by the group and the ‘localisation’ of international human rights. Following (and as a consequence of) his death by hanging in November 1995, the region plunged into violence. Responding to the upsurge in the resultant militancy that caused massive decline in oil exploration and production activities and revenues, the Federal Government initiated the amnesty programme. Although peace has largely returned to the oil-communities, the amnesty has a clear winner (militants) with the general population not reaping any palpable benefits. The paper highlights how the Wiwa-led MOSOP adopted and utilized the ‘localisation’ strategy for the benefit of the populace. It also discusses three important post-November 1995 occurrences relevant to the oil-industry that a rights-based approach would have seized as opportunities to resolve impending disputes in the region for the benefit of the general population.
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The emergence of the ever-growing anti-corruption movement from the early ’90s onwards has proven itself to be of considerable importance in how we understand and explain global inequalities as well as in redefining corruption as a lack of transparency. This paper examines the timing and content of this international anti-corruption movement. It argues that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the deepening of an increasingly transnational capitalism, anti-corruption discourse has arisen as a new version of the ‘white man’s burden’, a justification for intervention into the domestic politics of less powerful states as well as an explanation for their relative poverty. Concurrently, the anti-corruption movement has functioned to push states into increasing their autonomy with respect to local interests and fractions of capital in order to become more subservient and hospitable to transnational capital as a whole.
Article
The past two decades have witnessed growing concerns in policy circles about the role of natural resources in conflicts in the Global South. New frameworks of intervention have been designed with the aim of cutting the assumed links between armed groups and resources, and promoting transparent models of resource governance. This article argues that these interventions are often based on unwarranted assumptions about the relationship between resources, conflict and governance. It presents a critical analysis of a broad set of peer-reviewed publications and influential research reports about the different ways resource governance affects people in fragile and conflict-affected areas. The authors identify a number of gaps and weaknesses in the literature, pay particular attention to the quality of the empirical evidence base for certain theoretical claims, and suggest avenues for future research.
Book
Transparency—openness, secured through greater availability of information—is increasingly seen as part of the solution to a complex array of economic, political, and ethical problems in an interconnected world. The “transparency turn” in global environmental governance in particular is seen in a range of international agreements, voluntary disclosure initiatives, and public-private partnerships. This is the first book to investigate whether transparency in global environmental governance is in fact a broadly transformative force or plays a more limited, instrumental role. After three conceptual, context-setting chapters, the book examines ten specific and diverse instances of “governance by disclosure.” These include state-led mandatory disclosure initiatives that rely on such tools as prior informed consent and monitoring, measuring, reporting and verification; and private (or private-public), largely voluntary efforts that include such corporate transparency initiatives as the Carbon Disclosure Project and such certification schemes as the Forest Stewardship Council. The cases, which focus on issue areas including climate change, biodiversity, biotechnology, natural resource exploitation, and chemicals, demonstrate that although transparency is ubiquitous, its effects are limited and often specific to particular contexts. The book explores in what circumstances transparency can offer the possibility of a new emancipatory politics in global environmental governance.
Article
The rise in world prices of natural resources, coupled with the resource discoveries induced by high prices, is transforming Africa's opportunities. The economic future of Africa will be determined by whether this opportunity is seized or missed. The history of resource extraction in Africa is not encouraging. This paper reviews and develops the political economy of natural resources as a guide to how Africa might avoid a repetition of that history.
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This paper examines the impacts of mining-sector reform in Ghana at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. Since the inception of the national Economic Recovery Program (ERP) in 1983, the Ghanaian government, under the guidance of the IMF and World Bank, has amended numerous policies to establish a more attractive investment climate for foreign mineral-exploration and extraction companies. The country's mining industry has since expanded rapidly, experiencing by 2004 a fivefold increase in annual gold output and big rises in bauxite, diamond, and manganese production; however, at the same time, the perpetual expansion of mining and allied activities has strained indigenous communities: some subsistence groups have been displaced outright, and/or have been victimized by excessive mine pollution.
Article
This article examines the emergence and campaigns of Oilwatch Africa and their implications for North-South tensions among global advocacy networks. The paper explores how the actions of civil society networks in the global South also express internal tensions shaped by local and national power relations. These relations are affected by political, economic, and cultural variations in the social conditions of the communities that these networks seek to support, as well as diverse political interests among their member organizations, some of whose activities may facilitate rather than resist transnational exploitation.
Article
What might it mean to say that resources, and resource-dependency, have consequences for the conduct of politics? This article explores the research conducted under the sign of resource politics associated with the work of Michael Ross, Paul Collier and others through a detailed examination of the political economy of oil in Nigeria. Much of the resource politics work suffers from either too strong a commodity-determinism or an insufficient attention to the ways in which specific resource characteristics matter analytically with respect to politics, rule and conflict. I approach the oil question in Nigeria by using the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose and by identifying three different forms of governable space and rule (the chieftainship, the ethnic minority, and the nation state) associated with oil-based capitalism. Governable spaces as forms of rule, identity and territoriality are not necessarily fully governable (they may be almost ungovernable and wracked by internal dissent and conflict) and may not be compatible among themselves, but rather work against one another in complex and contradictory ways.
Article
This article critically examines the challenges that come with implementing the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)—a policy mechanism marketed by donors and Western governments as a key to facilitating economic improvement in resource-rich developing countries—in sub-Saharan Africa. The forces behind the EITI contest that impoverished institutions, the embezzlement of petroleum and/or mineral revenues, and a lack of transparency are the chief reasons why resource-rich sub-Saharan Africa is underperforming economically, and that implementation of the EITI, with its foundation of “good governance,” will help address these problems. The position here, however, is that the task is by no means straightforward: that the EITI is not necessarily a blueprint for facilitating good governance in the region's resource-rich countries. It is concluded that the EITI is a policy mechanism that could prove to be effective with significant institutional change in host African countries but, on its own, it is incapable of reducing corruption and mobilizing citizens to hold government officials accountable for hoarding profits from extractive industry operations.
Article
Transparency-based global environmental governance, like all global governance, necessarily plays out in national contexts. Its efficacy is shaped not only by global politics but also by the norms and capacities prevailing within countries. Over the past two decades, there has been an extraordinary upheaval in transparency views and practices in numerous countries, rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian. This multi-faceted development has been driven by such varied factors as democratization, privatization, and changing views about appropriate regulatory practices. These changes provide the crucial context for understanding the transparency transformation that is currently unfolding within global environmental governance, as well as what its promise, limitations and implications in practice might be in diverse national contexts. (c) 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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This paper summarizes and extends previous research that has shown evidence of a “curse of natural resources” – countries with great natural resource wealth tend nevertheless to grow more slowly than resource-poor countries. This result is not easily explained by other variables, or by alternative ways to measure resource abundance. This paper shows that there is little direct evidence that omitted geographical or climate variables explain the curse, or that there is a bias resulting from some other unobserved growth deterrent. Resource-abundant countries tended to be high-price economies and, perhaps as a consequence, these countries tended to miss-out on export-led growth.
Article
In 1935, after the death of dictator General Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela consolidated its position as the world's major oil exporter and began to establish what today is South America's longest-lasting democratic regime. Endowed with the power of state oil wealth, successive presidents appeared as transcendent figures who could magically transform Venezuela into a modern nation. During the 1974-78 oil boom, dazzling development projects promised finally to effect this transformation. Yet now the state must struggle to appease its foreign creditors, counter a declining economy, and contain a discontented citizenry. In critical dialogue with contemporary social theory, Fernando Coronil examines key transformations in Venezuela's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. The result is a timely and compelling historical ethnography of political power at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary reflections on modernity and the state.
Article
Estudio que analiza desde los presupuestos de la etnografía y la socioeconomía, la identidad cultural, los programas de inversión de ayuda internacional y las políticas económicas que se han implementado en Indonesia con el fin de mejorar las condiciones de vida de sus pobladores y sus espacios territoriales.
Article
Since the early 1980s there has been an explosion of auditing activity in the United Kingdom and North America. In addition to financial audits there are now medical audits, technology audits, value for money audits, environmental audits, quality audits, teaching audits, and many others. Why has this happened? What does it mean when a society invests so heavily in an industry of checking and when more and more individuals find themselves subject to formal scrutiny? The Audit Society argues that the rise of auditing has its roots in political demands for accountability and control. At the heart of a new administrative style internal control systems have begun to play an important public role and individual and organizational performance has been increasingly formalized and made auditable. Michael Power argues that the new demands and expectations of audits live uneasily with their operational capabilities. Not only is the manner in which they produce assurance and accountability open to question but also, by imposing their own values, audits often have unintended and dysfunctional consequences for the audited organization. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780198296034/toc.html
Resources, conflict and governance: a critical A. Zalik and I.`. Osuoka The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (xxxx) xxx-xxx review
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U.S. energy CEOs are awarding themselves millions in bonuses as their companies go bankrupt
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When Citizens Revolt: Nigerian elites, big oil, and the Ogonistruggle for self-determination
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Okonta, Ike, 2008. When Citizens Revolt: Nigerian elites, big oil, and the Ogonistruggle for self-determination. Africa World Press.
On the 20th Anniversary of the Death of Ken Saro Wiwa: Special Section 2
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Nigeria oil chief promises more transparency at state producer
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