Diarmid O'Sullivan, Open Society Foundation research fellow and ex-Global Witness campaigner has released a report today on how transparency helps identify problems in the governance of natural resources, as well as the challenges in ensuring that this transparency leads to accountibility. The report discusses the role the EITI should play in enabling citizens to use data about payments made by companies to governments to 'follow the money'.
Diarmid can be contacted at [email protected]
Introduction
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a global effort to apply the theory that providing citizens with information about the workings of powerful institutions – in this case, the payment of revenues to governments by oil, gas and mining companies – can empower them to better influence the actions of these
institutions in the public interest.
In the last decade, the EITI has become a fairly prominent part of the international community’s answer to the “Resource Curse”, a much-studied set of economic and political problems associated with entrenched poverty, corruption and instability in countries which depend economically on the production of natural resources.
Click here to read the full report; 'What's the Point of Transparency?'