RWI Contract Transparency Fellowship

A meaningful revenue transparency initiative leads to monitoring by local communities, continuing efforts to eradicate corruption, and ultimately to a reduction in poverty. This comprehensive approach requires more than the publication of payments by companies and receipts by countries. If citizens are to know whether such payments and receipts reflect a fair deal, the contracts on which they are based must be made transparent as well. Unfortunately, the widespread use of confidentiality clauses often protects oil, gas, and mineral contracts from this much-needed disclosure.

Revenue Watch is actively engaged in an international effort to promote greater contract transparency, through both research and advocacy. To expand the research on contract transparency, RWI has sponsored a fellowship at the Human Rights Institute of Columbia University Law School to undertake a comparative study on regulatory and contractual restraints on transparency in order to better understand the balance of interests surrounding such constraints. The focus of the fellowship is a systematic examination of the extractive industry's confidentiality practices and limits on disclosure of natural resource contracts.

The project undertook a comparative study of existing contracts, library and desk research, field research and extensive interviews of those closely involved in contracting processes. It also generated case studies of selected contract and agreements with varying degrees of transparency. The resulting knowledge is helping to promote an informed and nuanced conversation on extractive industry contracts among home and host governments, investors, banks and civil society. The inquiry extends beyond the text of contracts themselves to assess conditions that limit access and transparency, variations in business practices, effects of local laws, the role of banks and international financial institutions and the relationship to anti-bribery legislation.

The study was led by Susan Maples, under the supervision of Professor Peter Rosenblum, Director of the Human Rights Clinic. The project involved both documentary and field research, in addition to action-oriented engagement and capacity-building with RWI partners and other NGOs and stakeholders concerned with these issues.  In 2009, the two published the results of their research in a Revenue Watch book, Contracts Confidential: Ending Secret Deals in the Extractive Industries.

Following this publication, the project will focus on dissemination; further research and analysis of extractive contracts; research on best practices in connection with parliamentary access and influence in the contracting process; a civil society guide for analysis across the value chain; contract analysis capacity building modules; a contracts database; a concept note on a contract negotiation facility; law and policy assistance to national mineral policy reforms; collaboration on country research; a policy paper and academic article on post-conflict resource management; and a campaign legal brief for contract transparency.

Contract disclosure is a centerpiece of RWI’s own advocacy platform, as well as PWYP International’s and that of our local partners in producing countries. RWI has also supporting the Publish What You Pay coalition in its efforts to embed contract disclosure requirements in US and international legislation. Fulfillment of the public’s right to access these contracts (or at least provisions affecting the public interest) will help inform citizens how much their government is supposed to receive, which can then be compared with how much the government actually receives. The fellowship for 2007-2008 has made significant steps in understanding the workings of confidentiality and in identifying critical problems resulting from lack of transparency. The research conducted provides a critical policy and advocacy platform to demonstrate how greater transparency can and should become the norm. RWI hopes to continue the fellowship program with the Human Rights Clinic in the coming years.

Find more information on the activities of the Human Rights Institute of Columbia University Law School or about Contracts Confidential.