This overview includes sources of information for analysis and research by members of parliament, parliamentary and caucus staff in improving the management of extractive industries. It will be updated on a regular basis. For any questions, comments and suggestions please contact: Femke Brouwer, NRGI parliamentary capacity development officer, at [email protected]

Information categories
Overview of extractive policy issues
Parliamentary law-making and oversight of extractives
Oil and mining data
Allocation of rights and contracts
Fiscal regimes
State-owned enterprises
The EITI standard
Revenue management
Public financial management
Local content
Web-based platforms
Trainings

Overview of extractive policy issues

PUBLICATIONS

• NRGI readers on The Resource Curse, The Natural Resource Charter Decision Chain, The Oil and Gas Industry, The Mining Industry and Measurement and Assessment of Natural Resource Governance.
• Andrew Bauer and Juan Carlos Quiroz, Handbook of Global Energy Policy, Chapter 15 on Resource Governance (ed. Andreas Goldthau, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). This chapter examines the steps necessary for transforming extractive resource wealth into well-being and stability. Specifically, it defines resource governance and briefly diagnoses the reasons why countries rich in natural resources tend to perform below potential and describes specific policies that resource-rich countries can implement to take full advantage of their resources.
• Rick Van der Ploeg, Natural Resources: Curse or Blessing?, CESifo, working paper 3125, 2010. This paper examines a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources.
• Richard Dobbs et al., Reverse the curse: Maximizing the potential of resource-driven economies, McKinsey Global Institute 2013. This report lays out a new growth model to transform the potential resource windfall into long-term prosperity, drawing on successful approaches that some resource-driven countries have employed.
• Christian O.H. Wolf, The Petroleum Sector Value Chain, World Bank Group 2009. This publication briefly describes the key constituent activities of the petroleum sector following a so-called industry value chain. It also presents some of the key policy decisions associated with the different stages of the value chain.
• The Role of Mining in National Economies, International Council on Mining and Metals, October 2014, 2nd edition. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the contribution mining makes to national economies for sustainable development and poverty reduction.
• Valerie Marcel, ed., Guidelines for Good Governance in Emerging Oil and Gas Producers, Chatham House 2013. A review of common challenges facing emerging producer countries in the phases of exploration, recent discoveries and early production. The aim of these guidelines is to promote effective decisions about the structure and rules of the petroleum sector in a context of low institutional and sector capacity.

 

TOOLS

• The Natural Resource Charter is a set of principles to guide governments' and societies' use of natural resources, so these economic opportunities result in maximum and sustained returns for a country's citizens. It outlines tools and policy options designed to avoid the mismanagement of diminishing natural riches, and ensure their ongoing benefits.
• The Extractive Industries Source Book identifies key levers and provides case studies and resources for making a success of the oil, gas and mining industries – from the standpoint of the public good. Key policy areas covered include: sector policy and law, contract and regulation; sector organization and administration; fiscal design; revenue management; transparency and accountability; and finally sustainability in terms of environmental and social management and the linkages of these activities to broader impacts across the economy.
• The Resource Governance Index measures the quality of governance in the oil, gas and mining sectors of 58 countries. The index assesses the quality of four key governance components: institutional and legal setting; reporting practices; safeguards and quality controls; and enabling environment. It also includes information on three special mechanisms used commonly to govern oil, gas and minerals—state-owned companies, natural resource funds and subnational revenue transfers.

 

WEBSITE

• EITI country reports contain data on revenues, production, and often labor statistics. Reports are usually published annually and include data from companies and government.
• The Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Resource Centre contains a wide variety of information, including press releases, publications and reports, and news stories.

 

Parliamentary law-making and oversight of extractives

PUBLICATIONS

• Parliamentary law-making and oversight of the extractive sector, NRGI 2015. This is a series of five briefings on extractives designed for members of parliament outlining key concepts, parliamentary strategies and questions for the improvement of parliamentary law-making and oversight of the oil, gas and mining sectors.
• Parliamentary Oversight of the Extractive Industries Sector, World Bank 2010. This document outlines the role parliaments can play, describing the stages of the extractive industries value chain, including the link to the national budget, with possible action steps for members of parliament for each stage. Through these learning modules, members of parliaments and their staff can identify strengths and weaknesses in government’s extractive industries policy and how to make the extractive sector more development-oriented.

 

Oil and mining data

DATABASES

• The International Energy Agency has a comprehensive set of maps, graphs and charts displaying energy (oil, gas, coal, renewables etc.) production, consumption, imports, flows etc. in a variety of interactive graphical formats on an individual country level.
• The United States Geological Survey publishes country profiles on their website that provide a summary and analysis of general geological information. Mineral-specific analysis also provides a useful background on extraction norms and trends.

 

Allocation of rights and contracts

PUBLICATIONS

• How to understand mining contracts, Open Oil, ISLP, VCC and NRGI, 2014. This book highlights strong contract clauses and explores how others could be improved. The publication goes beyond legal considerations to explore policy questions and company interests underlying contract provisions—issues that are crucial for understanding and negotiating contracts, and for monitoring their enforcement.
• Oil Contracts: How to read and understand them, Open Oil 2012. This book explains how to read the contracts which govern the oil industry roughly follows a similar structure as the guide on oil contracts (see above)
• The law firm Allen and Overy has compiled two guides for common terms in oil, gas and mining contracts, along with a wide range of information about the types of clauses used. The two guides respectively cover the mining sector and the oil and gas sector.
• Peter Rosenblum and Susan Maples, Contracts Confidential, NRGI 2009. This report delves into government and private sector objections to contract disclosure and, through an analysis of over 150 contracts, concludes that the vast majority of clauses in contracts can be disclosed with no adverse consequences on governments or investors. It also outlines how citizens can better confront the challenge of secret deals.
• Silvana Tordo, Petroleum Exploration and production Rights: allocation strategies and design issues, World Bank, working paper 179, 2010. This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of various practices used by petroleum producing countries to allocate petroleum exploration and production (E&P) rights and draws conclusions about the optimal design of E&P allocation systems.
• NRGI parliamentary briefing on Promoting Transparency and Monitoring of Contracts
• NRGI readers on Legal Framework, Granting Rights to Natural Resources and Contract Transparency

 

TOOLS

• Resource contracts is a searchable repository of over 350 petroleum, mineral and land contracts covering 54 countries.
• The Open Oil contract repository provides access to most oil contracts that are in the public domain.

 

Fiscal regimes

PUBLICATIONS

• Carlo Cottarelli, Fiscal Regimes for Extractive Industries: Design and Implementation, IMF 2012. This paper underpins the recent IMF approach to resource revenue taxation in its technical assistance portfolios, based on maximizing revenue generation. It contains useful illustrations and benchmarks of average effective tax rates.
• Jack Calder, Administering Fiscal Regimes for Extractive Industries: A Handbook, IMF and WB 2014. This handbook fills a gap by developing important considerations and recommendations for tax administration that are specific to the resource sector and its fiscal policy, including capacity, organization and administrative issues.
• Frian Aarsnes and Olav Lundstøl, The Case for Windfall Taxes: A Guide to Optimal Resource Taxation, Publish What You Pay Norway 2013. This paper provides interesting civil society perspectives on good resource taxation, with a focus on closing loopholes in fiscal regimes and calibrating a sound and balanced tax system. The distinction between resource rent taxes and windfall taxes is well detailed, with a bias of the authors for windfall taxes.
• NRGI parliamentary briefing on Getting a Good Deal from Oil, Gas and Mining
• NRGI reader on Fiscal Regime Design

 

TOOLS

• Corporate income taxes, mining royalties and other mining taxes: A summary of rates and rules in selected countries, Price waterhouse Coopers 2012. This is an example of a survey that provides the reader with general descriptions of fiscal regimes applying to various mining jurisdictions. This publication summarizes the income taxes, mining taxes and mining royalties for 22 countries.
• Global Oil and Gas Tax Guide, Ernst and Young 2014. This guide summarizes the oil and gas corporate tax regimes in 84 countries and can be used for comparative research and general reference.
• Numerous contracts are available in the Resource Contracts repository, where you can compare the fiscal terms between different agreements.

 

DATABASES

• The Africa Mining Legislation Atlas is a database of different fiscal regimes in Africa.
• The Negotiations Portal aims to address the information-sharing and coordination gap by improving the accessibility and visibility of useful tools, resources as well as technical support available to assist governments in the investment process.

 

State-owned enterprises

PUBLICATIONS

• Patrick Heller, Paasha Mahdavi and Johannes Schreuder, Reforming National Oil Companies: Nine Recommendations, NRGI 2014. NRGI surveyed 12 national oil companies (NOCs) from diverse geographical and operational contexts to distill practical steps that policy-makers can take to make their countries' NOCs more effective and more accountable to governments and to citizens.
• Valerie Marcel, ed., Guidelines for Good Governance in Emerging Oil and Gas Producers, Chatham House 2013. A review of common challenges facing emerging producer countries in the phases of exploration, recent discoveries and early production. The aim of these guidelines is to promote effective decisions about the structure and rules of the petroleum sector in a context of low institutional and sector capacity.
• Patrick Heller and Valerie Marcel, Institutional Design in Low-Capacity Oil Hotspots, NRGI, 2012. This paper looks at the institutional design of NOCs of new or prospective oil producing countries. It offers five research propositions on the connections between country capacity and effective oil-sector institutional design to allow governments to more effectively structure decisions about how to manage state-owned oil companies.
• Copper Giants: Lessons from State-Owned Mining Companies in the DRC and Zambia, NRGI, 2015. This study examines the governance of state-owned ventures in the mining sector and tools that governments can use to promote effective performance and accountability. The publication covers country studies from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which NMCs have played a central role in the management of large deposits of copper, cobalt and other minerals.
• NRGI parliamentary briefing on State Participation in Oil, Gas and Mining
• NRGI readers on State Participation and State-Owned Enterprises and Commodity Trading

 

TOOLS

• Analysis and Comparisons of State-Owned Companies in the Resource Governance Index.

 

The EITI standard

PUBLICATIONS

• The EITI Standard, 2013.The Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Standard is the global transparency standard for improving governance of natural resources. The standard contains the set of requirements that countries need to meet in order to be recognized as first an EITI Candidate and ultimately an EITI Compliant country.
• Femke Brouwer, Laury Haytayan and Luke Smitham, EITI: A Parliamentary Tool for Extractive Sector Governance in Liberia and Yemen, NRGI 2014. This case study presents lessons learned from parliamentary engagement in the EITI process in Liberia and Yemen and offers strategies for other countries seeking to involve parliamentarians in similar ways.
• The EITI guide for legislators, NDI and NRGI 2009. While outdated, this publication provides useful guidance for members of parliament on how to use EITI reports to effectively hold governments accountable. For updated information and guidance on the EITI, please consult the EITI standard.
• NRGI parliamentary briefing on EITI and Parliamentary Oversight of Oil, Gas and Mining Revenues
• NRGI readers on The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and Transparency Mechanisms and Movements

 

TOOLS

• Using EITI for Policy Reform: Guide to the EITI Standard, NRGI 2014. This guide is intended to help stakeholders identify how the EITI Standard links to the policy objectives that are most relevant to their country’s extractive sector, and develop disclosure methods that reflect best practice and generate information of maximum value to national reform and oversight processes.
• EITI reports: results and analysis, NRGI 2013. This webpage presents research on the quality of recent EITI reports and extracted key pieces of revenue data. Use the tools here to analyze revenue and payment figures for all EITI reports including data up to 2011, and compare report data and report quality across all 48 countries.

 

DATABASE

• Marie Lintzer and Chris Perry, NRGI, Unlocking EITI Data for Meaningful Reform, NRGI 2015. This dataset draws information from 223 EITI reports up to February 2015 into a searchable database. An interactive data tool helps the user compare extractive revenues with total government revenues, with the estimated value of production, and with the government’s overall spending on health, education, and aid receipts.

 

WEBSITE

• The EITI webpage contains information on what the EITI Standard is, provides links to data of the extractive sector in all 48 EITI countries, including reports and guidance documents on how to implement the EITI.

 

Revenue management

PUBLICATIONS

• Andrew Bauer and Malan Rietveld, Rules-based Investment for Natural Resource Funds, NRGI 2014. This policy brief outlines how a fund’s investment rules can contribute in a meaningful way to the governance, transparency and accountability of a natural resource fund (NRF) and promote understanding and agreement between oversight bodies, the fund’s management and members of society.
• Paul Collier and Anthony Venables, Resource Revenue Management in Developing Countries: Economic Principles and Policy Rule, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies 2009. This paper addresses the efficient management of natural resource revenues in capital-scarce developing economies.
• NRGI Parliamentary briefing on Managing and Spending Natural Resource Revenues
• NRGI readers on Revenue Management and Distribution and Fiscal Rules and Natural Resource Funds.

 

TOOLS

• The NRGI-CCSI Natural Resource Funds Tool is a world-wide survey of NRFs looking at their management, investments, transparency, and accountability to the public, as well as the fiscal rules that govern them.
• The SWF Institute provides a number of rankings of Sovereign Wealth Funds, including an index of SWF transparency.

 

DATABASE

• The IMF World Economic Outlook is published in April and October each year and includes a database with a variety of economic indicators covering country and regional levels.

 

WEBSITES

• The International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds (IFSWF) is a voluntary group of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), which meet, exchange views on issues of common interest, and facilitate an understanding of the Santiago Principles and SWF activities. The website contains case studies of SWFs, as well as guidance documents.
• NRGI’s revenue management and economic diversification web pages contain outlines of NRGI’s work in these areas and links to useful articles and publications.

 

Public financial management

PUBLICATION

• Rebecca Simson, Natasha Sharma and Imran Aziz, A guide to public financial management literature for practitioners in developing countries, Overseas Development Institute 2011. This guide is prepared for people seeking to deepen their knowledge on public financial management (PFM) in developing countries. It caters to the needs of newcomers to the field who want to familiarize themselves with the introductory PFM literature, as well as practitioners broadening their PFM knowledge beyond their own area of expertise.

 

TOOL

• The Open Budget Survey is the only independent, comparative, and regular measure of budget transparency, participation, and oversight in the world. It is the culmination of analyses conducted by a global network of hundreds of researchers over a two-year period.
• The Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability framework (PEFA) portal contains links to public assessment reports and the most recent status of national and subnational PEFA assessments in any given country as of December 23, 2014. The entire data set is updated on an annual basis. Data on public assessments is updated regularly.

 

WEBSITE

• The Governance and Social Development Resource Centre’s Public Financial Management gateway is designed to point readers to the most useful, credible and up-to-date resources available on the internet in relation to public financial management and accountability in a development context.

 

Local content

PUBLICATIONS

• Anna Maria Estevez and Mary-Anne Barclay, Enhancing the benefits of local content: integrating social and economic impact assessment into procurement strategies, pp. 205 – 215, 2011. The paper recommends the development of a local procurement strategy and offers a step-by-step process for applying a local procurement social risks and opportunities assessment to local procurement planning.
• Anna Maria Estevez, Bruce Conye and Anna Moreno, Enhancing the subnational benefits of the oil, gas and mining sectors, NRGI 2013. This paper offers guidance on designing and implementing local content initiatives in the oil, gas and mining sectors to ensure economic sustainability within producing regions.
• Silvana Tordo et al., Local Content Policies in the Oil and Gas Sector, World Bank 2013. This paper describes policies and practices meant to foster the development of economic links from the petroleum sector, as adopted by a number of petroleum-producing countries both within and outside of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
• NRGI Reader on Local Content.

 

TOOL

• The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment has conducted a survey of the local content frameworks of a number of countries, identifying the key legislation, regulations, contracts and non-binding policies and frameworks dealing with local content issues in the mining and petroleum sectors.

 

WEBSITE

• The Local Content Solutions website contains papers on local content policy and information on their training programs.

 

Web-based platforms

• GOXI is a web-based platform for dialogue and collaboration serving those actively working on governance issues in the extractive industries.
• ELLA is a knowledge sharing and learning platform on selected economic, environmental and governance issues.

 

Trainings

• The Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) has developed a number of global and regional residential training courses that meet the learning needs of civil society advocates, government officials, journalists, members of parliament and parliamentary staff working toward improving the management of oil, gas and minerals. NRGI's trainings are tailored to the learning styles of adults, with a focus on learning through participants' own experiences, sustained debates and interaction.
• The UNITAR online course on governance of extractive industries discusses basic governance principles, and allows participants to apply these principles to the specific domain of natural resources in general and extractive industries in particular in the context of a practical exercise.
• The Negotiation Portal has a page which lists different organizations that provide training in extractive governance with links to their websites.

 

Last updated October 2015