Over the past decade, EITI is said to have facilitated reporting on nearly a trillion dollars in revenues from natural resources. Credit: Bigstock

Development groups and corruption watchdogs are applauding landmark new standards adopted Wednesday by an international initiative focused on ensuring greater transparency among oil and mining companies operating particularly in developing countries.

Yet some civil society advocates are also warning that the new standards, agreed ahead of a board meeting of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) being held Thursday and Friday in Sydney, don’t go far enough.

“The EITI needs to keep its bite,” Corinna Gilfillan, an EITI board member and director of the U.S. office of Global Witness, an advocacy group, said following the unveiling of the new standards. “It needs to apply and build on its new rules and be prepared to be a driver rather than a follower of governance reform to avoid diminishing relevance.”

EITI has been in place since 2002, created out of civil society discussions over how resource-rich developing countries can escape the “resource curse” – ensuring that income from their extractives industries is used for public-sector funding rather than risk being siphoned off by corrupt government officials or cronies. Over the past decade, the initiative is said to have facilitated reporting on nearly a trillion dollars in revenues from natural resources.

EITI includes governments, the private sector and civil society, currently covering 39 countries and requiring those members to engage in public reporting of revenues from within their extractives sectors. While most of those members are in Africa, on Wednesday the heads of France and the United Kingdom agreed to become members, following a similar pledge made by the United States in 2011.

Other Western countries engaged with EITI in some respect include Norway, where the EITI secretariat is housed, and Australia. When the U.K. hosts the Group of Eight (G8) rich countries next month, transparency is slated to be a central focus.

While there has been much optimism about the aim and provenance of EITI, recent years have offered increasing evidence that its requirements have not been strong enough. According to a 2011 internal evaluation, compliance with EITI requirements was not necessarily “bring[ing] about fundamental changes” in line with the initiative’s principles.

Evidence of this failure can be seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Although an EITI member, Congo’s government “was able to sell in secret five major mining assets to anonymous shell companies,” according to research by Global Witness. “As a result, the DRC may lose out on around 1.36 billion dollars, twice the country’s health and education budgets.”

In mid-April, the EITI board temporarily suspended Congo, citing a failure to ensure “full disclosure and assurance of the reliability of the figures”. Yet the growing evidence of the EITI standards’ potential ineffectiveness also led to the push for the new rules unveiled Wednesday.

“The new EITI Standard will address a number of the recommendations made [by civil society], including requiring more transparency of state-owned companies and natural resource funds,” Jonas Moberg, head of the EITI international secretariat, told IPS ahead of the Sydney conference.

The standards will now impose significant new reporting requirements on EITI member countries, requiring regular project-to-project details, covering extraction licenses, how those licenses were awarded, and companies involved in the sector. State oil companies, too, will now need to disclose how much product they’re selling.

“The EITI has finally recognised that, when it comes to complex industries, merely disclosing payments is not enough,” Daniel Kaufmann, president of the Revenue Watch Institute, a U.S. watchdog group, said Wednesday. “The new Standard could make EITI more effective in addressing the vast governance challenges facing resource-rich countries.”

Safeguarding relevance

The extractives industry can have a “tremendous impact – good or ill” on a country’s development, Robert F. Cekuta, a U.S. State Department official, said at the EITI conference Wednesday.

“Mismanagement of these resources, as we have seen too many times, can impede economic growth, reduce opportunities for trade and investment, divert critically needed funding from social services and other government activities, and contribute to instability and conflict,” he noted.

“At the same time … proper, sound management of the sector means revenues generated from oil, gas and mining can fuel a country’s economic growth, producing jobs and fostering responsible investments in infrastructure, health, education, and other high-impact sectors, as well as appropriate savings.”

While Cekuta expressed his government’s strong support for the new rules, the U.S. has already passed legislation – known as Section 1504 of the financial regulatory Dodd-Frank Act – that would impose stronger standards on U.S.-listed extractives companies than the new EITI rules would require. The European Union is expected to put in place a similar law next month.

For this reason, some proponents of greater transparency have expressed concern that EITI is losing its pioneering role.

“The EITI’s influence rests on its being seen as a totemic reformers club which governments and companies want to be part of,” Global Witness said following the announcement of the new standards. “This attraction will fade if the initiative is seen to be merely playing catch-up with more dynamic reforms taking place elsewhere.”

The group points in particular to a rollback on civil society calls to require that extractives contracts be publicly disclosed, an obligation that the new standards would merely encourage rather than mandate. Likewise, the new standards will only require that full company ownership information is publicised by 2016.

Global Witness and others are also pushing EITI to ensure that the new reams of data are as user-friendly as possible, in order to encourage collation and analysis by public watchdogs.

Two-tongued interests

Meanwhile, an interesting disconnect has cropped up between events in Sydney and Washington. On the one hand, several of the world’s largest oil companies – including ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron – sit on the EITI board and are thus inferred to be in agreement with the newly revised transparency rules.

On the other hand, these companies are currently part of a lawsuit here attempting to dismantle Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the legislation on which the new EITI standards are mostly closely based.

“Protection of the law is essential for investors to asses a company’s risk and for communities in resource-rich countries to hold governments to account,” Ian Gary, senior policy manager of Oxfam America’s oil, gas and mining programme, said from Sydney.

“This lawsuit is wholly incompatible with the industry’s transparency commitments and support of payment disclosure through [EITI]. It is unacceptable that oil companies should receive reputation benefits by supporting a transparency initiative while at the same time fighting a landmark payment disclosure law in U.S. courts.”

Police accost women protesting against the Kudankulam nuclear plant in India. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS.

For years India’s pro-liberalisation, Congress party-led coalition government chafed at civil society groups getting in the way of grand plans to boost growth through the setting up of mega nuclear power parks, opening up the vast mineral-rich tribal lands to foreign investment and selling off public assets.

Now, at the end of its tether, the Interior Ministry has cracked the whip on hundreds of non-governmental organisations engaged in activities that “prejudicially affect the public interest.”

“It is shocking what the government has done – but not surprising given the increasingly authoritarian, undemocratic and repressive measures being directed…against anyone who is seen to challenge or disagree with their positions and decisions,” Lalita Ramdas, anti-nuclear campaigner and board chair of Greenpeace International, told IPS.

Ramdas said NGOs concerned with nuclear power, human rights, environment and ecology – areas where corporate and industrial interests were likely to be questioned – appeared to be particular targets of the government order.

Among the worst affected is the Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), a network of more than 700 NGOs that is currently challenging, in the Supreme Court, the government’s restrictions on foreign funding reaching groups that engage in activities that can be described as “political” in nature.

In its court petition INSAF described itself as an organisation that believes that “the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India need to be safeguarded against blatant and rampant violations by the State and private corporations.”

INSAF said it has “actively campaigned against land grabs by corporations, ecological disaster by mining companies, water privatisation, genetically modified foods, hazardous nuclear power (and) anti-people policies of international financial institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.”

INSAF declared in court that it “firmly believes in a secular and peaceful social order and opposes communalism and the targeted attacks on the lives and rights of people including religious minorities, and regularly organises campaigns, workshops, conventions, fact-findings, people’s tribunals, solidarity actions for people’s movements and educational publications.”

“With that kind of a profile we were expecting this crackdown,” Anil Chaudhary, coordinator of INSAF, told IPS. “Still, the government could have waited for the Supreme Court verdict.”

“At this rate,” he said, “organisations working against discrimination of women and (advocating) for their empowerment through participation in local bodies could be termed “political”, as (well as) organisations working for farmers’ rights.

“The same arbitrariness can be applied to green NGOs trying to protect the environment against mindless industrialisation.”

Chaudhary thinks it unfair that NGOs critical of government policies are being singled out. “Instead of selectively freezing the funding of groups under INSAF, the government should order a blanket ban on all foreign funding.”

Among INSAF’s many campaigns is an intiative to bring international financial institutions like the World Bank under legislative scrutiny for their activities in India.

It cannot have escaped the government’s attention that INSAF’s campaigns have run parallel to powerful movements for transparency and clean governance led by social activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal, founder of the Aam Admi Party (Common Man’s Party) that plans to contest general elections due in 2014.

Kejriwal, whose social activity led to the passage of the 2005 Right to Information Act, has also been closely associated with transparency campaigns led by Anna Hazare, who mounted a Gandhian-style fast against corruption in April 2011 that rallied over 100,000 ordinary people.

Street protests demanding good governance have since been a thorn in the side of the government.  When they peaked in December 2012, following the gang rape of a young woman in a bus in the national capital, police took to beating protestors.

The government, starting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has also been frustrated by NGOs’ efforts to stall work on a string of mega nuclear parks along peninsular India’s long coastline, especially at Jaitapur in Maharashtra, Mithi Virdi in Gujarat and Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.

In February, the government froze the accounts of two leading Tamil Nadu-based NGOs allegedly associated with the protests at the site of the Kudankulam plant, signalling a new and tough stance against civil society groups fighting the displacement of farmers and fishermen by mega development projects.

The two NGOs, the Tuticorin Diocesan Association and the Tamil Nadu Social Service Society, received four million and eight million dollars respectively over a five-year period that ended in 2011, according to declarations they made to the government.

With strong backing from the Church, the groups continue to operate despite the freeze on their assets.

During the same five-year period a total of about 22,000 NGOs across India received roughly two billion dollars in foreign contributions, going by government records.

Unexpected protests have surfaced from among the Congress party’s partners in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Devi Prasad Tripathi, general secretary of the Nationalist Congress Party and member of parliament, reminded Interior Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde that the UPA is “committed to protecting and promoting secular, democratic and progressive forces in the country.”

“Effectively, the government is trying to promote globalisation while cracking down on the globalisation of dissent,” commented Achin Vanaik, professor of political science at the Delhi University.

The government’s move stands in stark contrast to promises made not two years ago at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid and Development Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, where 159 governments and member organisations honoured the vital role played by the non-profit sector by pledging to foster an “empowering” climate for civil society.

In his most recent report to the United Nations General Assembly, Maina Kiai, special rapporteur on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, noted with grave concern that India has repressed “peaceful protestors advocating economic, social and cultural rights, such as…local residents denouncing the health impact of nuclear power plants.”

The textile industry is suffering from the blackouts. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Raheel Tauseef is feeling quite powerless this summer. Frequent power outages in the industrial city of Faisalabad in the Punjab province of eastern Pakistan, where the 29-year-old and his family run three hosiery factories, are taking a heavy toll on their business.

“The power outage is anywhere between 12 and 16 hours,” Tauseef told IPS. We do get a respite of some four hours, but even that is not at a stretch. Just as the machines get rolling, the power goes off.”

So bad is the situation that the family has had to lay off over a thousand workers in the last two months. “Many factory owners are now keeping workers on a daily wage earning basis and pay them only on the days when there is work,” he said.

Little wonder then that Mian Zahid Aslam, president of the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was sounding frustrated when IPS caught up with him over the phone.

Having sat through three gruelling back-to-back meetings, all he could say was: “We are done with meetings. We want some action now, and quick.” Apparently, all that the various stakeholders could discuss at the meetings was how best to end the energy shortfall and revive the dying industry.

“The fomenting anger of the factory workers will spill out on the streets if something is not done on a war footing,” said Aslam.

Fearing precisely such violence, the provincial government of Punjab has directed the administration to avoid unscheduled power outages which have now reached up to 20 hours a day.

Meanwhile, many industrialists in Punjab have installed huge generators, run either on gas or diesel, to meet their export deadlines. But this is not without its problems either.

“Due to shortage of gas, we get it only for three days,” said Tauseef. In desperation, many factory owners have switched to diesel, but even that has become precious now. “Buying diesel from the stations is almost like begging for it,” he added.
Over 80 per cent of the 3.2 million people in Faisalabad, a city dubbed the Manchester of Pakistan, are linked to the textile industry. It is home to nearly half of Pakistan’s textile factories.

The national trade body All-Pakistan Textile Mills Association reports that the sector accounts for over 50 per cent of Pakistan’s total exports of roughly 25 billion dollars, and employs 38 per cent of the manufacturing sector workforce. That works out to about 3.5 million people.

According to experts, Pakistan is losing between 1.3 per cent and two per cent of its gross domestic product due to the energy crisis and an ineffective law and order apparatus.

And the summer has only made the situation worse. With the mercury soaring well above 40 degrees centigrade across the country, there is a shortfall of 7,000 mega watts of power. Of the total demand for 16,000 mw, the available supply is only 9,000 mw.

Power cuts were a problem all political parties acknowledged in their manifestos for the May 11 elections. The party which finally won – the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) – had, in fact, ranked it second after the economy on its list of important things to address.

Their leader and now the prime minister designate, Nawaz Sharif, promised in his election rallies to end load-shedding in two years if his party was voted to power. He also vowed to make Pakistan one of the top ten economies of the world and talked about expensive schemes like bullet trains and privatising the national airline and the railways.

Not everyone was impressed, though. Haris Gazdar, a leading economist based in Karachi, capital of Sindh province, hoped the new government would “rethink the bullet train business.”

“Our politicians promise us the moon,” said Tauseef. “Energy is indeed a big challenge and I have yet to see a plan of action.”

On its part, the PML-N plans to pump in two billion dollars to generate 10,000 mw of electricity in the next five years. Half of this is expected to come from developing the Thar coalfields in Sindh and setting up coal-fired plants in that southern province.

This meets the approval of Pakistan’s former science and technology minister, Professor Atta ur Rahman. The previous ruling Pakistan People’s Party, he told IPS, had “opted wrongly for oil-based power plants due to the huge kickbacks they received.”

Top priority should be given to converting all the country’s power plants to coal, he believes. “China and India both use coal as the major source of energy,” he said.

And before the environmentalists leap up in protest at his suggestion, he added, “We can employ cheap locally fabricated filtering devices to clean up the emitted soot.”
Rahman is hopeful the new government can “overcome the problems.”

His only caveat: “They must appoint competent and honest professionals and observe merit.”

The water and power ministry too has warned that unless corruption in the National Power Control Centre in Islamabad is curbed, no improvement in performance can be expected.

The PML-N government will have to take some tough decisions if it is going to tackle the energy challenge with any amount of seriousness.

“To overcome the energy crisis, prices will have to be raised and dues recovered,” said Gazdar, who is the director of the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi. “Alternatively, they can allocate more gas for power generation at the expense of other consumers.”

Petroleum minister Sohail Wajahat H. Siddiqui has already indicated a price hike without which, he said, the sector would suffer “irreparable economic and efficiency loss.”

With the government providing as subsidy the gap of Rs 3.02 per unit between the cost of producing electricity (Rs 11.91 per unit) and the price at which it is sold to the consumer (Rs 8.89 per unit), the Pakistani consumer can expect a hike in tariff as soon as the new government takes over the reins of power.

The Senate voted 99-0 to adopt a resolution that urged President Barack Obama to fully enforce existing economic sanctions against Iran and to “provide diplomatic, military and economic support” to Israel “in its defense of its territory, people and existence”.

Washington, it said, should support Israel “in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force” if Israel “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

The measure also re-affirmed the official policy of the administration of President Barack Obama that it would take whatever action necessary to “prevent” Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

At the same time, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Republican-led House of Representatives unanimously approved new sanctions legislation that, if passed into law, would blacklist foreign countries or companies that fail to reduce their oil imports from Iran to virtually nil within 180 days.

The same bill would expand the current blacklisting of companies that do business with Iran’s financial sector to include those engaged in the country’s automotive and mining sectors, as well.

In perhaps its most controversial section, the bill also eliminates President Obama’s ability to waive most sanctions for national-interest or national-security reasons.

Such waiver authority, which has been routinely included in existing sanctions legislation, has been used by Obama to ensure that countries that have historically enjoyed important trade and financial relations with Tehran continue cooperating with Western-led international efforts to pressure Iran to curb its nuclear programme.

The president’s waiver authority is also considered critical to prospects for a negotiated agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) by which such curbs would be accepted by Tehran in return for easing sanctions.

Both moves come as the Senate Republicans unveiled yet another bill even more far-reaching than that approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee by blacklisting companies that do any trade with Iran and deprive the president of all waiver authority. Under the draft legislation, which so far lacks any Democratic co-sponsors, sanctions could be eased or lifted only by an act of Congress.

Approval of both the Senate resolution and the House bill were hailed by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier group of the Israel lobby here.

“The passage of this resolution is an extremely significant and timely state of solidarity with Israel and a restatement of America’s determination to thwart Iran’s nuclear quest – which endangers America, Israeli, and international security,” it said about the Senate action.

The House bill, it noted with approval, would impose a de facto commercial embargo against Iran and would “maximise the effectiveness of American economic and diplomatic efforts as Iran nears a nuclear weapons capability.”

But other observers said the latest Congressional moves marked a dangerous escalation in tensions at a critical moment.

“Congress should abstain from any more reckless threats or sanctions that push us closer to the brink of war with Iran,” Jamal Abdi of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said of the Senate action.

“Attacking the president’s waiver authority is a cynical attempt to weaken his hand at the negotiating table and sabotage diplomatic efforts,” he added about the House bill. “If the president can’t lift sanctions in exchange for concessions, the Iranians will have little incentive to cooperate.”

The latest Congressional moves came as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its latest quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear programme detailing the installation of more advanced centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium, a buildup of stockpiles of 3.5-percent and 20-percent enriched uranium, and advances in the construction of its heavy-water reactor at Arak.

While a number of senators made much of the latest report, suggesting that Tehran was on the verge of building a nuclear weapon, experts here said that the report offered no major surprises and that Iran’s 20-percent enriched stockpile – which could most easily be further enriched to bomb grade – remained substantially below what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last September defined as Israel’s “red line”.

“The report findings underscore the urgent need to intensify negotiations with Tehran to resolve the political questions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program and to resolve the outstanding questions regarding the potential military dimensions of the program,” according to an analysis by the Arms Control Association (ACA) here.

“But, at the same time, the findings reinforce earlier assessments that Iran remains years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

Iran has repeatedly denied that its nuclear programme is designed to develop a weapon, and, since 2007, the U.S. intelligence community has insisted that the country’s leadership has not yet decided to build one. But the progress Iran has made in building and mastering the technology would shorten the time it would need to construct a bomb if such a decision were made, according to nuclear experts.

On the diplomatic front, meanwhile, progress has been more or less frozen since the latest P5+1 meeting with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan in early April when Tehran rejected a Western offer to ease sanctions on gold and precious-metal trade and some Iranian exports in exchange for suspending 20-percent enrichment and transferring its existing 20-percent stockpile out of the country.

Most observers believe the new talks are unlikely until after Iran’s elections next month and the inauguration of a new president, despite the fact that decisions on nuclear issues are ultimately made by the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Among the favoured candidates approved this week by the Guardian Council is Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, who is considered by veteran Iran watchers a hard-liner who has often frustrated his P5+1 interlocutors.

Some had hoped that former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who entered the race at the last minute and has occasionally urged better relations with the West, would offer a major challenge, but his candidacy was rejected by the Council.

Another approved candidate in the race, Hasan Rowhani, served as former president Mohammed Khatami’s chief nuclear negotiator. In that post, he struck a deal to suspend enrichment with the so-called EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany). But his lack of prominence makes him an underdog in a race dominated by conservatives closely associated with Khamenei.

Whether the flurry of new threats and sanctions by Congress will affect the election – or the calculations of Khamenei himself – remains to be seen.

Even the strongest supporters of sanctions have conceded that the economic pressure they’ve exerted on the regime to date has not produced the desired result and may even have strengthened regime hardliners who are convinced that Washington’s ultimate aim is “regime change” – a conviction that is likely to be strengthened by a review of Wednesday’s Senate debate.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Nawaz Sharif addressing a public gathering in 2012. Credit: cc by 2.0

While entrenched interests among Pakistan’s powerful security establishment constitute one prominent obstacle to any such optimism, a more significant hindrance could be scepticism among the country’s other two neighbours – Afghanistan and Iran – over Sharif’s own past, including his dealings during his two previous stints as prime minister.

Better relations with India

For the moment, Sharif himself is attempting to stoke this optimism. During his election campaign, Sharif pledged to revive India-Pakistan relations, which soured during Pervez Musharraf’s presidency from 2001 to 2008, and during a post-election phone call Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his wish for a “new course” between the two countries.

Following through on this vow, however, will be very difficult. Pakistan has long used ethnic tensions against India, as against Afghanistan, and changing this policy will require both a new mindset and a new set of convictions.

Sayeed Salahudeen, chief of the Muttahida Jihad Council (MJC) and the Hizb-ul-Mujahedeen, a powerful separatist Kashmiri militia group believed to be based in Pakistan, has already warned Sharif not to abandon the “Kashmir cause” over “friendship with India”. As long as “Kashmir is under India’s occupation”, Sulahudeen continued, “the national security of Pakistan, the safety and security of its borders, and its economic stability is at stake.”

Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri militants has been an essential part of Pakistan’s approach toward India, and any attempt to end this will take time. During his election campaign, Sharif stated that the Kashmiri conflict “needs to be resolved peacefully, to the satisfaction of not only both countries but also of the Kashmiri people.”

Sharif also promised a full investigation into the Kargil conflict, the 1999 incident in which Pakistani soldiers and Kashmiri militants infiltrated Indian side of the Line of Control, setting off a major crisis between the two nuclear powers. Sharif, who was prime minister at the time, has long claimed that Musharraf, as the military commander, had acted on his own, although another Pakistani army general insisted in January that Sharif himself was not as ignorant about the plans as he has said.

The new prime minister has also said he plans to investigate the alleged involvement of Pakistan’s powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in the 2008 Mumbai bombings, another key action that would please India but thoroughly aggravate powerful elements within the Pakistani establishment.

The India-Pakistan conflict is today deeply rooted, and governments in Pakistan, both civilian and military, have for decades viewed India as a strategic rival. Indeed, the potential “threat” from India has consistently been the army’s justification for its massive budget.

While civilian governments have generally opposed increasing military expenditures, the military-intelligence establishment continues to exert considerable influence, particularly in foreign and security policymaking. Sharif’s post-election statement that the prime minister would now be “the army chief’s boss” was an attempt to mitigate this concern, but it remains unclear whether he will be able to effectively follow through.

Sharif appears to hope that expanding economic ties between the two countries will weaken resistance to enhancing relations between the two long-time rivals. India’s economy has grown at a much more rapid pace than Pakistan’s over the past decade, and building stronger commercial ties to its giant western neighbour offers Islamabad perhaps the most direct route to getting its own economy out of the doldrums.

Afghan discomfort

While Sharif has established a certain credibility regarding his desire for better relations with India, the same does not hold true for Afghanistan where the new prime minister does not enjoy much popularity.

This is due not only to his support for warring jihadi factions in 1992, but also because Pakistan under his watch became the first country to recognise the Taliban as the legitimate Afghan government in 1997. In addition, Afghans have yet to forget Sharif’s attempt to impose Sharia law in 1999, the same set of decrees the Taliban brutally imposed in Afghanistan.

In his congratulatory message to Sharif, Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed his hope that the two countries would be able to cooperate “to root out terrorism”. However, this was viewed mostly as a formality.

“If Pakistan’s political officials want to show good faith,” an Afghan news website states, “they have to confront terrorist groups inside Pakistan that are organised by ISI.”

Indeed, concern over an uncomfortably close association between Sharif and the Taliban intensified during the candidate’s pre-election gathering in Lahore. If he won, Sharif promised, he would pull Pakistan back from the U.S.-led international “war on terror” coalition. If such a statement were not meant to “blackmail” the United States, an editorial in Afghanistan’s Hasht-e Sobh newspaper stated, it means “he is serious in what he is saying.”

In a separate interview with the Hasht-e Sobh, Mahmoud Karzai – Hamid Karzai’s brother and a possible presidential candidate for Afghanistan’s 2014 election – accused Pakistan of attempting to annex Afghanistan, the prospects for which the country “tasted during Taliban rule”.

Such rhetoric refers to an old dispute over the British-drawn boundary that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Pashtun tribal areas, though the region continues to be prone to frequent violence and remains a source of tension between the two countries. Whether Sharif can dispel such suspicions will yet another challenge he faces in improving ties with his neighbours.

Iran and Saudi Arabia

Iran, which also accumulated its share of complaints about Islamabad’s behaviour under Sharif in the 1990s, is not expected to play a primary role in Pakistan’s regional policies, barring a major event such as a military crisis or controversy around gas pipelines.

Contrary to some analyses, any Iranian scepticism regarding the new Pakistani government is not related to the Islamabad’s alleged support for Sunni insurgents in Balochistan province, on the Iranian side of the border. In fact, Iran and Pakistan have established a cooperative relationship on this front.

Rather, scepticism stems, again, from Nawaz Sharif’s support of the Taliban during the 1990s, as well as his close associations with Saudi Arabia which, among other support, gave him safe haven during the years he was exiled from Pakistan after his ouster by Musharraf in 1999.

Iran and Afghanistan almost went to war in 1998, after Taliban militants murdered Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e Sharif. Because of Sharif’s support for the Taliban, as well as his close ties to Riyadh, Tehran’s chief rival in a region that has become increasingly polarised along sectarian lines, Iran’s hard-line media has reacted with concern to his return as prime minister.

Among other things, Tehran is concerned about the fate of the cross-border natural-gas pipeline between Iran and Pakistan despite strong U.S. opposition. Pakistan desperately needs Iranian gas to meet its growing energy needs, and outgoing Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the final construction phase of the pipeline in March.

Pakistan received 500 million dollars to start building the pipeline in its territory, running through Balochistan into Karachi, and the deal is clearly to Pakistan’s advantage.

However, if a story by one influential Pakistani newspaper is true, that deal could now find itself in jeopardy. The Dawn newspaper has reported on Sharif’s rumoured suggestions to Saudi Arabia that “he may be open to reviewing the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline.”

A man hauls water at the Chico Mendes landless peasant camp in Pernambuco, Brazil. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

Everyone knows water is life. Far too few understand the role of trees, plants and other living things in ensuring we have clean, fresh water.

This dangerous ignorance results in destruction of wetlands that once cleaned water and prevented destructive and costly flooding, scientists and activists warn.

Around the world, politicians and others in power have made and continue to make decisions based on short-term economic interests without considering the long-term impact on the natural environment, said Anik Bhaduri, executive officer of the Global Water System Project (GWSP), a research institute based in Bonn, Germany.

“Humans are changing the character of the world water system in significant ways with inadequate knowledge of the system and the consequences of changes being imposed,” Bhaduri told IPS.

The list of human impacts on the world’s water – of which only 0.03percent is available as freshwater – is long and the scale of those impacts daunting.

“We have accelerated major processes like erosion, applied massive quantities of nitrogen that leaks from soil to ground and surface waters and, sometimes, literally siphoned all water from rivers, emptying them for human uses before they reach the ocean,” Bhaduri said.

On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years, which distorts the natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia. Two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking due to pumping out groundwater, oil and gas. Some deltas are falling at a rate four times faster than global sea level is rising.

More than 65 percent of the world’s rivers are in trouble, according to one study published in Nature in 2010. Those findings were very “conservative” since there was not enough data to assess impacts of climate change, pharmaceutical compounds, mining wastes and water transfers, Charles Vörösmarty of the City University of New York previously told IPS.

Recently, China’s First National Census of Water discovered they’d lost more than 28,000 rivers compared to just 20 years ago. Most experts blame the loss on massive overuse and engineering projects to shift water from one region to another.

“We treat symptoms of environmental abuse rather than underlying causes…by throwing concrete, pipes, pumps, and chemicals at our water problems, to the tune of a half-trillion dollars a year,” said Vörösmarty, who is also co-chair and a founding member of the GWSP.

As these problems continue to mount, the public is largely unaware of this reality or its growing costs, he said in a release.

Protecting and investing in natural infrastructure is far cheaper than concrete and pipes, representing the smarter solution to water security. This approach also benefits tourism, recreation and cultural benefits, improved resilience and biodiversity conservation.

World experts are meeting in Bonn, Germany this week to consolidate this understanding and offer policy makers solutions to prevent ongoing damage to the global water system.

The Water in the Anthropocene conference will also make recommendations on how decision makers can adapt to the multiple challenges of growing water use, declining ecosystems and climate change.

The public and policy makers are not aware of these huge water challenges, said water expert Janos Bogardi, senior advisor to GWSP. Education aside, there is an overwhelming need to have well-defined global water quantity and quality standards that meet the needs of people, agriculture and healthy ecosystems.

The upcoming U.N. Sustainable Development Goals are expected to include “water security”, which is huge step forward, Bogardi told IPS.

“Defining these interrelated needs is huge challenge for scientists and politicians alike,” he said.

Reasonable daily water use to meet sanitary needs and drinking is 40 to 80 litres, but U.S. per capita daily use is over 300 litres, while Germany is 120 litres. In urban Hungary, where water is relatively expensive, consumption is 80 litres/day.

But how much water does nature need?

GWSP scientists’ best guess at this point is that taking 30 percent to 40 percent of a renewable freshwater resource constitutes “extreme” water stress which could tip an ecosystem into collapse. This can be mitigated if water is returned and recycled in good quality. Mining fossil groundwater resources is by definition non-sustainable.

“We have to be careful that the water security goal is truly sustainable for ecosystems,” Bogardi said.

It is not clear that the Sustainable Development Goal on water will “simultaneously optimise water security for humans as well as for nature”, said Vörösmarty.

“The water sciences community stands ready to take on this challenge. Are the decision makers?” he asked.

Hubbard glacier in Seward, Alaska. Credit: Bigstock

Many eyes are turning north to the Arctic, some in horror at the rapid decline of a key component of our life support system, others in eager anticipation at the untapped resources beneath the vanishing snow and ice.

“I’ve worked in the north for 21 years and the scale and speed of change up there is astonishing,” said Douglas Clark of the University of Saskatchewan.

“These changes, taken as whole, and reflected in our report, keep me awake at night,” Clark told IPS.

Rapid and even abrupt changes are occurring on multiple fronts across the Arctic, according to the Arctic Resilience Report (ARR).

And what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

“It’s the first international report to tell the world to buckle up, we’re on a wild roller coaster ride and we don’t know what’s coming,” he said.

The ARR report is a two-year collaboration between experts in the Nordic countries, Russia, Canada and the United States, and includes indigenous perspectives. It is a cutting edge assessment of how changes in climate, ecosystems, economics, and society interact.

The report was prepared for and released at the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna, Sweden on Wednesday.

“What is happening in the Arctic has profound implications for every part of the world,” said Sarah Cornell, lead author of the study.

Global warming is not only melting snow and ice, it is warming the Arctic ocean and the surrounding lands. Seasons are changing, permafrost is thawing, new species are invading, Arctic species are struggling, lakes are vanishing, and rivers are being redirected by the melting landscape, the report documents.

Some Arctic ecosystems are undergoing catastrophic changes, and some of these are large-scale and irreversible, Cornell, a scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, told IPS.

While the Arctic is as remote as the moon for many people, it is intimately interconnected with the rest of the world. Weather is driven largely by the cold Arctic and Antarctic regions balanced by the hot tropics. But the Arctic is rapidly defrosting – last summer the sea ice shrunk to half of what it was less than 30 years ago. The ice decline and the heating up of the Arctic have been accelerating in recent years.

“This has and will have spectacular consequences for the rest of the world. We don’t know what they’ll all be,” Cornell said.

The Arctic is home to cultures and species found nowhere else and they can’t go any further north to escape the rising temperatures. It is a real struggle to survive, said Tero Mustonen, president of Snowchange Cooperative, a network of local and indigenous cultures around the world.

“The Arctic is undergoing fundamental changes. Moose are showing up in the tundra for the first time along with new insects, plants and even trees,” Mustonen told IPS from his home in eastern Finland.

Mustonen, a co-author of the ARR, works with Chukchi reindeer herding communities from northeastern Siberia who have roamed those remote lands for hundreds of the years. Like many indigenous communities living on the land, they have a deep ecological, cultural and spiritual connection to their landscape. And that landscape is changing so much they sometimes don’t recognise their own home, he said.

“The Chukchi don’t easily share their thoughts. But the elders have a clear and powerful message to convey to the world: ‘Nature doesn’t trust humans any more’.”

However, the focus of the eight-nation Arctic Council was primarily on future shipping opportunities, access to oil, gas and mineral resources, and geopolitics, with China, Japan, India, South Korea, Singapore and Italy granted observer status on the Council while Canada blocked the European Union’s application.

The Council is the world’s main international forum on northern issues and will be led by Canada for the next two years. Canada said it will focus on economic development. Estimates show that the region may have 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits, and vast quantities of mineral resources.

The Council’s much-lauded scientific research will now be focused on how to develop northern resources for the benefit of northerners. Canada recently drew criticism for re-directing its own scientific research to supporting business and industry.

Secretary of State John Kerry represented the U.S. at the Arctic Council, demonstrating Washington’s renewed interest in the Arctic. The White House also released its new National Strategy for the Arctic Region. While acknowledging the profound impacts of global warming on the region and indigenous people, the U.S. strategy says the region will help to supply U.S. energy needs well into the future.

At the meeting, members adopted an agreement on marine oil pollution preparedness. Some indigenous and environmental groups urged the Council to place a moratorium on drilling for oil in the Arctic given the dangerous conditions and difficulties of clean up.

Greenpeace International said the oil pollution agreement offered no specific practical minimum standards and had no provisions to hold companies liable for the full costs and damages.

“There were two conferences going on here — one that warned of the dangers of climate change and rapid industrialisation in this fragile region, and another, attended by foreign ministers, that took almost no concrete steps to address them,” said Ruth Davis, Greenpeace International senior policy advisor.

Arctic peoples aren’t necessarily opposed to economic development but they do want to be in control of what happens. However, Arctic nations and local communities are at very different stages. In Finland and Russia, indigenous people have no official land or water rights, unlike Canada or Alaska, said Mustonen.

“The rights and cultures of indigenous peoples in these regions have to be taken seriously in order to integrate their needs into any form of development,” he said.

The people of Cunduacán and Huimanguillo, which have a combined population of 300,000, will present a class action lawsuit against Pemex in June.

Oil rigs and pumps. Credit: Bigstock

“There have been several harmful effects; we have carried out tests on soils, sediments and water and we are about to receive the results,” Marisa Jacott, the head of Fronteras Comunes (Common Borders), an environmental NGO, told IPS.

Fronteras Comunes and the Asociación Ecológica Santo Tomás (Santo Tomás Ecological Association) are providing legal advice to the local population, mainly small farmers and fisherfolk, who have incurred great losses due to oil spills and gas explosions.

Mexico’s 2011 Class Action Law allows individuals and the federal consumer protection agency to sue state and private companies. However, the law does not provide for reparations.

The oil industry has been active in Tabasco since the early 1950s, and expanded there from the 1970s onwards with the construction of petrochemical plants, pipeline networks and storage facilities, sparking an economic boom.

But the boom did not result in benefits for the local communities. Instead, the oil industry displaced traditional activities like banana farming and cattle ranching.

The oil industry is active in 13 of Tabasco’s 17 municipalities, producing 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) – of a national total of 2.5 million bpd – according to the Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP).

“There is environmental pollution and crop destruction, and there are soils that have lost their fertility. This means that harvests are not as abundant as they were before,” Lorena Sánchez, head of the Tabasco Human Rights Committee (CODEHUTAB), an NGO that has received complaints from local people about these problems, told IPS.

“It has affected people’s diets and caused respiratory health problems as well as blood and skin diseases,” she said.

Since 2011, CODEHUTAB has brought four lawsuits to the federal environmental protection agency, PROFEPA, that have resulted in fines for Pemex, but not in reparations for victims in local communities.

The most recent case, this year, was related to seven gas flares burning in the municipality of Paraíso, where CODEHUTAB took blood samples from 50 children between the ages of seven and 15. Ten percent of the samples had chromosome alterations, linked by the epidemiologists to oil industry activity.

PROFEPA estimates there are an average of 20 crude spills a year in Tabasco. Between 2008 and 2012, the environment ministry recorded 102 sites contaminated by environmental emergencies in the country caused by Pemex, including three in Tabasco.

In addition to Tabasco, the eastern and southeastern states of Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Hidalgo and Puebla and the highways connecting them to Mexico City are regarded as vulnerable to oil industry activity.

The oil industry in this region produces pollution with heavy metals, ozone, sulphur dioxide, nitric oxide, volatile aromatic compounds like benzene, hydrogen sulphide, salts, ammonia, cadmium and acids, all of which are harmful to the environment and human health, the NGOs complain.

Manuel Pinkus-Rendón and Alicia Contreras, academic researchers at the Autonomous University of Yucatán, concluded in a study published last year that “the social and environmental fabric of Tabasco reflects a regional development potential considerably below that which existed over 60 years ago, as a result of environmental degradation.”

For their study “Impacto socioambiental de la industria petrolera en Tabasco: el caso de Chontalpa” (Social and environmental impact of the oil industry in Tabasco: The case of Chontalpa), the authors interviewed 200 residents of four towns in the municipality of Cárdenas, 65 percent of whom expressed negative views about oil industry activity, especially because of the pollution and destruction it causes.

“It is a case that has not been addressed. We want the judges to have the fewest possible reasons to reject it,” said Jacott, of Fronteras Comunes.

In April, the local residents presented a complaint to the National Commission on Human Rights. In 2004 they had filed a legal complaint against Pemex in the attorney general’s office, but it went nowhere.

The environmental organisations and local residents have spent two years building their case. The next step will be legal action over damage suffered in the adjacent state of Veracruz, another major oil-producing region.

“We want them to take the required preventive measures. All Pemex does is supposedly carry out remediation of the damage, but it does not invest in maintaining the pipelines and guarding the area,” CODEHUTAB’s Sánchez complained.

The organisations are asking for an assessment of the state of ecosystems in Tabasco, and the dissemination of Pemex’s policies and guidelines for preventing leaks, addressing environmental contingencies and cleaning up polluted sites.

They are also calling for the gradual replacement of fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, as well as regular measurements of the main atmospheric pollutants in affected areas.

US Army Corps of Engineers tours flooded areas in Burlington, North Dakota in 2011. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Patrick Moes

Seven in 10 U.S. citizens believe climate change is real and happening now. Yet most have never even contacted a government official about the issue, let alone volunteered with an environmental organisation or taken other action.

These findings are part of an exploration of Climate Change in the American Mind issued  by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

“They think it’s about polar bears or developing countries, not the United States… not my community, not my friends and family,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project, told IPS.

Researchers divided the U.S. population into “six Americas” that share similar beliefs about climate change. Seventy percent belong to three major “Americas” that believe, to a more or less strong degree, that climate change is happening, is harmful and is caused by humans.

After falling between 2008 and 2010, public awareness on the topic here has been rising again, probably because of the number and severity of extreme weather events in the last two years. The trend was confirmed by an opinion poll released in April by the Gallup Institute.

The latest dire warning came just this week, when the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, announced that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had passed the critical threshold of 400 parts per million.

To put this number in perspective, the last time the Earth had a similar concentration of CO2 was three million years ago during the Pliocene era, when sea levels were up to 80 feet higher.

“The main way people know about this issue is through media reporting,” Leiserowitz explained. “And when the media don’t report it, it’s literally out of sight and out of mind.”

Bringing climate change down to earth

Television weather forecasters seem ideally suited to become climate change educators: they speak to thousands or even millions of people every day, often three to four times a day, and they are already trusted by their audiences.

The Yale Project is providing them with tools and training to discuss climate change, connecting them with the climate science community and organising debates with meteorologists who hold varying opinions of climate change to foster dialogue.

The idea of making information more accessible also inspired Climate Commons, an online interactive map of the United States, launched on Apr. 22 by the organisation Internews, as part of its Earth Journalism Network (EJN).

Data on climate change indicators – such as temperature, weather events and emissions – and related news stories are visualised on the map, tracking the impact of global warming and the presence, or absence, of media coverage.

“We are hoping that journalists and other communicators, as well as the general public, can all use this visualisation and can understand better what’s going on,” James Fahn, global director of EJN, told IPS.

“Eventually we do definitely want this map to become a source for bottom-up news and information and then observations and news from the public,” he said.

Because while a “good understanding of the problem … is necessary, it’s not sufficient,” he said, adding that more spaces are needed for citizen participation in actual policy making.

Shaping environmental democracy

“Ultimately, how we protect our environment is a fundamental question of how we … exercise our democracy,” Michael Marx, director of the Beyond Oil Campaign at Sierra Club, the largest grassroots environmental organisation in the U.S., told IPS.

David Eisenhauer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) agreed, telling IPS that “providing an opportunity for citizen input is foundational to our democracy”.

In March, the USFWS released its “Climate Adaptation Strategy” outlining nationwide strategies for the next five to 10 years to protect species and resources in a changing climate. Written in response to a 2010 call by the U.S. Congress and produced in collaboration with federal, state and tribal agencies, the strategy benefited during its draft stage from nearly 55,000 comments from individuals and organisations.

The range of actions that can be taken by ordinary citizens to address climate change is broad, and can be as simple as keeping the thermostat in one’s home on a lower setting, as one commenter suggested.

“The combination of personal behaviour choices and civic engagement and activism is a potent tool that has global scale consequences,” said Marx.

According to Leiserowitz, changing individual lifestyles in the United States could cut emissions by 10 percent. “The other 90 percent really has to come from a systemic change,” he said.

That means that public demands for change in the U.S need to be more systematic and urgent, said Leiserowitz.

On Feb. 17, the Sierra Club participated in a Forward on Climate Rally that drew an estimated 40,000 people in Washington D.C.

“We do not see the diversity and occasional conflict within the climate movement as a bad thing,” Marx said. “We accept that a democratic approach – as divisive and chaotic as it can appear – is also the most resilient and strongest [one].”

Fears of “big government”

Climate change is not only an environmental issue, Leiserowitz pointed out. It cuts across multiple aspects of society, including the economy, national security, and cultural and religious beliefs.

Some opponents of actions like mandatory emissions cuts fear they could be a pretext to usher in more intrusive government, as has been seen in other hot-button debates over issues like gun control and health care.

“They’re so afraid of the policy response that they suddenly become very sceptical of the problem itself,” said Leiserowitz.

“This is about something much deeper. It’s about identity, about values, it’s about emotions, and if you don’t know that that’s what you’re dealing with, you will eternally be frustrated when you provide them with more and more facts and they don’t respond the way you think they are going to.”

An open pit copper mine. Credit: Bigstock

Trillions of dollars a year are being produced through extractive industries, but just a tiny percentage of this money is impacting on the lives of poor communities in developing countries, according to a first-of-its-kind study released Wednesday.

The revenues being produced by exploiting natural resources in developing countries already massively outweigh development-focused foreign aid flows. But according to new research from the Revenue Watch Institute, a global watchdog group, there is a startling correlation between economic dependency on natural resources and low human development indicators.

“The 58 countries [studied] produce 85 percent of the world’s petroleum, 90 percent of diamonds and 80 percent of copper. Profits from their extractive sector totaled more than $2.6 trillion in 2010,” according to Revenue Watch’s new Resource Governance Index, unveiled here Wednesday.

“Revenues from natural resources dwarf international aid: In 2011, oil revenues for Nigeria alone were 60 percent higher than total international aid to all of sub-Saharan Africa. The future of these countries depends on how well they manage their oil, gas and minerals.”

Of those 58 countries, more than 80 percent have reportedly failed to put in place satisfactory standards for openness in these sectors – and half haven’t even taken basic steps in this regard.

Revenue Watch analysts say the findings constitute a “striking governance deficit”. While such problems have been widely known on an anecdotal basis, this is the first time these issues have been systematically disaggregated and compared.

“The index is a real wake-up call about how far we still have to go in managing public resources effectively and for the betterment of poor populations around the world,” Warren Krafchik, director of the International Budget Partnership, a Washington-based project that works to strengthen civil society involvement in public budgeting, told IPS.

“Particularly now after the global financial crisis, this data shines a big spotlight on how, while resources can still be transferred from the Global North to the South, the fact is that the South is sitting on really substantial resources of its own. The challenge is how to use those effectively.”

The new data highlight a real opportunity to do something “fundamental” about global poverty, Krafchik notes.

“It’s really not the amount of public resources that’s available that’s the primary obstacle to overcoming extreme poverty,” he says. “The issue is how those resources are managed and distributed.”

Similarly, several analysts are suggesting the data could influence discussion on the new international development agenda following the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015.

“We’re talking about real money here – foreign aid can be used as leverage, but the domestic resources issue is absolutely key,” Daniel Kaufmann, president of the Revenue Watch Institute, told a Washington audience Wednesday.

“Clearly, 2.6 trillion dollars has major transformative potential in terms of translating these natural resources riches into human capital. Further, oil-rich states are three times less likely to democratise than are the non-oil-rich, so this matters from a political standpoint, too. This is the development challenge of the decade.”

No resource curse

In terms of extractives governance, particular problems appear to be concentrated in northern and southern Africa and the Middle East. Latin America, on the other hand, is seen as generally doing better, with Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Trinidad & Tobago all ranked in the top 10.

The index is topped by developed countries, with Norway, the United States (though only regarding its extractives work in the Gulf of Mexico) and the United Kingdom the only countries rated satisfactory on all indicators. Australia and Canada (though only its sector in Alberta) are also in the top 10.

However, the governance findings are more complex, and more interesting, than a simple breakdown of poor versus rich countries. Kaufman says the data rejects “the tired notion of the deterministic ‘resource curse’”.

“The silver lining here is that there’s variation – a number of countries have satisfactory performance, and those are in diverse contexts, including in emerging economies,” he notes.

“Among those that perform poorly are some very rich countries, particularly in the Gulf. Just being rich isn’t necessarily an indication that a country is performing well, and being a developing country isn’t a rationale for doing poorly.”

While many are suggesting that the new index will provide an important tool for identifying country-level problems, debate remains over how to rectify these issues. While political will in affected countries will clearly be a paramount factor, potential roles for the international community are less clear.

According to numbers offered at a panel discussion here on Wednesday, foreign assistance won’t necessarily offer significant leverage towards greater compliance.

“Of the 46 countries with below satisfactory levels on this index, just six have external assistance levels greater than five percent of gross domestic product, and only three are higher than 15 percent,” George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brooking Institution, a think tank here, said, suggesting this route of influence is a “dead end”.

“However, that money can be used to enhance the performance of government capability … For instance, on taxation, there is a new movement of acknowledging that we need to help developing countries develop their capacity to develop their own revenues.”

Over the past decade, international discussion on natural resources governance has coalesced around a set of standards known as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). According to the EITI website, 21 countries are currently considered compliant with the initiative, while another 16 are pending candidates.

Yet EITI is still codifying its standards, and several EITI-compliant countries fared poorly on the new Governance Index. Advocates are particularly calling for the inclusion of contracts in the EITI transparency requirements, and several such major reforms will be discussed next week at an EITI board meeting in Australia.

Revenue Watch and others say the most potent role in ensuring government accountability in this regard will fall to national-level civil society.

“Control over resources traditionally meant power, and the incentives for politicians to give that up are really low,” Carlos Pascual, a U.S. State Department official, said Wednesday.

“You have to create different incentive structures, and changing that equation will have to strengthen the role of civil society and the political processes by which pressures can be brought on politicians to link their ability to stay in government with how they manage the resource base. We’re at the very beginning right now on thinking about what the best models may be … but at least we’re starting to have that discussion.”