Study: Innovations in EITI Implementation

RWI has commissioned a short policy brief to examine innovations in various countries' implementation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). By providing a concise survey of the ways countries have gone above and beyond the EITI's minimum criteria, RWI hopes to provide civil society and policymakers with an overview of the evolving global landscape for EITI. The brief, which will be published in early 2008, will provide the necessary information to consider undertaking similar innovations.

Since the launch of the EITI in 2002, a wide range of resource-rich countries have endorsed and begun implementing the initiative, with varying degrees of success. Several countries have produced EITI reports and more are expected to report their progress in the coming months. The quality and completeness of the initial reports has varied greatly from country to country, but these and future reports will ultimately be judged and reconciled by new validation mechanisms established in late 2006 by EITI's Board of Directors.

Even before this standardization takes effect, a review of the processes and reporting methods in adopting countries reveals several important innovations, which in turn offer lessons and potential examples for other countries implementing EITI.

While EITI has a set of established minimum criteria that countries must satisfy to qualify as implementing or ‘compliant' countries, many countries have chosen to go beyond these minimum criteria and incorporate additional forms of disclosure—such as disaggregated reporting, sub-national reporting, voluntary corporate contributions reporting, templates that incorporate not only upstream but also downstream revenues, and the introduction of EITI into statutory law.