Abstract
Transparency is an organizing principle of the norm of good governance. The EU has adopted a number of policies to promote this norm as a way to address corruption and cronyism in the natural resource sector of many countries. On the global scale, the EU supports the standards of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative. At home, the EU Accounting and Transparency Directives make it for EU companies mandatory to report payments to domestic and foreign authorities for oil, gas and timber extraction rights. This norm has been contested from different sides. China argues that economic development precedes good governance, instead of the other way around. Natural resource-rich countries see global standards as an intrusion of their sovereignty. The extractive industry in Western countries claims that national policies could disadvantage them by creating an uneven playing field. The chapter argues that these contestations remained predominantly soft and did not affect the legitimacy of the organizing principle too much. None of the contesters openly challenged the principle of transparency, but they rather tried to reduce its importance or to change the standardized procedures that came from it. As the EU did not waiver, these efforts have so far not been very successfully.
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Notes
- 1.
The Natural Resource Governance Institute is an independent, globally operating NGO.
- 2.
Value realization covers the governance of allocating extraction rights, exploration, production, environmental protection, revenue collection and state-owned enterprises. Revenue management includes national budgeting, subnational resource revenue sharing and sovereign wealth funds. Enabling environment looks at the broader governance context and to what extent it contributes to good natural resource governance (Natural Resource Governance Institute, 2017, p. 7).
- 3.
Participating countries are obligated to provide production data and every batch of diamonds carries a certificate stating that it has not contributed to the funding of an armed rebel group.
- 4.
The section was based on the Energy Security Through Transparency Act of 2009, a bipartisan bill sponsored by the Republican Senator Richard Lugar.
- 5.
France has announced that it wants to join EITI in the future.
- 6.
Country-by-country means that companies have to provide information for every country they operate in, instead of publishing only information at global level. A project is an operational activity, which is governed by a single contract, license, lease, concession or similar legal agreements and form the basis for payment liabilities with a government. If a number of these contracts are interconnected, they are also considered a project (European Union, 2013a). In other words, for a company it is not enough to report that it paid amount X to the government of a country, but it also has to disclose each individual contract.
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Acknowledgements
Martijn C. Vlaskamp thanks the Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral program of the Government of Catalonia’s Secretariat for Universities and Research (Ministry of Economy and Knowledge) for funding (Grant number: 2017-BP-152). Research was also supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation program (grant number 660245). Martijn thanks Carla Perucca for valuable research assistance and Alanna Irving for proofreading this text. The usual attribution of possible faults applies.
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Vlaskamp, M.C. (2020). Good Natural Resource Governance: How Does the EU Deal with the Contestation of Transparency Standards?. In: Johansson-Nogués, E., Vlaskamp, M., Barbé, E. (eds) European Union Contested. Norm Research in International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33238-9_6
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