Beyond government? Policy and practice in the UK Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical exploration of the changing social world of policy-making in the British central government. It examines new forms of governance that engage international corporations and non-governmental organisations into the making of state policy in the UK. It focuses on a case of one transnationally mobile blueprint for a collaborative anti-corruption policy. Implemented in the Whitehall, this policy, called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), has had profound effects on how government officials exercise their authority.

I describe the EITI as a densely scripted model for policy, organised around an infrastructure of official collective forms, which structurally gear its implementation to consensual deliberation. I suggest that this formal set-up makes necessary constant social work of negotiating difference and maintaining relationships. This leads me to argue that the institutions of the UK EITI not only provide a social and political forum for the negotiation of disclosure rules, but set in motion complex social and political dynamics, and engender epistemic and ethical dilemmas, that simultaneously contributed to, and undermined, policy-making.

My dissertation sheds new light on the increasingly networked, transnational character of ‘domestic’ policy-making. It analyses the political, social and affective dimensions of collaborative policy-making, and explains how ethical and epistemic dilemmas that arise from collaboration of civil servants and their ‘stakeholders’, affect the policy. Opening up the ‘black box’ of the UK EITI in order to recuperate its sociality and understand the agency of official abstractions enabling it, this thesis explores how British civil servants and their expert stakeholders, navigate the terrain of statecraft transformed by their collaboration.

Collaboration, I contend, transforms policy-making because it brings into play social interests, relations, and practices, which are rarely associated with state bureaucracies. At the same time, the ways in which this collaboration is formally organised, restrict the government’s control over the policy that it makes. Affecting policy-making within the government, collaboration results in processes of governance beyond government.