Does transparency matter? Evaluating the governance impacts of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in Azerbaijan and Liberia

By Benjamin Sovacool, Nathan Andrews. 2015

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has been sold by its advocates as a badly needed way to enhance access to information in the extractive industries sector and improve government accountability. It has also been lauded as enabling energy companies to demonstrate their responsibility and sustainability, enabling countries to attract more foreign investment, and enabling communities to engage in dialogue with national planners over energy issues. In this paper, we ask: does it work? Do countries adhering to EITI standards actually see selected governance metrics improve? To answer this question, this article first briefly summarizes the history of the EITI and details the hypothetical benefits espoused by its supporters. It then proceeds to “test” these benefits by qualitatively assessing the performance of EITI for the first two countries to achieve candidacy, Azerbaijan and Liberia. The paper finds that while the EITI affirms the salience of reliable information and data about the extractive industries, it is difficult to attribute governance improvements casually to the EITI. Moreover, the EITI reveals an inherent paradox about the virtues of transparency and also underscores that much of the damage from mining and hydrocarbon development is socially and economically unavoidable.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34295f2eca2933dba9f98fb05985867f69311491

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Building and Construction

1. Kweku Adams
2. Dawda Adams
3. Nathan Andrews
4. S. Ullah
5. Benjamin Sovacool
6. Farid Ullah
7. Samir Saidi

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Kweku Adams
2. Dawda Adams
3. Nathan Andrews
4. T. D. Graaf
5. Pervaiz Akhtar
6. S. Ullah
7. Götz Walter
8. Benjamin Sovacool

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. T. D. Graaf
2. Kweku Adams
3. Dawda Adams
4. Pervaiz Akhtar
5. S. Ullah
6. Benjamin Sovacool
7. Samir Saidi
8. Vlado Vivoda

Citations in the corpus

• The role of country-level institutional factors in escaping the natural resource curse: Insights from Ghana (2019, background): “concentration (Corrigan, 2014) including membership of the EITI could help natural resourcerich developing countries to escape the ‘natural resource-curse’ (Van Alstine, 2014; Sovacool and Andrews, 2015; Sovacool et al., 2016; Kasekende et al., 2016).”
• Globalisation, governance, accountability and the natural resource ‘curse’: Implications for socio-economic growth of oil-rich developing countries (2019, background): “Additionally, Sovacool and Andrews (2015) qualitatively assess EITI’s performance of”
• Energy Governance, Transnational Rules, and the Resource Curse: Exploring the Effectiveness of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) (2016, background): “See, as a small sample, Bac (2001), Bastida and Bernardino (2007), Bauhr and Nasiritousi (2012), Kolstad and Wiig (2009), Matisoff (2013) and Sovacool and Andrews (2015).”