Transparency is increasingly promoted as a necessary step to achieve various social and environmental sustainability goals. And yet, the pervasive idea that more transparency leads to more sustainability relies on an assumption that the market can and will transform information about corporate activities into a positive sustainability outcome. Reflecting on Traidcraft Exchange’s “Who picked my tea?” campaign and some of the responses to it, this chapter uncovers some of the assumptions that motivate transparency initiatives and shows how these assumptions serve the interests of powerful actors such as corporations and their investors. In doing so, they reinforce an understanding of sustainability that rewards companies for doing little more than disclosing information they themselves have decided is appropriate to share.

Organic certification programs aim to promote transparent economic, environmental, and social trade relationships as part of their social mission. Yet, these programs often produce forms of knowledge and accountability that, while more transparent for some groups, are less transparent for others. With a focus on the vanilla supply chain in Madagascar, I ethnographically examine interactions between smallholder vanilla farmers and organic certifying agents. I note how the organic certification process privileges certain practices as transparent, and thus desirable. These include written, quantifiable, and formalized representations of vanilla fields. This focus ignores or undermines local forms of transparency, which often rely on spoken, indirect, and informal market mechanisms. The forms of transparency favored by certification projects have economic consequences, as they open spaces for additional external actors – including certification agencies themselves – to capture profit and value from the vanilla market.

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.

In this chapter, I consider how transparency and gold are established and maintained as “global values” and how actors differently positioned within gold markets seek to align them, with greater and lesser degrees of success. I trace how this happens in three clusters of transparency projects: certification schemes and voluntary frameworks for mining companies; efforts to use blockchain technologies to increase transparency in the supply chain; and efforts to verify (and perform the verification of) gold’s presence in European central banks, especially the Deutsche Bundesbank. Exploring these specific sites where transparency and gold convene, both supporting and tugging against each other, allows us to consider transparency from a different angle than is found in many other discussions, viewing gold and transparency as engaged in competitive processes of value-making (and unmaking).

Building upon the ambiguous status of gold as both a monetary asset and a commodity, this chapter interrogates the plural veridictions that support industry claims to responsible business conduct. Through a chronicle of the political and legal struggles surrounding the “true” provenance of gold imported to Switzerland, it suggests that responsibility claims rely on a regime of discrete transparency. Transparency practices in the gold trade are both discreet in their efforts to preserve the secrecy of business operations, and discrete in the legal processes through which they separate normative orders to establish different veridictions on the “true” provenance and ownership of gold. Rather than opposing notions of transparency and secrecy, these veridictions seek to assemble the values associated with both terms. Challenging these veridictions supposes a disentanglement of gold from its status either as money or as commodity, and a shift from an ontology of individuals-as-consumers to one of individuals-as-citizens. A third veridiction emerges once imported gold is considered part of a stream of information owned by the sovereign rather than in terms of its relation to a consumer.

Replete with documentary artefacts, traceability systems, forensic testing, and inspections, organic certification is emblematic of technomoral aspirations and material interventions undertaken in the name of transparency. Based on research conducted in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, this chapter explores how organic certification becomes established as a regime of truth through semiotic technologies mobilized to make agricultural production transparent and legible. Probing a question I have frequently encountered – “Is it really organic?” – the chapter attends to what such a question reveals about transparency’s contemporary power. By examining how paper and digital record-keeping, as well as tags and traceability, come together in organic certification, it shows how transparency projects work to make real and to establish thresholds of truth for the objects that they purport only to observe.

The Introduction locates transparency in the global governance of agriculture and mineral supply chains. It proposes an analytical focus on the mediations of transparency to tackle the paradox of transparency, a process of mediation that incorrectly understands itself to be a process of disintermediation. This helps to investigate transparency beyond the normative and substantive assessment of its implementation. Rather than assuming that transparency is itself transparent, we ask: What are the technological practices, material qualities, and institutional standards producing transparency? How is transparency standardized, regimented by “ethical” and “responsible” businesses, or valued by traders and investors, from auction rooms to sustainability reports? Acknowledging that transparency is a global value, we question how transparency projects materially organize and semiotically regiment the global production and circulation of commodities across local settings. Focusing on moments and processes of mediation toward disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth, we introduce how the chapters render transparency observable across sites, actors, institutions, and technologies.

In exploring the politics of corporate versus small-scale mining of rubies and the ongoing struggles over a potentially enormous rare earth element (REE) deposit, this chapter hinges upon a critical analysis of transparency, opacity, and the politics of sovereignty in a country that is increasingly framed as a synecdoche for climate change in this century. Recent decades have seen the growth of two emergent forms in the international aid industry: (1) transparency and accountability initiatives (TAIs) that endeavor to bring aid organizations in line with standard expectations around their operations; and (2) modest, small-scale do-it-yourself (DIY) aid projects that emerge from and depend on trusting relationships between benefactors and beneficiaries. This chapter considers the ambiguous coexistence of these forms, drawing from ethnographic research with a small-scale healthcare project in Madagascar to illustrate how DIY aid can be effective (for better or worse) despite operating outside the purview of TAIs.

In the framework of the common objective of this volume, this chapter focuses on the technological element –expressed in AI– which is usually part of the definition of remote work. This chapter discusses how AI tools shape the organization and performance of remote work, how algorithms impact remote workers rights and how trade unions and workers can harness these powerful instruments to improve working and living conditions. Three hypotheses are considered. First, that AI systems and algorithmic management generate a de facto deepening of the subordinate position of the worker. Second, that this process does not represent technological determinism but instead the impact of human and institutional elements. And finally, that technological resources usually are more present in remote work than in traditional work done at the workplace. These hypotheses and concerns are addressed in several ways: by contextualizing the issue over time, through a multi-level optic centered on the interactions of different levels of regulation, by examining practical dimensions and finally by exploring the implications for unions and worker agency.