This chapter provides an ethnographic examination of how rubies extracted by a multinational mining company in Northern Mozambique are constructed as ethical, responsible, and transparent. At the same time, rubies extracted by small-scale miners working with screens and shovels around the company concession become unethical, illicit, and opaque. Informal ruby mining sustained a vibrant and illegal, but not necessarily illicit, international economy. Miners were subject to violent expropriation by state and company security forces. Some joined an insurgency and attacked government institutions and extractive infrastructure. That conflict continues to this day. My contention is that transparency is a technical claim, willfully mistaken as an ethical claim. Transparency is weaponized against very poor people trying to extract a living from the ground beneath their feet. As a result, ethical mining became the handmaiden to an international conflict.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the findings and theoretical insights developed throughout the book. Over the past decades, the accumulation of policies often has not been matched by proportional expansions in administrative capacity, fueling bureaucratic overload. While some countries, agencies, and policy sectors have managed to curb triage and maintain effective implementation, others have become susceptible to frequent and severe triage. Three main factors determine these outcomes: first, policymakers’ ability (or inability) to shift blame for policy failures onto implementers; second, organizations’ capacity to mobilize additional resources amid new policy demands; and third, the extent to which agencies are able to compensate for overload. Notably, environmental policy implementers are more vulnerable to policy triage, due to weaker political incentives and more fragmented governance. Social policy agencies benefit somewhat from tighter oversight and direct voter visibility but can still be undermined by austerity and politicized attacks on bureaucratic morale. Ultimately, the sustainability of modern governance hinges on institutional reforms that align policymaking and implementation more closely. Failure to do so not only erodes administrative performance and public trust but can also enable intentional sabotage of the bureaucratic state by governments seeking to dismantle its core capacities.

Greenland is an autonomous country that is part of the Danish realm. Having achieved home rule in 1979 and self-rule in 2009, Greenlandic political elites, journalists, Danish politicians, and residents from all walks of life expect full political independence will be declared at some point in the future. Greenland’s economy is supported and buttressed by an annual “block grant” from Denmark of approximately $500 million; both Denmark and Greenland have agreed that independence will be predicated upon the end of the block grant, linked to a concomitantly expanded and dominant resource extraction economy.

Our point of departure has been that, by using the language of solidarity, we – consciously or not – participate in the politics of it. The group of authors coming together in this volume contribute analyses of solidarity as a norm, a process, a practice, or a vocabulary creating polyperspectivity. In so doing, we let the course of our analysis be directed by the actors we investigate over a span of time in history. From the start, our intent has been to engage in a double move: to deploy history as an interpretive practice – a theory, a methodology, a philosophy – with which to engage law; and, simultaneously, to offer history as a substantive arena in which other interpretive practices from across a broader array of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences can engage with law.

Chapter 1 introduces the region of Kiambu in detail, establishing the stakes of moral debate over wealth amongst men in the region. While an older generation preaches the labour ideology (the notion that hard work will bring success) that allowed them to prosper in the aftermath of independence, it has been undermined by dwindling land holdings and opportunities for ‘off-farm income’, creating a crisis of hopelessness as young men wonder if they will ever reach the ‘level’ of their elders. Framing the study of masculine destitution to follow, the chapter discusses the legacies of the ‘Kenya Debate’, a regional debate in political economy about the relative prosperity of Kenya’s peasantry after independence. It argues for a processual, non-static approach to economic change in central Kenya, allowing us to see how class divides have been opened across generations due to population pressure on land. Its subdivision within families exerts stronger pressure on young family members who find themselves in the situation of being virtual paupers – land poor and ‘hustling’ for cash.

In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of transnational worker solidarity, with a focus on the potential of digital communication that became normalized during the Corona pandemic. I draw on Sally Scholz’s distinction between different types of solidarity and argue that historical forms of worker solidarity were often a combination of social and political forms of solidarity, in concrete local settings responding to concrete local problems. I also draw on economic and psychological considerations for explaining how these constellations helped bring about solidaristic action. I then provide arguments for why, despite various reasons for pessimism, transnational worker solidarity is, today, needed maybe more than ever. New digital technologies and the social habits that are developing around them have the potential to give a new impulse to transnational worker solidarity, because they can create levels of connectedness and trust that are closer to those experienced by certain historical worker communities, for whom social and political solidarity overlapped. But these opportunities can often not be grasped because of legal obstacles. Therefore, I conclude by postulating that workers should have a right to “know their colleagues” along value chains, allowing those who work together to connect in ways that potentially lead to solidaristic action.

This chapter will outline a collaborative approach to develop an interdisciplinary undergraduate energy program that embraces the strengths of and connections between STEM disciplines, social sciences, policy, communications, business, and the arts at your institution. The strategies presented will be based on the Collaborative Leadership Action Model developed by the author (Gosselin 2015) as well as his work as a facilitator with the Traveling Workshop Program of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. Each curriculum developed is different. There is no "one size fits all" for the curriculum outcome. The focus will be on a continuum of processes that can facilitate the development process.

This chapter investigates the legal instruments that govern MERCOSUR and the degree to which they have facilitated prosperity in the region. Even though it is an international regime, MERCOSUR remains a project for a future single market. In comparison with other regional integrations in this book, MERCOSUR members’ implementation of commitments has not unleashed regional prosperity. This is generally attributable to incongruity between the normative interests and beliefs in the state parties’ responses to MERCOSUR’s regime. Therefore, institutional functions and the level of implementation are not proportionate to the level of prosperity so far experienced. Indeed, MERCOSUR has not totally dismantled restrictions on intra- MERCOSUR trade, which couples with the delay in adoption of a number of secondary rules. To realise the prosperity gains of regional integration, state parties must synchronise the normative interests and beliefs in the implementing institutions.

While cross-cultural comparative approaches seem to be increasingly utilized across disciplines, this volume both explores and problematizes the purpose, aim, and methods underpinning the comparison of a global value such as transparency. The volume is based on research in disparate locations of the world – from European boardrooms and expert laboratories, Malagasy vanilla plantations to Indian tea auction rooms, Mozambican ruby mining to approaches to future resource extraction in Greenland. In its ensemble, the volume does more than bring empirical specificity to disparate geographies of supply chains; instead, the comparative effort seeks to assess the processes and forms of mediation enacting transparency in ideas, objects, and practices. As such, the contributions mobilize comparative effort to examine a similar object – the ideological and aspirational goal of transparency and its attendant practices, which are produced through variously different forms: technological, qualitative, institutional.