Paper short abstract:

This paper responds to an imperative imposed by ambiguous government-donor entanglement around transparency norms for Ghana’s energy sector future. It argues that such entanglements reflect a structural dynamic in support ofstakeholder capitalism which precludes alternative neoliberal imaginaries.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the growing invocation of transparency norms as the panacea for addressing the challenges associated with natural resource wealth, there is considerable ambiguity about how they shape market regimes in the global south. Through an in-depth account of government-donor entanglements around the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in Ghana’s energy sector, this paper recounts the multiple ways that such ambiguities around transparency reforms condition how various actors negotiate the complex web markets in specific extractive and temporal domains. The main argument suggests that donor engagements around the initiative are bound by a more structural dynamic associated with donors’ parallel role as dispensers of global extractive norms and brokers of an anticipatory and illusory form of stakeholder capitalism. This observation underlines changes in the global architecture for aiding the expansion Western capital by forging an expanded network that precludes alternative imaginaries of neoliberal future.