Beyond transparency: A consideration of extraction's full costs

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.