Study title

High-value natural resources, such as oil, gemstones, and minerals, are a source of unusually large rents that, without mitigating safeguards, can provide incentives for crony capitalism, patronage, corruption, and rent-seeking. Since the 1990s, the international community has attempted to improve natural resource revenue governance by promoting transparency in resource rich, developing countries. In fact, transparency has in many cases even become a prerequisite for obtaining investment, debt relief, loans and aid from donors, multinational financing institutions, and extractive industry companies. This project has sought to (1) obtain robust empirical evidence indicating whether transparency initiatives that seek to disclose information on natural resource revenue management to the citizens are attaining their intended objective - namely, better natural resource revenue governance - and (2) to understand the obstacles in the transparency process. The project consists of 2 data sets and qualitative interview transcriptions. This study contains the qualitative interview transcriptions.