Transparency is generally seen as a corporate priority and a central attribute for promoting business growth and social morality. From a philosophical perspective, society has experienced a gradual paradigm shift which intensified after the Second World War with the advent of the information era. As a fundamental part of an inescapable, hegemonic capitalist system and given the insistent emphasis on it as a moral imperative, transparency, this book avers, needs to be examined and challenged as to its true governance value in building a sustainable twenty-first century society. Rather than clinging to the fantasy of complete transparency as the only form of accountability, corporate governance is strengthened in this way by practicing true social responsibility, which emerges not from outward-looking compliance but from a deeper place in the corporate psyche through inward-looking contemplation and the development of moral maturity.

While its importance in domestic law has long been acknowledged, transparency has until now remained largely unexplored in international law. This study of transparency issues in key areas such as international economic law, environmental law, human rights law and humanitarian law brings together new and important insights on this pressing issue. Contributors explore the framing and content of transparency in their respective fields with regard to proceedings, institutions, law-making processes and legal culture, and a selection of cross-cutting essays completes the study by examining transparency in international law-making and adjudication.

With 163 authoritative entries providing definitive explanations and critiques of the fundamental principles and practices of corporate governance, this timely Encyclopedia is a comprehensive overview of the economic, political, social, legal and environmental impacts of corporations across the globe.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the critique of contemporary ideology, offering an innovative genealogy of one of its most fundamental discursive manoeuvres: the ideological effacement of mediation. Providing a comprehensive historical revision of media (from the Greeks to the Internet), this book identifies several critical junctures at which the tension between visibility and invisibility has overlapped with conceptions of neutrality—a tension best incarnated in today's use of the word transparency. Then, it traces this term's evolving semantic constellation through a variety of intellectual discourses, exposing it as a key operator in the revaluation of ideals, sensibilities, and modalities of perception that lie at the core of our contemporary attention-based economy.

Transparency in government operations is widely regarded as an important precondition for macroeconomic fiscal sustainability, good governance, and overall fiscal rectitude. Notably, the Interim Committee, at its April and September 1996 meetings, stressed the need for greater fiscal transparency. Prompted by these concerns, this paper represents a first attempt to address many of the aspects of transparency in government operations. It provides an overview of major issues in fiscal transparency and examines the IMF's role in promoting transparency in government operations.

This book critiques the contemporary recourse to transparency in law and policy. This is, ostensibly, the information age. At the heart of the societal shift toward digitalisation is the call for transparency and the liberalisation of information and data. Yet, with the recent rise of concerns such as 'fake news', post-truth and misinformation, where the policy responses to all these phenomena has been a petition for even greater transparency, it becomes imperative to critically reflect on what this dominant idea means, whom it serves, and what the effects are of its power. In response, this book provides the first sustained critique of the concept of transparency in law and policy. It offers a concise overview of transparency in law and policy around the world, and critiques how this concept works discursively to delimit other forms of governance, other ways of knowing and other realities. It draws on the work of Michel Foucault on discourse, archaeology and genealogy, together with later Foucaultian scholars, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler, as a theoretical framework for challenging and thinking anew the history and understanding of what has become one of the most popular buzzwords of 21st century law and governance. At the intersection of law and governance, this book will be of considerable interest to those working in these fields; but also to those engaged in other interdisciplinary areas, including society and technology, the digital humanities, technology laws and policy, global law and policy, as well as the surveillance society.

This Research Handbook offers crucial ethical perspectives on navigating the increasingly complex and contested landscape of contemporary energy law. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it brings together diverse scholarship and expertise from academia, international organizations, legal practice and the judiciary to address wide-ranging issues linking energy and law to ethical drivers such as wealth, peace and war, development, climate change, and use and abuse of natural resources.