The quest for transparency spans countries, policymakers, NGOs, and industries.1 Transparency can be defined as disclosing to the public, in a timely and reliable manner, information that governments and/or corporations previously considered confidential. Recent examples include the Carbon Disclosure Project, the Aarhus convention on access to environmental information, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and its provisions on global genetically modified organism flows, and a wide array of financial information (e.g., in the G8 declaration of Lough Erne in 2013). Stemming from the “right to know,” advocates from NGOs and development organizations view transparency as a cure for corruption and a benefit for democratic accountability; transparency should lead to stakeholder empowerment and improve legitimacy, learning, investment certainty, and better governance.
In this article I look at the efforts to establish financial transparency as a norm for the extractive sector. This sector is important because its activities are accompanied by a...