The Formal, Financial and Fraught Route to Global Digital Identity Governance

Examining the activities of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) - an intergovernmental organization at the center of global anti-money laundering and counter-the-financing of terrorism governance- this paper advances a two-fold argument. First, the FATF shapes how, where and who is involved in developing key standards of acceptability underpinning blockchain activities. While not itself directly involved in the actual coding of blockchain protocols, the FATF influences the location and type of centralized modes of control. Drawing on the notion of protocological control from media studies, we illustrate how centralized control emerging in global digital identity governance emanates from the global governance of financial flows long considered by international organizations like the FATF. Second, we suggest that governance by blockchains persistently shapes the ability of the FATF to stem illicit international financial flows. In highlighting both the influence of FATF on blockchain governance and blockchain governance on the FATF we draw two strands literature that have been considered separately together in an analysis of the formal, financial and fraught route to global digital identity governance

Enrolling into Exclusion:African Blockchain and Decolonial Ambitions in an Evolving Finance/Security Infrastructure

There is growing debate over whether applications of blockchain and other financial technologies (‘fintechs’) reinforce forms of neo-colonial extraction that perpetuate North–South inequities or help enact decolonial ambitions across the Global South. This paper expands such discussions and contributes to this special issue on ‘fintech in Africa’ by situating emerging African blockchain techno-experimentation within wider international infrastructural relations. We argue that blockchain-based activities in and across the African continent must be understood within those also unfolding in countries that have been subjected to financial sanctions of varying types (China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela) by the European Union, United States, and United Nations. Our analysis traces how blockchain-based applications by sanctioned countries are extending exclusions in novel and existing socio-technical relations. We conclude that blockchain-based experiments are facilitating rather than displacing a colonial finance/security infrastructure

Governing Techno-Futures:OECD Anticipation of Automation and the Multiplication of Managerialism

How do international organisations (IOs) govern the present based on claims about the coming impacts of technological change? Drawing on primary documents and participant observation, this article traces how the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) anticipates automation emanating from the growing integration of blockchain technologies in global governance. We find that promises of radical, rapid, and reckless automation advanced by promoters of Bitcoin and other ‘defiant’ applications of the technology are steered by this IO towards more incremental and carefully managed forms of automation. The OECD relies on two managerialist practices to anticipate “reckless automation” through the promotion of what we identify as “responsible disruption”. In combination, OECD practices of scenario building and shared orientation framework construction deepen and extend managerial forms of global governance today whose technocratic and expert-led nature limits democratic possibilities and perpetuates global inequalities

Imaginary failure:RegTech in finance

The notion of ‘RegTech’ has become a buzzword for applications of emergent technologies to regulatory activities. This paper contextualises and interrogates the novelty of the RegTech phenomenon as expounded in recent years by industry practitioners, regulators and a growing chorus of scholars. Harnessing the notion of ‘imaginary’ from Science and Technology Studies, we identify a particular solutionist vision materialising across public documents from national and international financial regulators, industry organisations, as well as RegTech and consulting firms. We identify two failures of an emerging RegTech imaginary. First, is a dynamism failure in the way RegTech materialises static visions of regulation. Second, is a systems failure as the solutionist RegTech imaginary focuses on narrower, individual problems in finance at the expense of wider changes occurring since the 2007–8 global financial crisis. RegTech, we conclude, reflects continuities with a pre-crisis era and fails to tackle key market and regulatory changes occurring since. Our analysis holds implications for the turn to technological solutions in addressing persistent issues of instability in global financial governance. We point to the need for developing wider imaginaries of technological possibilities for regulation in an increasingly digital world

One pot ‘click’ reactions: tandem enantioselective biocatalytic epoxide ring opening and [3+2] azide alkyne cycloaddition

Halohydrin dehalogenase (HheC) can perform enantioselective azidolysis of aromatic epoxides to 1,2-azido alcohols which are subsequently ligated to alkynes producing chiral hydroxy triazoles in a one-pot procedure with excellent enantiomeric excess.

Finding fault lines in long chains of financial information

IPE has usefully identified numerous contributors to financial crises. Considerably less attention however has been granted to the roles of financial infrastructures, considered in this special issue as the socio-technical systems enabling basic yet crucial financial functions to be carried out, but that tend to be taken for granted and assumed. This article argues that vulnerabilities in information flows enabled through connections between globally dispersed human actors and non-human objects have shaped the types of events triggering crises, how such periods of instability unfold, and their eventual resolution. Building on insights from actor-network theory, we illustrate how fault lines in ‘long chains’ of financial information conditioned three financial earthquakes between the 1980s and the present. Our analysis bridges insights from accounts that tend to separately emphasize material and ideational roots of crises. It also points to the importance of supplementing the stress on quantitative indicators with efforts to identify and address vulnerabilities in the quality of connections between disparate actors and objects that enable or disrupt flows of information facilitating global financial markets

The veil of transparency : blockchain and sustainability governance in global supply chains

This article interrogates the turn towards digital technologies for addressing sustainability challenges in global supply chains. Focusing on the case of blockchains, we assess industry claims that this set of distributed ledger technologies for undertaking, verifying, and publishing digital transactions provides the greater transparency necessary to resolve sustainability challenges. Our central contention is that blockchain-based initiatives to promote sustainability in global supply chains double-down on modes of third-party audit and disclosure governance that have thus far failed to address labour and environmental abuses. The turn towards these digital technologies, we show, extends interlinked processes of managerialization and the spread of ‘audit culture’ in the governance of global supply chains. These tendencies heighten obstacles to enhancing sustainability across global supply chains, exacerbating the very challenges blockchain initiatives are ostensibly meant to address. Worse than not fundamentally addressing sustainability problems, applications of this set of ‘sustech’ render failures to address sustainability abuses more opaque. The technological novelty of blockchain helps to construct what we call a ‘veil of transparency’ over sustainability abuses and marginalities in and across global supply chains

Interrogating technology-led experiments in sustainability governance

Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under‐recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology‐led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under‐recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi‐stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology‐led multi‐stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long‐standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving