The employer provided everything – wages, housing, post office, parks, canteens. Such a model of the “company town,” where a single corporation dominates in multiple capacities as employer, landlord, service provider, and quasi-regulator over a dwelling area, has endured across borders and time. The term can portray textile mills in eighteenth-century England or coal and steel towns in early twentieth-century America just as fittingly as it does today’s network of “supply chain cities” that span East and Southeast Asia and beyond. This chapter studies Inter-Asia’s supply chain cities – in particular, manufacturing sites in East and Southeast Asia. More than physical spaces, these sites represent a form of legal entrepôt, created by law and capable of shaping laws and norms through diverse pathways, including regulatory fragmentation and coordinated advocacy. In comparison with another gilded-age moment of industrial development – early twentieth-century United States – these modern company towns exemplify the uniqueness of Inter-Asia’s corporate forms, exercise of power, and regional integration.

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.

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).

As digital technologies for tracking and tracing mineral commodities continue to expand, this chapter evaluates the role of blockchain-inspired systems and the organizations promoting digital certification technologies in mineral supply chain management. Drawing on research conducted in the cobalt mines of Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in mining sites affiliated with De Beers’ GemFair program in Sierra Leone, the chapter explores two key themes. First, it examines how transparency shapes both cobalt –an essential component for enhancing lithium battery performance – and diamonds – an emblem of hyper-consumption – within the broader digital transformation of the extractive industries. Second, it considers this digital turn as an effort to establish disintermediated trust in certification mechanisms formerly reliant on third-party verification. The chapter argues that, while digital transparency is presented as the pinnacle of technological accountability, it simultaneously operates through practices of concealment.

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.

This chapter is devoted to understanding how the main ideas in graph theory and combinatorics optimization can assist insight-driven problem solving, and thereby, create public impact. The reader sees how such ideas have laid the foundation for apps such as Google Maps and how they are being used to improve our understanding of social networks, design transportation networks, create efficiency schedules for sports events, enhance cryptosystems, and improve the efficiency of supply chains. The reader also learns how analytics scientists have been able to learn from the amazing ability of nature in problem solving (swarm intelligence) and use this to develop effective insight-driven problem solving approaches that can yield powerful insights in addressing complex societal problems.

A global resurgence of industrial policymaking has been evident in low-carbon industries. These sectors – renewable energy, battery storage, and electric vehicles, among others – have seen levels of state intervention rarely witnessed outside of late economic development. But because of China’s dominant position in manufacturing such products, industrial policies for clean energy industries have been accompanied by calls for a reshoring of manufacturing, including in the United States, which is examined in this chapter. While such reshoring may be politically expedient, it presents obstacles to global emissions reductions. First, calls for reshoring likely understate the extent to which the world must rely on Chinese manufacturing capacity for clean energy technologies, until alternative supply chains are established elsewhere. Second, these competitive approaches to industrial policymaking put government measures in explicit tension with the need for global collaboration to meet transnational decarbonization goals. The politicization of clean energy industrial policies may yield short-term political successes but risks long-term instability on emissions reductions and decarbonization.

Modern slavery is an amalgam of legal concepts defined in international law united by a shared characteristic – they are all forms of unfree labour: one person deprives another person of their freedom for profit. The introduction explains how unfree labour involving migrant workers and supply chains is particularly troublesome for states to govern because these transnational vectors do not fit within the ‘default’ territorial format of legal jurisdiction and, thus, challenge traditional ideas of state sovereignty. It treats modern slavery laws, which combine international, national, and (sometimes) regional laws, as an example of transnational law and shows how, in this context, the nation state is but one among an assemblage of governance actors. It develops a multidimensional conception of jurisdiction to explore the transnational legal governance of unfree labour and to illustrate how modern slavery laws reconfigure traditional understandings of sovereignty.

The ILO seized on the reference to ‘forced labour’ in the definition of human trafficking in the UN protocol to carve out a prominent role as a key knowledge producer in the global antislavery governance network. This chapter describes how the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention treats consent as the mark of free labour. Despite this narrow understanding, it argues that, by diagnosing forced labour as a problem resulting from the failure of labour market regulation, the ILO’s prescription extends well beyond unfree labour. It also explains how the traditional territorial format of the ILO’s governance authority, which is rooted in a national sovereignty, makes it difficult to regulate forced labour associated with international migration and global supply chains. The ILO’s biggest challenge: to persuade the employers’ organisation, which along with states and trade unions are the ILO’s constituents, to agree to a convention to govern global supply chains.

Focusing on the role of the Australian charitable foundation Walk Free, an organisation connected to the faith-based abolitionist movement, this chapter traces the emergence of a global antislavery governance network and explores the role of philanthrocapitalists and public–private partnerships in it. It shows how Walk Free established an ethical business alliance that portrays slavery in global supply chains as resulting from market failure and depicts the control large transnational corporations have over their supply chains as an antidote to the limits of state sovereignty. Walk Free and the global antislavery governance network advocates for market-based solutions to the problem of modern slavery – such as supply chain transparency and mandatory human rights due-diligence legislation – that enlist transnational corporations located in the Global North to enforce international legal standards against contractors located primarily in the Global South. This chapter illustrates how scale and governance interact in ways that reconfigure sovereignty and shore up neoliberal capitalism.

This chapter explains how modern slavery figured in a revitalised vision of British global sovereignty as EU membership was under threat. The Coalition Government assembled an elite policy network and forged a bipartisan consensus in favour of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Although primarily carceral, the act also required large corporations to disclose their efforts to rid their supply chains of slavery. Part of the Conservative government’s antislavery agenda, the Immigration Act 2016 pulled labour regulation further towards criminal law. As home secretary (2010–2016) and prime minister (2016–2019), Theresa May positioned the United Kingdom as a critical actor in the global antislavery governance network and fashioned the United Kingdom’s fight against modern slavery as a key plank in her vision of Global Britain. After May’s resignation, the pandemic, and Brexit, the Conservative government came to treat victims of modern slavery as if they were illegal migrants undeserving of human rights.