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This introductory article draws on the contributions to this special issue to consider the implications of a transparency turn in global environmental and sustainability governance. Three interrelated aspects are addressed: why transparency now? How is transparency being institutionalized? And what effects does it have? In analyzing the spread of transparency in governance, the article highlights the broader (contested) normative context that shapes both its embrace by various actors and its institutionalization. I argue that the effects of transparency—whether it informs, empowers or improves environmental performance—remain uneven, with transparency falling short of meeting the ends many anticipate from it. Nonetheless, as the contributions to this issue make clear, transparency has indeed come of age as a defining feature of our current and future politics.

Although transparency is a key concept in the social sciences, it remains an understudied phenomenon in global environmental governance. This paper analyzes effectiveness of 'governance by transparency' or governance by information disclosure as a key innovation in global environmental and risk governance. Information disclosure is central to current efforts to govern biosafety or safe trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Through analyzing the dynamics of GMO-related information disclosure to the global Biosafety Clearing House (BCH), I argue that the originally intended normative and procedural aims of disclosure in this case—to facilitate a GMO-importing country's right to know and right to choose prior to trade in GMOs—are not yet being realized, partly because the burden of BCH disclosure currently rests, ironically, on importing countries. As a result, BCH disclosure may even have market-facilitating rather than originally intended market-regulating effects with regard to GMO trade, turning on its head the intended aims of governance by disclosure.

Although transparency is a key concept of our times, it remains a relatively understudied phenomenon in global environmental politics. The link between transparency and accountable, legitimate and effective governance is assumed, yet the nature and workings of this link require further scrutiny. Transparency via information disclosure is increasingly at the heart of a number of global environmental governance initiatives, termed "governance-by-disclosure" here. The article identifies two assumptions that underpin such governance-by-disclosure initiatives, and calls for comparative analysis of the workings of such assumptions in practice, as a way to illuminate the nature and implications of a transparency turn in global environmental governance and its link to accountable, legitimate and effective governance.