The translucence of transparency: extractive industry beneficial ownership disclosure as an emerging transparency regime.

Ejiogu, Amanze; Denedo, Mercy; Egbon, Osamuyimen; Lauwo, Sarah

Abstract

This study explores the nature and limits of transparency in the context of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative's beneficial ownership regime. To do this, we draw on Ball's (2009) three transparency metaphors – public value or norm of behaviour, openness, and complexity – to frame our study and conceptualise transparency as an ambiguous and ambivalent concept connoting light and darkness, clarity and opacity. Empirically, we draw on diverse country-level data (supplemented by company-level data to highlight exemplars) from the period between 2013 and 2021. Our findings show how the beneficial ownership regime's intersection with the wider political culture provides a space wherein the nature of transparency and the resultant visibilities and invisibilities are negotiated and contested and eventually compromised. We conceptualise this space as a zone of in-betweenness, or translucence, and represent it as an opacity–transparency continuum. As such, what is revealed is the social construction of translucence – a state in which there is neither full transparency nor complete opaqueness but, rather, something in-between. Our findings also highlight how resistance – in both subtle and confrontational forms –influences placement within this zone of in-betweenness (translucence).

Citation

EJIOGU, A., DENEDO, M., EGBON, O. and LAUWO, S. 2025. The translucence of transparency: Extractive industry beneficial ownership disclosure as an emerging transparency regime. Critical perspectives on accounting [online], 102, article number 102806. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102806

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 10, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Jun 16, 2025
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 20, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 20, 2025
• Journal: Critical perspectives on accounting
• Print ISSN: 1045-2354
• Electronic ISSN: 1095-9955
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 102
• Article Number: 102806
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102806
• Keywords: Extractive industry transparency initiative (EITI); Beneficial ownership; Transparency; Accountability; Translucence; Opacity
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/2885939