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

Over 100 civil society members met at the end of the OGP meeting to discuss strengthening the partnership both in-country and internationally.

News Article ~ 30 April 2012

In March, RWI held its first IKAT-U.S. workshop, linking Southeast Asian CSOs focused on the oil and mining industries.

Blog ~ 10:35, 24 April 2012

RWI and local partners held a workshop to discuss inputs to three proposed petroleum bills.

Blog ~ 10:45, 30 March 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

Community environmental concerns in the U.S. and Peru have slowed or stopped large-scale projects this year.

Blog ~ 13:05, 22 November 2011

The EITI has just released an amended version of its new 2011 rules, now available for download.

Blog ~ 9:22, 18 November 2011

This September, amid heated debate, RWI and AFIEGO held two workshops on Uganda's new oil bill.

Blog ~ 7:57, 15 November 2011
Revenue Watch convenes 70 members of parliament, activists and journalists to share knowledge on oil and mineral management.
News Article ~ 28 October 2011

Revenue Watch cordially invites you to the release of Enforcing the Rules, a new study of monitoring in the mining industries, on 9 November.


News Article ~ 27 October 2011

This month, RWI welcomed an important new actor in Ghanaian oil governance: the Public Interest and Accountability Committee.

Blog ~ 7:58, 25 October 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
As Tanzania works toward validation as an EITI country, local members of civil society, the media and a parliamentary representative gathered in Dar es Salaam for a series of Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) training and strategy sessions organized by the Revenue Watch Institute, in collaboration with the Policy Forum of Tanzania and with logistical support from Norwegian Church Aid—Tanzania office. The first event was an informal training and coordination session held on January 20 for the civil society members of the Tanzania EITI Multi-Stakeholder Group (MSG)
News Article ~ 26 January 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
On June 16, 2009, citizen leaders and politicians gathered in Lima as a new process was announced for public dialogue on the development of the Amazon region. A new arrival in Lima would find it hard to imagine that the parties gathered and smiling for a photograph today were two weeks ago engaged in an all out confrontation that would lead to the death of at least 34 policemen and native activists, leave the country highly polarized and seriously damage the democratic regime.
News Article ~ 25 June 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
One month of massive rallies and protests. Rivers interrupted by chains of canoes, central roads and even provincial and regional airports occupied by indigenous protesters. Pumping station shutdowns blocking the flow of oil to refineries and export stations and threatening to disrupt both national energy supplies and critical exports. A state of emergency across the entire Amazon region, with some constitutional rights suspended and the Army and the Navy poised to intervene in order to restore order and maintain the flow of Peru's precious black gold. After weeks of silence, a roundtable arranged for negotiations between the executive and the indigenous leadership.
News Article ~ 15 May 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
Though Halliburton made history recently when the company and its former subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) agreed to the largest corruption settlement ever paid by a U.S. company under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)—$579 million—their historic guilty plea is only the latest in a string of high-level bribery cases involving payments from multinationals to secure contracts in Nigeria and elsewhere around the globe.
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