Recent Articles

The story of a village near a gold mine in Azerbaijan shows how secrecy can undermine the public trust and the public good.

Blog ~ 4:43, 4 May 2012

Participants from 11 countries learned about managing oil windfalls and shielding economies from price volatility.

News Article ~ 30 April 2012
In her latest collection, "Oil Village," Azeri photographer Rena Effendi exposes the environmental fallout of Azerbaijan's oil boom.
News Article ~ 14 December 2011

Ilgar Mammadov discusses the experience of Eurasia’s veteran transparency advocates.

News Article ~ 22 August 2011
In February, 15 members of civil society convened in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the first Eurasia Regional Extractive Industries Knowledge Hub.
News Article ~ 27 April 2011
Recently, Open Society Institute - Azerbaijan, held a journalistic competition for investigative reports about issues of public finance—a critical area of concern for transparency activists. Three of the award-winning stories are now available in English, covering topics including regional access to water, the challenges to vocational training, and food safety.
News Article ~ 24 June 2010
As 22 countries in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) faced a deadline today for completing their national validation processes, the Revenue Watch Institute called for clear and consistent standards in the Initiative's response to the 20 countries whose validation work unfortunately remains incomplete.
Press Release ~ 9 March 2010
It is widely known that a transparent "company-state" relationship is a key factor for resource-rich countries seeking efficient management of their natural resources to benefit current and future generations. Transparency in the extractive industries makes it possible to track resource development and the use of resource revenues. Governments in resource-rich countries are showing increasing enthusiasm for transparency initiatives, and demonstrating a new readiness to embrace accepted international standards.
News Article ~ 14 September 2009

Civil society groups in Azerbaijan won a crucial victory on June 30, when the Azeri Parliament set aside a raft of dangerous measures before its final vote on a new law regulating the activities of non-governmental organizations. The rejected proposals included a series of new rules that would have effectively crippled the local NGO community, including drastic limitations on foreign funding, escalated registration requirements and new prohibitions on the activity of non-Azeri foundations within the country.

News Article ~ 1 July 2009
Citizen groups in Azerbaijan have decried two new state oil development contracts signed without public notice, in a reversal of years of commendable transparency in oil negotiations. The deals covering four oil fields were made with a relatively unknown company and in the absence of the financial and training provisions that would normally benefit Azerbaijan in such an agreement.
News Article ~ 1 June 2009
When Azerbaijan chose to be the first country to undergo the EITI validation process, it seized the opportunity to lead in global EITI implementation, but it also entered uncharted territory among its EITI peers. In a three-day workshop organized by Revenue Watch in Baku in December, civil society groups and all members of Azerbaijan's EITI working group met to gain a more thorough understanding of the entire validation process, its purpose, the detailed set of indicators used, and the roles of all parties in EITI implementation more broadly.
News Article ~ 9 April 2009
The fourth annual EITI Global Conference in Doha this February will include the first-ever presentation of the EITI Chairman's Awards for "partners who have shown leadership in establishing resource transparency since the last EITI conference."
News Article ~ 27 January 2009
In three post-Soviet countries, a new awareness of the resource curse is growing. Revenue Watch and the Soros Foundation Kazakhstan gathered more than fifty leaders in Kazakhstan last month for conference on efficiency in public spending. Like other oil-rich countries, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia have struggled with the paradox of abundant resource wealth combined with a plague of social ills, but they are now exploring ways to take the transparency movement a step further, and apply the same standard of openness that guides revenue oversight to the question of public spending.
News Article ~ 12 December 2008
Revenue Watch Institute and Soros Foundation-Kazakhstan will hold an international conference, entitled "Efficiency of Public Spending in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia" on November 14-15, 2008. The conference will take place in Astana, Kazakhstan at the Okan Intercontinental Hotel (the Istanbul Hall).
News Article ~ 14 November 2008