Transparency for Whom? Information Disclosure and Power in Global Environmental Governance

Information disclosure is the most obvious manifestation of the transparency turn in global governance, as evident from a growing uptake of environmental disclosure practices by countries, corporations and international organizations. Any analytic examination of environmental disclosure measures needs to grasp their relation to wider configurations of political and economic authority. Highlighting these relations of power reveals that transparency measures do not necessarily overcome asymmetries in information access, and may even exacerbate them.