Transparency has become ubiquitous in seemingly every sphere of social, economic, and political life. Despite its pervasiveness and presumed efficacy in business and political discourse, transparency remains a theoretically vague and ethnographically elusive category that occludes more than it reveals. Rather than assuming that transparency is itself transparent, or a programmatic tenet to be implemented or executed, this volume turns the question on its head: What are the technological practices, material qualities, and institutional standards producing transparency in extractive, commodity trading, and agricultural sites? How is transparency certified and regimented by “ethical” and “responsible” businesses, or valued by investors, from auction rooms to sustainability reports?

These questions mirror the shift from the post–Cold War project of transparency as anti-corruption, governmental accountability, and legal access to information, to its more recent trajectory in international commodity trade, sustainability, digitalization, and supply chain governance. In its current instantiation, policy demands for transparency have become an indirect tool in the governance of global supply chains. More acutely, transparency has also reverberated precipitously in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing inflationary environment. Price increases and product shortages in the midst of a supply chain crisis have increased demands for transparency from consumers, governments, and regulatory entities alike, going beyond the discursive attribution of moral attributes of transparency and toward an action-oriented call for transparency. This sudden exposure of longstanding dependencies and newly revealed supply chain fragilities in global markets has repositioned the centrality of transparency in a context of heightened consumer anxieties and the questions surrounding the efficiency of commodity flows in times of crisis. In effect, definitions of supply chain transparency in sustainability governance have been premised on making certain things visible to the protagonists of these processes. This would include “a state in which information is made apparent and readily available to certain actors” (Gardner et al. Reference Gardner, Benzie and Börner2019: 164), “the disclosure of information” (Mol Reference Mol2010: 132), or “openness and reduced secrecy, garnered through greater availability of information” (Gupta and Mason Reference Gupta and Mason2014: 5). Yet, for all the claims that transparency works, less attention has been paid to how it works, even when it fails to achieve its purported goals.

This volume responds to this problem by examining the political instrumentality and social relevance of transparency through an ethnographic focus on the social, legal, and economic regimes that govern the global supply chains of mineral and agricultural products. Calls for transparency in the mining and agricultural sectors emerged along with the rise of global sustainability politics, especially the UN adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and the pressure on global corporations to adopt more legible compliance and accountability mechanisms. This demand for transparency in extractive and agrobusiness operations has accompanied the heightened production of natural resources – doubling in the last twenty-five years and poised to increase exponentially to keep pace with the demands of energy transition – as well as its increasingly visible deleterious social and environmental impacts (Shapiro and McNeish Reference Shapiro and McNeish2021: 4). Along with the acceleration of extractivism worldwide, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists working on and with rural communities impacted by the unchecked expansion of supply chains thus increasingly encounter transparency discourses flowing downward from the very same industries causing social and environmental harms. Often, such claims are relegated to legitimization strategies, and thereby neglect to pay attention to how transparency works and what it actually does. In contrast, management and supply chain research has sought to develop and assess transparency technologies, but without considering how new evaluation instruments and standards or quantification processes that are meant to bring transparency to consumers have been interpreted by those subjected to their implementation. Building from ethnographic studies of transparency, the volume articulates the notoriously slippery analytics of “local” and “global” by examining the mediation practices and technological processes that commodities, actors, and institutions undergo to be deemed transparent. In turn, each chapter describes ethnographically processes of valuation charged with making transparency a global value. As a portable concept connecting material objects, agents, forms of expertise, and cultural practices across the world, transparency brings together otherwise dispersed fields of value enacted in processes of disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth-making. Rather than these dimensions being mutually exclusive, we consider them as never-fully-aligned moments in the making of transparency, and as complementary to the value of transparency.

Moving past the liberal Geist and development creed behind the concept (Appel Reference Appel2019), the book situates transparency as a total social fact in the making of commodities. Inspired by Mauss’s attempt to observe how persons, objects, knowledge, and techniques were specifically assembled to form the social, the chapters approach the global value of transparency through an ethnography of the makers of transparency across institutions, markets, and technologies, and in the production of scientific and ethical knowledge. The chapters examine how different actors – industry associations and government agencies, corporate managers and traders, auditors and certifiers, farmers and miners – define and produce transparency as a global value in and through natural commodities. Transparency works and is made visible, we suggest, across the four conceptual moments organizing the volume: disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth. These notions, which together shape understandings of transparency and how power is diffused through it, frame the ethnographic contributions of this book. The next sections conceptualize the socio-material worlds, practices of epistemic authority, and cultural tensions attached to notions of disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth as these respectively structure the means and ends, the paradox, the ideologies, and the visibility of transparency. This introduction then discusses how these conceptual moments together assemble transparency as a global value in the context of supply chain capitalism. Finally, we provide an overview of the chapters.

The Means and Ends of Transparency

Coupled with the “demonstrative-revelatory” technological advancements of the early 2000s (Lawrence Reference Lawrence2020: 510), the dawn of transparency on a global scale had its original momentum as an idealized guarantor of democratic governance, access to information, and anti-corruption movements (Birchall Reference Birchall2014; Fung et al. Reference Fung, Graham and Weil2007; Garsten and De Montoya Reference Garsten and De Montoya2008; Hetherington Reference Hetherington2011; Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2006). As it was transformed under the guise of openness and accountability, political power became increasingly cloaked in opacity and conspiratorial thinking as “the raison d’être of transparency claims” (West and Sanders Reference West and Sanders2003: 12).

This dynamic of openness and opacity was magnified with mining and agricultural products in a new “grammar of responsibility” (Barnett et al. Reference Barnett, Cloke, Clarke and Malpass2010). Increased public scrutiny, consumer awareness, and market pressure toward environmental and social impact disclosure (e.g., Kalkancı et al. Reference Kalkancı, Ang, Plambeck and Atasu2016; Maloni and Brown Reference Maloni and Brown2006) steered corporations in these sectors to adopt “ethics” as a new market orthodoxy (Dolan and Rajak Reference Dolan and Rajak2016). To its critics, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement responded through virtuous discourses and the theatricality of responsibility, sustainability, and accountability (Benson and Kirsch Reference Benson and Kirsch2010; Coumans Reference Coumans2011; Rajak Reference Rajak2011), as well as corporate technologies of social engineering and co-option (Kirsch Reference Kirsch2015; Verweijen and Dunlap Reference Verweijen and Dunlap2021). CSR discourses have saturated the vocabulary of corporations, but the meaning and relational content of CSR are obscure even to those who promote its “implementation” (e.g., Van den Brink et al. Reference Van den Brink, Kleijn, Tukker and Huisman2019: 396–397) and to the agents and engineers in charge of negotiating it (J. M. Smith Reference Smith2021). While these terms often coalesce in CSR reports, responsible standards, sustainability indexes, or certification schemes, we approach them through the common lens of transparency, put to use both as a means – that is, to assess corporate (ir)responsibility, (un)sustainability, and (un)accountability – and an end – to benefit from an unquestioned global value.

As a means, transparency has been mainly approached in sustainability and supply chain research from the perspective of its capacity to deliver “normative” (participation and the right to know) and “substantive” (environmental protection and effective governance) criteria (Gupta and Mason Reference Gupta and Mason2014; Mol Reference Mol2010: 132). Reasserting the absence of a common definition, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development broadly considers that transparency characterizes a situation of “comprehensive and timely access to information and data that are necessary to hold policymakers, institutions and enterprises accountable for their actions,” insisting that “transparency is not an end in itself but rather a precondition for accountability” (UNCTAD 2020: 2). According to this logic, once implemented, transparency is turned into a de facto instrument for governing supply chains and drives transformative expectations in global sustainability. And yet, such expectations must also acknowledge that transparency is itself a subject of political and normative conflict rather than a neutral disclosure device deployed to increase accountability, democracy, and participation (Gupta et al. Reference Gupta, Boas and Oosterveer2020: 85). As a result, transparency is often pluralized to reflect its various orientations to sustainability governance, be it inward (firms’ internal management), outward (their impacts), or downward and upward (a view toward its employees or the firm as seen by its subordinates) (Heald Reference Heald, Hood and Heald2006).

As an end, transparency has been operationalized through rankings, benchmarks, due diligence procedures, and compliance with standards, all of which are increasingly demanded by investors and firms’ shareholders. Various types of transparency are also distinguished by their presumed beneficiaries (citizens, experts, market actors) or their underlying aims (less corruption, increased legitimacy, efficient governance, capital accumulation, abolition of hierarchy) (Tienhaara Reference Tienhaara2020). Nonetheless, concerns about how these various artifacts of transparency should be implemented tell us little about what transparency means to various publics and actors, how it is constructed, or how it ultimately works, or fails to do so. Although definitions of transparency go relatively unquestioned in supply chain governance, transparency projects are thus necessarily parceled (i.e., what is disclosed to whom) and intermediated (i.e., through acts and artifacts of disclosure).

This dual approach to the means and ends of transparency opens up space for reflection on how the concept structures and is structured by relations of power – that is, how such projects are developed, for and by whom, and with what effects. If transparency can be charged with value in trade relations, it is critical that we understand what is meant by claims to unmediated access to valuable information in attempts to re-embed transparency projects: If our world is one of mediation, then what forms of mediation do we want and need?

Mediation and the Paradox of Transparency

As Koivisto rightly notes, the language of transparency is one of metaphors. With its roots in the Enlightenment, “the very optical feature of seeing through” (Koivisto Reference Koivisto2022: 21) allows the metaphorical use of transparency as a manifestation of immediacy. As a metaphor, she argues, transparency can be considered a medium between an object and a viewing subject, whose ideal is paradoxically one of immediacy, or an idealized proximity and intimacy. This paradox is further stated by Alloa, who defines transparency as “mediated immediacy” (Reference Alloa, Alloa and Thomä2018), or Birchall, who considers it an “invisible medium through which content is brought … into the visible realm” (Reference Birchall2014: 81–82).

Taking seriously the mediated character of transparency, we depart from a slightly different epistemological tradition to approach the paradox of transparency. Already in his 1881 PhD dissertation, Franz Boas, the “father” of American anthropology, noted that perception was necessarily shaped by the situation of the observer. From this general statement, according to George Stocking (Reference Stocking1965: 57), Boas questioned “the very possibility of a general measure of all perceptions or of a general law governing the relationship of stimulus and perception” – that is, the existence of unmediated perception. In his famous article “On Alternating Sounds” (Reference Boas1889), Boas described how “a new sensation is apperceived by means of similar sensations that form part of our knowledge,” or, in other words, that experience is mediated by the culture in which someone is socialized. Therefore, immediacy – such as that promised in enlightenment sciences, or now in transparency discourses – is by definition impossible.Footnote ¹

The claim that transparency is a process of mediation which incorrectly understands itself to be a process of disintermediation – the “paradox of transparency” – is a central idea of this volume, following what Andrea Ballestero describes as the “literal impossibility” of unmediated perception (Reference Ballestero2012). The challenge here is that moments of disclosure presuppose a process of enclosure (Kockelman Reference Kockelman2016) in which the thing revealed is eventually captured and reified. Questioning what Koivisto coins as “the metaphorical authority of transparency” (Reference Koivisto2022: 5), the ethnographies in this volume attempt to show that it is possible to do the work that transparency projects often seek to do but in a more reflexive way.Footnote ² Each chapter demonstrates that more robust claims to epistemic authority imply moving past the self-evidence of the transparency metaphor and building upon ethnographic engagement and longstanding reflections on reflexivity as a condition of anthropological knowledge production, with ethnographic attention paid to the medium of transparency, on the one hand, and acknowledgment of the researcher as a positioned medium, on the other.

As this volume suggests, the paradox of transparency offers a fruitful entry point to investigate transparency beyond the normative and substantive assessment of its implementation. Indeed, any kind of transparency project implies the mediation of numerous actors, institutions, standards, laws, and documents in order to produce the unmediated visibility that transparency proposes. At the same time, ethnographic approaches to transparency have tended to reproduce epistemological frameworks that also have their limits. First, in line with Simmel’s sociology of secrecy (Reference Simmel1906), transparency has often been construed as the second term of an interactional equation with opacity, implicating a social process of boundary-making. A major issue in such approaches is that dyadic conceptualizations of transparency and opacity, publicity and privacy, disclosure and concealment often result in being both the explanans and the explanandum. Anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers interested in natural resources and global supply chains have tended to take transparency as an explanans of specific forms of production and related cultural practices, and to criticize it as a depoliticizing machine mainly through governmentality thinking. As an explanandum, this approach has oriented efforts to reveal and disclose what transparency conceals in binary terms, simultaneously hindering the possibility of analyzing transparency as an emerging value between and beyond predefined boundaries; and, more insidiously for researchers, to reproduce these binaries themselves through the illusion of revealing undisclosed truths.

Second, in line with Foucault’s work on total institutions inspired by Bentham’s panopticon, transparency ideologies are often seen as manifestations of discipline and governmentality. They legitimize aspirations to “control at a distance” (Foucault Reference Foucault2008), just as labeling something a “conspiracy” tends to delegitimize it as an inappropriate and inferior form of knowledge. Transparency, in this view, is seen as the counterpart of regime complexity and as an instrument of power, notably shaping lives through big data and algorithms (Besteman and Gusterson Reference Besteman and Gusterson2019) that are increasingly contested by privacy demands, or what Birchall (Reference Birchall2021) calls a “right to opacity.” Yet, transparency-as-governmentality also potentially reproduces the utopia of disintermediation it seeks to criticize. For example, digital transparency, Flyverbom argues (Reference Flyverbom2016), entails at the same time secrecy and transparency, hiddenness and openness, and is better approached as a “management of visibilities” through digital intermediaries, such as those put forth in blockchain projects, traceability tags, or smart contracts that increasingly populate supply chains (e.g., Bolay Reference Bolay2021; Calvão and Archer Reference Calvão and Archer2021). Similarly, calls for making algorithmic systems accountable have grown in response to their perceived opacity and discriminatory practices, despite the limitations and inadequacies of this idealized view of transparency (Ananny and Crawford Reference Ananny and Crawford2016). This algorithmic transparency is often premised on the desirable idea of understanding how a system works by cracking open its black box, an idea of “complete transparency” that is by itself an “impossible goal” (Crawford Reference Crawford2021: 12). This is in part the effect of the technologically mediated work of transparency, as seen in the case of predictive policing and surveillance (Brayne Reference Brayne2021). These systems hinge at once on artificial intelligence and automated decision-making processes with built-in accountability procedures, while at the same time relying on external third parties that skirt these transparency obligations in collecting and storing data.

The critical point here is that we should not mistake the aspiration of unmediated access to a given object for its mediating technologies; rather, to understand what is transparent requires “attention to the technological foundations and mediations of transparency, such as the techniques and devices used to manufacture transparency” (Flyverbom Reference Flyverbom2016: 111). Transparency is thus a product of the age of globalization, and a catalyst for organizing, valuing, and (de)legitimizing different forms of knowledge. More than looking at transparency as inherent in an object or system, we follow calls to “show instead how these limitations can be starting points for reconstructing accountability for systems that cannot be seen into, held still, or fully traced” (Ananny and Crawford Reference Ananny and Crawford2016: 13). This collection of ethnographic studies of mining and agricultural commodity production and circulation extends this line of questioning. The chapters examine how miners, farmers, buyers, and sellers of natural commodities create their own theories of knowledge and enactments of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim Reference Jasanoff and Kim2009: 120) about transparency in the broader world. How are such practices and knowledges made transparent – that is, how are they made into interpretable representations while appearing immediate to the knower?

Ideologies of Transparency

If the lens of mediation offers suitable conceptual affordances to approach transparency-in-the-making, the broader aim of this volume is to expand this approach to understand how transparency emerged as a global social value. This requires bringing back the ideologies capable of building trust in sociotechnical mediations of transparency. Andrea Ballestero (Reference Ballestero2012) suggests the notion of transparency ideology, which can be used analogously with “language ideology” and “semiotic ideology,” to highlight the ironic imperative of transparency in disavowing the artifice required to create immediacy. Such disavowal can be interpreted in line with what Mazzarella (Reference Mazzarella2006: 489) calls “politics of immediation,” whereby the denial of mediation, albeit a constitutive process of social life to make society imaginable and representable, manifests the intensification of a bureaucratic ethos and occurs because it implies distance, intervention, and displacement. Similarly, an account of transparency as a semiotic ideology (cf. Keane Reference Keane2018) would suggest the need to reveal interiority in a world in which mediation is a constitutive fact of life.

Anthropologists have productively engaged with this contradiction, generating a powerful critique of any claim to “see through” ideologies in order to understand “what’s really going on.” These ideologies can be considered as a theory of representation which holds that something which is not visible can be made visible to a knower. This often involves bringing something that is distant in time or in space into the contemporary space-time and lifeworld of the knower – something that the “free market” is often believed to realize. In other words, transparency promises direct knowledge despite spatial and temporal distance, conveying conspecifics into different sorts of social roles and stereotypes which are differently empowered.Footnote ³ In this view, anthropologists of transparency “problematize taken-for-granted ideas about who is observing and who is observed, about the materiality of documents as vessels of knowledge, and, ultimately, about the desirability of transparent arrangements” (Ballestero Reference Ballestero2012: 160). In doing so, they hope to examine how transparency is a “political technology” and thus “a form of intervention into a world constituted by relations that can be molded, corrected, and regimented” (160). And like all political technologies meant to build trust, transparency can be used by a variety of actors and in different ways. In contrast with its assumed neutrality in bringing the sight of a subject onto an object, transparency necessarily occurs across antagonistic social fields. Anthropology has fruitfully engaged with some of these dimensions of transparency. For instance, Marilyn Strathern (Reference Strathern2000a) opened a vast field of research on audit cultures. Strathern brought attention to processes of “second-order description” in representing the academic field and the growing opposition within it. Beyond education, the concept of audit cultures became central in critical analyses of other social fields, such as CSR, development, or international organizations. Likewise, others contributed to an understanding of the epistemological violence of quantification (Merry Reference Merry2016) and the instrumental uses of transparency as a tool of neoliberalism (e.g., Rajak Reference Rajak2011; Shore Reference Shore2008), as well as the undergirding ideologies of secrecy and conspiracy (West and Sanders Reference West and Sanders2003), in what we might call, after Joseph Masco (Reference Masco2021), an “anthropology of opacity.”

If semiotic ideologies speak to the reflexive discourses people have about language and the assumptions they carry about how signs work in the world (Keane Reference Keane2003), we pluralize transparency ideologies to reveal these contradictions of interiority and distance. This move paves the way for an anthropological approach to transparency that can ultimately reconcile the aspiration for a global value with a desire for an “ethics of invisibility,” as in the case of “digital miners” in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, for whom “seeing and transparent visibility were extensions of the colonial gaze and a form of predation” (J. H. Smith Reference Smith2021: 27).

Seeing Transparency

These reflections should not be limited to subsuming transparency under discursive and visual metaphors of cultural mediation. Transparency projects are also materialized and enacted in documents and procedures, as well as technical – and increasingly digital – devices, whose ordinariness makes them largely invisible, all while being infused with institutional considerations structured upon dyadic oppositions such as transparency/opacity or visibility/invisibility (see Brenneis Reference Brenneis and Riles2006). Semantics of transparency as they are upheld in sustainability governance can be traced to other governmental practices and have their epistemological roots in modern science’s institutionalization and in the Enlightenment’s aspirations for universal truth. Stemming from the optical revolution, dynamics of mediating transparency in science went hand in hand with the development of instruments, documents, and material experiments to expand visibility, whereby the world could be made legible provided that one looked at it correctly (Levitt Reference Levitt2009: 2) – that is, with the right tools and prior knowledge. Similar dynamics unfold in the practice of government, whereby the state is assumed to be able to “see” as long as it deploys adequate subjectifying techniques such as censuses or mapping (Scott Reference Scott1998). While most “professional visions” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1994; see also Pentimalli and Rémery Reference Pentimalli and Rémery2020) explicitly code the world and highlight some of its features at the expense of others, few would claim that their vision should be aimed at transparency.

The premises of the optical revolution established an ocular-centric view that still drives many of the processes examined in this volume, including the capacity to digitally track and trace raw materials, to produce documents for certification and verification, often at the expense of more direct, though less visible, forms of accountability and trust embedded in social relations. The literature on how documents work as objectivity machines (Hoag Reference Hoag2011) and mediators of knowledge (Hull Reference Hull2012; Riles Reference Riles2006) provides striking illustrations of how “transparent” access to information is embedded in objects and sociotechnical networks. Not unlike Latour’s (Reference Latour1991) reading of Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Shapin and Shaffer Reference Shapin and Schaffer1985), truths – scientific, but also legal – are experimentally produced in processes of mediation, whereby cuts are made in hybrid networks of humans and nonhumans whose stabilized forms work as evidence for scientific or legal truth claims upon which representations of transparency are grounded.

When applied to the making and circulation of natural commodities, transparency is geared in particular to spatial representations defined as “supply chains” or “production networks,” as well as “sustainability networks” (Ponte and Cheyns Reference Ponte and Cheyns2013). Across these “chains” and “networks,” raw materials traverse what can be called, after Mazzarella, “nodes of mediations” to designate “sites at which the compulsions of institutional determination … come into always provisional alignment in the service of different [transparency] projects from the grass roots to corporate boardrooms” (Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2004: 352).

Earlier, we suggested that transparency is a total social fact in the making of global commodities. To grasp this holistic perspective, the chapters in this volume examine a variety of dispersed yet interlinked sites, including banks, laboratories, trading houses, centers of expertise, courts of law, government offices, NGOs, and corporations. Empirically building upon such siloed sites, the temporal and spatial dispersion of the total social fact of transparency is also susceptible to a Latourian analysis. Transparency can be decomposed as a series of mediations between a distant location and “oligoptica” – sites in which “narrow but precise views” are manufactured and are represented in transparent “panoramas” (Latour Reference Latour2005: 173–190). Building upon the spatialities that constitute actor–network theory, Oppenheim (Reference Oppenheim2007: 478) adds that “oligoptica” and “panoramas” describe mediations “in a summation of other places, times, and agencies through which a local site [oligopticon] is made to do something.” This something, in the case of this volume, includes the production of ontological truth claims toward a broader representation (or panorama) of transparency. This has methodological benefits since oligoptica are the exact opposite of (utopian) panoptica, as they exist concretely as investigable sites (a laboratory, an NGO, a government office, a trading house). Seeing transparency as it is traced across these sites offers an alternative to the individual contextualization of different transparency projects within their own institutional and political agendas. In other words, an ethnographic focus on processes of transparency-in-the-making rather than transparency-as-something-else (e.g., as governmentality or disclosure) allows us to analytically overcome the fragmented nature of transparency in its already institutionalized forms.Footnote ⁴ These are re-presentations that illustrate on a wider scale the inevitable status of “secondary-order description” of transparency projects that has already been pointed out by Strathern (Reference Strathern2000b).

As different scholars of so-called algorithmic transparency have reminded us, the problem may not lie with the perceived or assumed opacity or inscrutability of these systems, to which transparency would serve as a panacea (Amoore Reference Amoore2020: 5). Instead, focusing on sites of mediation (or oligoptica) opens up the possibility of understanding the shared or contested practices and semiotic processes occurring across dispersed endeavors, sites, and frameworks, connected nonetheless by material flows, semantic repertoires, or forms of expertise. Much like digital algorithms become “ethicopolitical” entities increasingly “implicated in new regimes of verification, new forms of identifying a wrong or of truth telling in the world” (Amoore Reference Amoore2020: 6), we need to go beyond seeing transparency in transparency; instead, we should “look across” these assemblages as complex “sociotechnical systems” to understand not how they contain but how they enact what makes them accountable (Ananny and Crawford Reference Ananny and Crawford2016: 2).

Toward a Global Ethnography of Transparent Commodities

Acknowledging that transparency is a global value suggests paying attention to how transparency projects materially organize and semiotically regiment the global production and circulation of commodities across local settings. The field of sustainability governance in particular has seen a proliferation of transparency initiatives to monitor increasingly complex global supply chains, ushering in the promise of an era of unmediated visibility, increased participation and inclusion, and enhanced efficiency (Gardner et al. Reference Gardner, Benzie and Börner2019; Grimard et al. Reference Grimard, Lake, Mardas, Godar and Gardner2017; Sarfaty Reference Sarfaty2015; Sauer and Hiete Reference Sauer and Hiete2020). The recent spread of transparency in international trade and corporate management illustrates the enmeshment of supply chain capitalism in most spheres of life (Tsing Reference Tsing2009) along with the growing use of extractivism to describe processes of harvesting the earth’s surface and its subsoil (Gudynas Reference Gudynas, Schuldt, Acosta, Barandiarán, Bebbington and Folchi2009; Ye et al. Reference Ye, van der Ploeg, Schneider and Shanin2019) and the “social wealth” of everyday human interactions and cooperation (Mezzadra and Neilson Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2017). Agriculture and mining – that is, food and mineral supply chains procuring natural commodities – are the focus of this book because they share the extractivist process that has precipitated sustainability concerns in recent years. The violent logics of extractivism, understood as “taking resources without reciprocity nor stewardship” (Shapiro and McNeish Reference Shapiro and McNeish2021: 20; see also Dunlap and Jakobsen Reference Dunlap and Jakobsen2020), are increasingly noticed and denounced in scientific scholarship and by the wider public. Indeed, while extractivism expands and intensifies globally, so does its contestation (Kröger Reference Kröger2015; Willow Reference Willow2018) and the greater visibility of its social and environmental impacts (Esty Reference Esty2004; Gupta and Mason Reference Gupta and Mason2014).

The chapters draw primarily from mining or farming as social processes, sharing a focus on “raw” materials to assess the ambiguous valuation of these objects and their qualities.Footnote ⁵ Complementing an already rich literature on the momentum of extraction, the book’s contributions are interested in how natural commodities are interpreted and valued as they move away from the site where they were first harvested. Our concern is less with the circulation of commodities themselves (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1986) than with the way transparency regimes structure this circulation. By focusing on moments and processes of mediation toward disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth in the making of transparent commodities, we render transparency observable, allowing researchers to identify the connections and power relations between specific sites, actors, institutions, and technologies across global supply chains.

Often dubbed with positive connotations of ethicality, responsibility, and sustainability, the huge number of initiatives that are meant to bring more transparency to agriculture and mining supply chains vary greatly in scope, focus, and mechanisms of enforcement. Initiatives such as the voluntary principles on security and human rights in mining merely provide guiding standards to companies, while a regulation such as the US Dodd–Frank Act seeks to tackle the risk of conflict financing through mandatory due diligence. Certification schemes such as the Kimberley Process have become mandatory to trade diamonds, while fair trade and organic certifications operate on a voluntary basis. Traceability mechanisms are increasingly requested by accrediting bodies to access licit markets, while the conduct of traceability is mainly outsourced to contractors specialized in giving credence to corporate claims of “responsibility.” Despite the heterogeneous natures of these initiatives, they share the premise that “supply chain transparency” is considered a sine qua non to reach their purported accountability aims (Gardner et al. Reference Gardner, Benzie and Börner2019), to prove the authenticity of their sustainability claims, and to further value them on the markets. In relative contradiction to discourses on advances in sustainability governance, contemporary analyses of global supply chains demonstrate heightened marginalization (Mezzadra and Neilson Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2019), invisibility (Sassen Reference Sassen2014), and precarity (Tsing Reference Tsing2015). Rather than dismissing transparency as a smokescreen for neoliberal capitalism, the essays in this volume engage head-on with notions of transparency in order to better understand its status as a global value that numerous actors construct, negotiate, mobilize, and contest in their daily lives.

Taking stock of the inevitably mediated and parceled out character of transparency projects and their shared connection to a global value, the essays in this volume collectively propose a theory of transparency as a quality being worked through series of mediations toward disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth. Each of these concepts manifests successive moments as well as various – and sometimes contradictory – practices in the making of transparent commodities.

Disclosure refers to the processes of making certain things, actors, and processes visible in trading processes. Immediacy entails the discourses and practices of expertise used to perform unmediated access to what is being disclosed. Trust points to the relational and technological aspects of mediating immediacy and the distributed credence of accountability claims in politics and bureaucracies. Truth, finally, addresses the ways in which transparency projects seek to make ontological claims on nature and sustainability incontestable by (re)ordering socio-material worlds through legal frameworks and sociotechnical devices.

By offering a holistic view of the making of transparent commodities through the lens of these structuring concepts, the volume hypothesizes that transparency is construed in the linkages between valuation practices, technical expertise, bureaucratic legibility, and narratives of truth and ignorance. Accordingly, the contributors’ efforts to interrogate the making of transparency as moments of disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth facilitate a comparative ethnography of how transparency works, not through the lens of predefined, isolated variables, but from the perspective of transparency as a total social fact that both produces and is produced by various actors and institutions. These concepts relate to four complementary dimensions of the production of transparency, which enable the comparative establishment of transparency within a broader system of value (see Graeber Reference Graeber2001: 13–15). The value of transparency, in other words, can be made perceptible only in relation to other terms in a system of meaningful distinction.

Overview of Themes and Chapters

The volume seeks to answer the following questions: How is transparency regimented, standardized, or institutionalized by traders, international regulators, evaluators, and managers? What are the technical, aesthetic-sensory, and material conditions that enable the discourse and practice of transparency? What power relations sustain, or undermine, the emergence of transparency as a global social and economic value? What political projects, forms of violence, and practices of inclusion and exclusion do such endeavors establish and legitimate across production and consumption? What makes specific commodities transparent and ethical – or, by the same token, opaque and unethical? Rather than describing how transparency is implemented, the chapters in this book scrutinize the different ways in which it is constructed in moments of disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth, thereby illuminating its various, sometimes contentious, and often unintended effects along with the pervasive appropriation of nature by expanding supply chains.