Aiding stakeholder capitalism: donors and the contentious landscape of transparency reform in Ghana

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the growing invocation of transparency norms as the panacea for addressing the challenges associated with natural resource wealth, there is considerable ambiguity about how they shape market regimes in the global south. Drawing from empirical insights on government-donor engagements around the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) that were pieced together from multiple rounds of fieldwork in Ghana between 2012 and 2016, this article recounts the distinctive ways that such ambiguities around transparency reforms work to deepen the logics and mechanics of global capital in the extractive sector, with substantial gaps in labour market protections and domestic ownership. The author argues that the EITI’s successes in this endeavour reflect a more structural dynamic that is tied to donors’ parallel role as intermediaries of extractive governance norms and brokers of a distinctive form of stakeholder capitalism. This observation underlines changes in the global architecture for aiding the expansion of Western capital by forging expanded networks that preclude alternatives to neoliberalism.