Share Your Thoughts on NRGI's New Strategy

Dear friends and colleagues,

I write to you at an exciting juncture for the Natural Resource Governance Institute: we’re formulating our 2020-2025 strategy. At NRGI, we recognize that the achievement of our mission is possible only through the collective efforts of our advisers, partners and friends around the world. We are therefore keen to leverage your experience, perspective and feedback as we finalize the new strategy.

Our mission is to help people in resource-rich countries benefit from their natural resources, while also helping them to mitigate the harms that extraction can bring.

Concretely, this means that we assist countries in getting a good deal for their resources, and then help to ensure that the resulting revenues are managed for the benefit of citizens, including future generations. Acknowledging the realities of climate change, we will also expand our support to resource-rich countries embracing the energy transition. And finally we will work to address the barriers to resource governance that arise due to corruption and state capture. These four areas of work constitute the interrelated pillars of our new strategy, which you can access here.

Our draft strategy elaborates on these pillars, describes some shifts in our geographical focus, and details how our work on many topics—from state-owned enterprises to the “implementation gap” between laws and enforcement—will evolve.

Because the extractive sector is a highly politicized space where economic, financial and political considerations intersect, our strategy directs us to consider more than ever the nuances of political economy, and within it, the interrelated realities of state capture, high level corruption and closing civic space. Building on significant gains in disclosures in extractives over the past decade, we will both focus on the sector’s remaining areas of opacity and traverse beyond transparency to complementary areas, drawing on our leading-edge analysis and data work.

We will also deepen our engagement with influential actors such as extractive companies and investors, influential states like China, and international financial institutions. We will hone and adapt the technical assistance we provide, and build demand for accountability.

We will deepen our focus on the countries where we work, and move away from the country classification we call “limited engagement.” Instead we will complement our main country programs with responsive engagement deployed through regional offices.

And finally, we will double down on our work with our local partners and continue to build alliances across stakeholders to affect and sustain change. The critical role of an informed and influential civil society, particularly in the context of closing civic space, continues to be at the heart of what we do.

My colleagues and I at NRGI have been energized by the vibrant discussions that have led us to this draft, and we hope you find it inspiring as well. We would greatly appreciate any input you care to share with us, whether on the big picture or the granular details. Please do so by writing to us at NRGI@resourcegovernance.org by 28 October, using the subject line “Strategy feedback.”

Best regards,

Daniel Kaufmann
President and CEO