Beyond Governments: Making Collective Governance Work, Lessons from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.

Wisor, Scott

Beyond Governments: Making Collective Governance Work, Lessons from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. By Eddie Rich and Jonas Moberg. Sheffield: Greenleaf, 2015.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is one of the most high-profile of the many multistakeholder collaborations that have emerged in recent years to fill gaps in global governance. EITI promised to bring transparency to one of the least transparent sectors in some of the world's least transparent countries. This book, authored by two members of the EITI secretariat, seeks not only to show what has been learned from the EITI experience to date but to make general recommendations for collective governance entrepreneurs. Part 1 introduces and defines collective governance, Part 2 gives a history of EITI, Part 3 attempts to describe how to be a governance entrepreneur, and Part 4 provides recommendations for the future of collective governance.

The book is at its strongest when providing information on how EITI came into existence, how its mandate has changed over time, and how it has attempted to move forward despite the varied interests and preferences of civil society, companies, and governments that take part in the exercise.

Academic readers will be frustrated by the book, as its broadly positive story about EITI lacks evidential or argumentative support and there is little to no consideration of common objections to either multistakeholder initiatives or to transparency. The book is full of platitudes noting the benefits of transparency and making recommendations for how companies or governments ought to act, but there is insufficient consideration of the international political economy in which these voluntary initiatives are meant to change conduct. There is a reason why the extractive industries lack transparency--rent-seeking elites use it to maintain power and wealth while marginalizing other groups and deterring democratic governance. Those elites will exercise greater control over what happens in a country than will any voluntary form of collective governance. Despite these shortcomings, the book's value remains in the insider view of multistakeholder governance that it provides.