Greenland is an autonomous country that is part of the Danish realm. Having achieved home rule in 1979 and self-rule in 2009, Greenlandic political elites, journalists, Danish politicians, and residents from all walks of life expect full political independence will be declared at some point in the future. Greenland’s economy is supported and buttressed by an annual “block grant” from Denmark of approximately $500 million; both Denmark and Greenland have agreed that independence will be predicated upon the end of the block grant, linked to a concomitantly expanded and dominant resource extraction economy.

In exploring the politics of corporate versus small-scale mining of rubies and the ongoing struggles over a potentially enormous rare earth element (REE) deposit, this chapter hinges upon a critical analysis of transparency, opacity, and the politics of sovereignty in a country that is increasingly framed as a synecdoche for climate change in this century. Recent decades have seen the growth of two emergent forms in the international aid industry: (1) transparency and accountability initiatives (TAIs) that endeavor to bring aid organizations in line with standard expectations around their operations; and (2) modest, small-scale do-it-yourself (DIY) aid projects that emerge from and depend on trusting relationships between benefactors and beneficiaries. This chapter considers the ambiguous coexistence of these forms, drawing from ethnographic research with a small-scale healthcare project in Madagascar to illustrate how DIY aid can be effective (for better or worse) despite operating outside the purview of TAIs.