Transnational Business Governance and the Management of Natural Resources

In the last two decades, the international community has intervened directly to reduce the conflict and corruption that accompany natural resource development in weakly governed states. These efforts converge on the norm of information disclosure by a number of different transnational business governance initiatives. This article examines how the successive failures of public and private efforts led to patterns of convergence and divergence in the transnational governance of the extractive sector. The timing of the effort, combined with variation in industry structure, differences in the targets of information disclosure, and learning over time influence the outcome in each case. This is explored through a comparison of the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Dodd-Frank reforms in the US, and recently adopted due-diligence standards by the OECD, the US, and by industry