This article explores the prospects for transparency to be a transformative force in global biosafety governance. It analyzes whether information disclosure can further a right to know and choose, and hence facilitate oversight over transnational transfers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It examines the question of “Whose right to know what and why?” with regard to GMOs in the agricultural commodity trade in relation to the global Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. I argue that the limited disclosure obligations in this global context follow rather than shape market developments, and that complex infrastructures of sampling, testing and detection are required to put disclosed information to use. If so, rather than a normative right-to-know of importing countries, a competing norm of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) prevails. I conclude that the potential of transparency to empower remains unrealized, particularly for the poorest countries most reliant on globally-induced disclosure.

This introductory article draws on the contributions to this special issue to consider the implications of a transparency turn in global environmental and sustainability governance. Three interrelated aspects are addressed: why transparency now? How is transparency being institutionalized? And what effects does it have? In analyzing the spread of transparency in governance, the article highlights the broader (contested) normative context that shapes both its embrace by various actors and its institutionalization. I argue that the effects of transparency—whether it informs, empowers or improves environmental performance—remain uneven, with transparency falling short of meeting the ends many anticipate from it. Nonetheless, as the contributions to this issue make clear, transparency has indeed come of age as a defining feature of our current and future politics.

Although transparency is a key concept of our times, it remains a relatively understudied phenomenon in global environmental politics. The link between transparency and accountable, legitimate and effective governance is assumed, yet the nature and workings of this link require further scrutiny. Transparency via information disclosure is increasingly at the heart of a number of global environmental governance initiatives, termed “governance-by-disclosure” here. The article identifies two assumptions that underpin such governance-by-disclosure initiatives, and calls for comparative analysis of the workings of such assumptions in practice, as a way to illuminate the nature and implications of a transparency turn in global environmental governance and its link to accountable, legitimate and effective governance.

This paper analyzes how the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, a global regime governing trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs), is influencing agricultural biotechnology policy choices in developing countries/emerging economies. Through empirical analysis of Mexico, China and South Africa, we examine whether discursive and/or institutional change has followed the negotiation and implementation of the Cartagena Protocol in these countries. We find that, although trade and market competitiveness concerns are driving biotechnology policy choices in all three cases, a precautionary biosafety discourse has gained greater legitimacy as a result of the Cartagena Protocol, empowering those domestically who voice such concerns. Related to that, debates and/or decisionmaking processes in this controversial area have become more inclusive in all three countries—an important influence of the Cartagena Protocol.We also find persisting regulatory diversity rather than harmonization of biosafety regulatory frameworks in our three countries, with international trade linkages and domestic politics playing an important mediating role in determining Protocol influence.