The Expansion of Financial Regulation to Include Humanitarian Issues:An Examination of the Development of Conflict Mineral Reporting Requirements Using Actor-Network Theory

This study conceptually and empirically examines the establishment of certain financial regulation that resulted from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2009. The crisis led to the establishment of the most extensive change in the regulation of the financial sector since the Great Depression (Green, 2011). During the forty years leading up to the crisis, the United States had engaged in a process of increased deregulation to promote greater efficiency (Yaron & Hendershott, 1998). The belief that reduced regulation would improve efficiency and foster innovation became the mantra of many economic advisers to policy setters, to the point that as the regulations were relaxed there tended to be little fanfare or outrage to changes in regulation policy. This is true with both republican and democrat administrations throughout this period. Since 2000, there have been two major legislative actions that can be viewed as antithetical to the principle of deregulation, the first being Sarbanes-Oxley, which occurred as a result of Enron and other accounting scandals. The second, known as the Dodd-Frank Act, resulted in legislation that bailed out various sectors of the economy and fundamentally changed the structure of financial regulation in the United States. Specifically, I examine one part of this regulation related to corporate disclosure of activities that deal with conflict minerals. Within the political debates over regulation of corporate disclosure, an interest in corporate activities in war-torn areas emerged. Ultimately, regulation was adopted that required corporations to disclose operative activities that included mining of minerals in countries affected by political conflict. My research explicates using an actor-network approach, how and why activities in the U.S. political arena led to mandated disclosure of corporate activities dealing with the mining of local mineral deposits eventually referred to as conflict minerals. My findings show that a confluence of unlikely parties found common ground in their assessment of the issues surrounding the mining of conflict minerals and worked together towards the adoption of disclosure regulation that lead to more transparency in corporate reporting of their involvement in commercializing mineral deposits