Lack of disclosure of contracts, payments and socio-environmental impacts characterize Mexico's coal industry. The picture shows workers at the Nueva Rosita coal mine in the northern state of Coahuila. CREDIT: Courtesy of Cristóbal Trejo

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 9 2022 (IPS)

In the northern Mexican state of Coahuila the current situation of coal, used mainly to generate electricity, is opaque.

A veil surrounds the industry in terms of production, consumption, inspections, pollution, contracts and the state of the mines that supply coal to two power plants belonging to the governmental Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).

In the southern state of Guerrero, another power plant uses coal from Australia and Colombia.

Cristina Auerbach, director of the non-governmental organization Familia Pasta de Conchos, said there is a veil of mystery surrounding the industry in Mexico.

“The system is not transparent. Sometimes the issue goes unnoticed, because at a global level coal in Mexico is insignificant. But it is so problematic that they can’t make it transparent because they can’t order transparency” in the country, she told IPS.

Her organization was created in 2006, following an explosion caused by methane accumulation that year at the Pasta de Conchos mine in Coahuila, which left 65 workers dead, 63 of whom were buried in the explosion and whose bodies have never been recovered.“With regard to coal…there is no national registry of how many pits there are. There have been complaints about illegal coal mining. The final results are quite poor. We don't know if it is lack of commitment, or a lack of interest in promoting transparency.” -- Sol Pérez

Coal is mined in Coahuila and Tamaulipas, in the north of this Latin American country. In December 2020, according to official figures, Mexico produced 459,414 tons of coal, which is highly polluting and harmful to human health.

But to meet domestic demand, the country imports about nine million tons per year.

Last March, coal-fired generation contributed more than 2,000 megawatts of electricity, three percent of the national total. In Coahuila, there are some 40 underground coal mines.

Ignored

Coal has been left out of the natural resource transparency schemes negotiated between the federal government and international civil society organizations in platforms such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and the Open Government Partnership (OGP).

EITI, created in 2003, brings together more than 50 countries and promotes open and accountable management of oil, gas and mineral resources. Mexico joined EITI in 2017 and is currently undergoing the first review of its compliance with the standards, a process that began last August and whose results are to be published in the coming months.

In Latin America, Colombia, a producer of hydrocarbons and coal, has the most advanced status, receiving a rating of “satisfactory progress” in implementing the EITI standards. The South American nation practices proactive transparency, issuing a biannual report.

Peru, another oil and gas producer, has made “significant progress,” according to the global transparency standard.

Argentina, Ecuador and Trinidad and Tobago are other hydrocarbon producers in the region that are also under evaluation, while Brazil and Venezuela do not belong to EITI.

The José López Portillo thermoelectric plant, owned by the governmental Federal Electricity Commission and located in the northern state of Coahuila, burns coal to generate energy in Mexico. CREDIT: CFE

OGP, founded in 2011, groups 78 nations and hundreds of civil society organizations. In Mexico, the 4th National Action Plan 2019-2021 revolves around 13 topics, including transparency in final beneficiaries of companies in the hydrocarbon and mining sector.

Transparency can help strengthen accountability, the fight against corruption, the evaluation of public policies and informed decision-making by stakeholders, such as local communities.

Sol Pérez, a researcher at the non-governmental Fundar, Centro de Análisis e Investigación, questions the lack of exhaustive information on fossil fuels.

“There is no effective access to information” in the state-owned oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), she told IPS.

“With regard to the issue of coal, the picture is very similar,” she added. “There is no national registry of how many pits there are. There have been complaints about illegal coal mining. The final results are quite poor. We don’t know if it is lack of commitment, or a lack of interest in promoting transparency.”

The “EITI-Mexico Shadow Report: Progress and Challenges in Socio-environmental Transparency”, published in May 2021, concluded that the government and companies have persisted in their refusal to disclose disaggregated socio-environmental information on the extractive sector.

The report, prepared by organizations participating in EITI, exposed phenomena such as the partial existence of data on royalty payments for the exploitation or use of national waters and the lack of complete files on environmental matters.

Another case addresses the unavailability of geo-referenced oil well locations.

The document found that out of 49 hydrocarbon contracts of EITI companies, only 10 include social impact assessments, while only two contain an environmental impact analysis.

Mexico ranks 12th in the world in oil production, 17th in gas extraction, 20th in proven crude oil reserves and 41st in proven natural gas deposits. But its position in the oil industry is declining due to the scarcity of easily extractable hydrocarbons.

Since 2020, hydrocarbon production has been dropping. In February 2020 oil extraction totaled 1.73 million barrels per day; the following year, 1.67 million; and last February, 1.63 million, according to the government’s National Hydrocarbons Commission.

Gas has followed a similar trajectory, with production totaling 4.93 billion cubic feet per day in February 2020; 4.838 billion cubic feet per day 12 months later; and 4.673 billion cubic feet per day last February.

The lack of sufficient domestic gas makes imports necessary, especially from the United States, which have been on the rise since 2020, after a drop between 2018 and 2019.

Imports of gas grew six percent between 2020 and 2021 – from 853 million cubic feet to 904.6 million. Last February, imports totaled 640 million, more than half the volume of the entire previous year.

View of a service station of the state oil giant Pemex in Mexico City. The company’s activities suffer from a lack of transparency and access to information, despite commitments in this regard made by the Mexican government. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Empty promises

For its part, OGP includes the development of a National Action Plan to drive beneficial ownership transparency and initiate the publication of such data from hydrocarbon and mining companies, with the aim of building a corporate Beneficial Ownership Register by 2023.

Actions included the preparation of a diagnosis of final beneficiaries in Mexico and a pilot project for the dissemination of information, which have been completed.

These examples show how little importance the Mexican government attaches to access to public information and transparency in the extractive sector.

In addition, they highlight the challenges ahead for the government in implementing the regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, in force since April 2021 and known as the Escazú Agreement.

In 2020, CFE purchased 1.58 million tons of coal through 60 direct contracts awarded to producers in the Coahuila coal region, without environmental and social impact assessments, as revealed last November by the non-governmental organization México Evalúa.

Although the country evolved in the Resource Governance Index, developed by the non-governmental Natural Resource Governance Institute, between 2019 and 2021, issues such as governance of social and environmental impacts still need to be improved.

“Governance of local impacts is poor, mainly due to opacity in the disclosure of environmental mitigation plans, which the government considers confidential,” the paper states.

Increased pressure

In 2021 and 2022, EITI priorities in Mexico include providing information about the energy transition, supporting open data, providing information on investment decisions, strengthening revenue mobilization, addressing corruption risks, and measuring impact.

In the design of OGP’s new action plan, which is to be ready in August, civil society wants to include a commitment to transparency in hydrocarbons, mining and electric energy.

Auerbach, the activist, complained that communities have become “sacrifice zones” in exchange for mining.

“They don’t care if we are informed or not, if we protest or not, it changes absolutely nothing,” she said. “There are environmental liabilities from 50 years ago, from 30 years ago or from last week. And that is not included. Whatever the CFE and Pemex say is fine and the rest just go along with it. Under this government, they are untouchable. The Ministry of the Environment says that it is going to review how the area will end up when they finish exploiting the concessions in 50 years.”

EITI’s alternative report suggested publishing information on environmental impact mitigation in priority maritime areas for biodiversity conservation that host oil projects and payments for environmental licenses, environmental taxes, non-compliance with regulations or environmental impacts.

Pérez said the Escazú Agreement offers an opportunity to promote transparency and access to information.

“The ideal conditions don’t exist, but Escazú is an opportunity. On the environmental issue, the lack of information is well identified. The lack of public commitment is worrisome. We can link EITI and Escazú,” she said.

Latin American experts on transparency and open data participate in a debate during the Open Government Partnership Regional Meeting for the Americas, in the Costa Rican capital. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

As public policy, political transparency and open data need an active ingredient to bring about social change that would reduce inequality in Latin America: citizen participation, said regional experts consulted by IPS.

That is the link that ties together open data and the transformation of society and that democratises access to rights and opportunities, said activists and government representatives working to democratise access to information and public records in the region.

During the Open Government Partnership Regional Meeting for the Americas, held Nov. 18-19 in San José, Costa Rica, experts in transparency referred over and over to a central idea: only empowered citizens can leverage information to create a better democracy.

“Simply opening up information never changed anyone’s reality, nor did it reduce the inequality gap,” Fabrizio Scrollini, lead researcher of the Open Data Initiative in Latin America, told IPS. “Just opening up access to information in and of itself doesn’t do that. Miracles don’t exist.”

What does happen, he said, “is that with a specific policy there is a set of parallel actions that can be major facilitators of these processes of empowerment of societies in the region.”

Scrollini said citizen participation makes it possible to turn a simple technological advance, such as a government platform or web site, into a tool for social change. Change is built from the grassroots level up, working with people, he said.

As an example, he cited the Uruguayan project Por mi Barrio (For My Neighbourhood), which enables the residents of the capital, Montevideo, to report problems in their community, from a pothole in the road or piles of garbage to a faulty street light, which are immediately received by the city government.

To that end, the municipal government allowed the developers of the project, a civil society group, access to its computer system for the first time.

“It brings the government closer to all segments of the population,” Fernando Uval told IPS. “We are holding workshops in different neighbourhoods, to inform people about how it works.”

“The emphasis is especially on those who have the least access to technology, so they can report problems in their neighbourhood and improve their living conditions,” said Uval, a Uruguayan who represents Open Data, Transparency and Access to Information (DATA), the organisation behind Por mi Barrio.

The key, experts say, lies in making open data and public policies on transparency a means to achieving social change, and not an end in themselves.

Moreover, if all information were open in real time, public policies and people’s response to social problems could be more effective.

“If government information were in a totally open format that would enable a political scientist to know where the inequality lies – through the GINI index, which measures it, for example – and to combine it with data related to economic or population growth, we could make better decisions,” Iris Palma told IPS.

Palma is the executive director of the non-governmental organisation DatosElSalvador, dedicated to securing the release of public information in that Central American country.

Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike – in easily managed formats.

For example, if an economist were to request information from a census, a digital version would be easier, to analyse the data using models and statistical programmes, instead of receiving them only in print.

The concept of open government stipulates that public administration should be transparent, provide easy access to information, be held accountable to the citizens, and integrate them in decision-making.

In the world’s most unequal region, governed by authoritarian regimes for decades, the concept of a participative government is relatively recent.

“We went from states and governments that operated on the basis of secrecy to a radical change, based on openness,” Scrollini said.

“That poses new challenges, because information should be used, and to be used, policies are needed to help people do so, and people need to be empowered,” he added.

Nevertheless, civil society in Latin America is forging ahead. For example, people in Mexico can find out how their tax money is used through the Open Budget programme.

In the region, the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency brings together efforts to monitor the activities of the legislatures of nine countries in the region.

Meanwhile, in Costa Rica, a group of enterprising young people took public data from the Economy Ministry to create a smart phone app called “Ahorre Más”, which helps people make decisions when they’re shopping in the supermarket.

“With respect to the issue of open government, Latin America and the Caribbean are a step ahead, and are in the vanguard around the world,” said Alejandra Naser, an Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) researcher who led a workshop on open government during this week’s regional meeting.

“It is precisely for that reason that we want to reinforce the movement with tools for decision-makers,” she added.

The challenge is how to get citizens involved in these processes.

Scrollini says technology cannot be the only route to achieve open data, and calls for a rethinking of traditional social input tools, such as community workshops or neighbourhood meetings, to figure out how people’s ideas can be incorporated into the design of these policies.

Other methods target key segments of the population, which could later foment greater use by other social sectors – from marathon sessions where the groups are invited to work with data to broader programmes with the users of the future.

“We actively work on ‘hackathons’ (an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development collaborate intensively on software projects), to get journalists involved, because these reporters then foment the involvement of society at large,” said Cristina Zubillaga, assistant executive director of the National Agency for e-Government and Information Society, a Uruguayan government agency.

At the same time, she said, “we work with academia to train students in data management.”

International development aid, meanwhile, the big source of financing for these programmes in the region, underlines that it is essential to support civil society groups that already have some experience and can serve as spearheads.

“We support organisations that can translate information into easily understood terms, showing people that they can get involved and that the availability of information affects and involves them,” Ana Sofía Ruiz, an official with the Dutch development organisation HIVOS’ Central America programme, told IPS.

“We are trying to draw people in, to get them involved in this,” said the representative of HIVOS, which has financed projects like Ojo al Voto, a Costa Rican initiative that provided independent information during this year’s presidential and legislative elections.

Ojo al Voto wants to help provide oversight of the work of the Costa Rican parliament.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

President Obama's new executive order could make the U.S. government among the world’s most transparent. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 9 2013 (IPS)

President Barack Obama has initiated a potential sea change in U.S government accountability, unveiling Thursday an executive order mandating all federal agencies to make openness and public accessibility the default methods for handling official data.

Depending on how the order and related rules are implemented, the change could make the U.S. government among the world’s most transparent, at least with regard to non-secret information. Elated supporters – including many longstanding critics of government secrecy – suggest that the move now offers a potent model for other countries that have expressed interest in increasing their transparency."If you release the data, people will be able to find ways to analyse it in ways that make sense.” -- Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

“It’s really reassuring to see this issue get formalised in an executive order, which constitutes a major step in updating how government information gets disseminated,” Dave Maass, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights advocacy group, told IPS.

“One of the most important aspects of this order is that it will force the government not only to release vastly more data but to do so in a more standardised format. Over the past several years, many policy experts have been doing great stuff with ‘big data’, but so far not much of that has been machine readable, meaning that it’s been very difficult to collate and analyse.”

Maass notes that the move will impact on both agencies’ input and output responsibilities, and thus will do much to ensure that government information is accurate to begin with, prior to its release. Still, that now puts additional onus on analysts to come up with inventive ways of using any massive new streams of data.

“While some journalists have had trouble with big data dumps, there have been notable examples – for instance, surrounding WikiLeaks – in which we’ve seen that people are able to sort through huge amounts of data and come up with innovative ways of parsing that information,” he says.

“I think the key here is that if you release the data, people will be able to find ways to analyse it in ways that make sense.”

New mindset

The new moves are mirroring a broader international discussion over digital standards among fast-changing industries. While governments, including Washington, have been relatively slow to adopt such new standards, Thursday’s executive order should now speed that process up.

The new policies build on but greatly expand a series of steps taken by the Obama administration in recent years, beginning with a directive in 2009 that set a series of deadlines towards increased transparency. March 2012 then saw the release of a new government-wide strategy paper.

While advocates of government openness cautiously applauded these moves, many continued to push the administration to do far more, urging the adoption of a new mindset altogether.

Thursday’s order “is significantly different from the open data policies that have come before it”, John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington advocacy group that has been at the forefront of the push for greater government transparency, wrote Thursday on the group’s website.

“This Executive Order and the new policies that accompany it cover a lot of ground, building public reporting systems, adding new goals, and laying out new principles for openness … Most importantly, though, the Executive Order takes on one of the most important, trickiest questions that these policies face – how can we reset the default to openness when there is so much data?”

At least 48 governments have now committed to the Open Government Partnership, a set of principles in favour of greater transparency. Concrete implementation has been slow, however, and Wonderlich suggests says the United States now offers an important model.

The partnership “has spawned a huge number of similar commitments from governments around the world … [exhibiting] enthusiasm that needs an example of where to head next,” he writes, noting that Obama’s policy changes constitute a “new approach to open data, moving beyond rhetoric and aspiration”.

Troves

While many advocates are seeing the new policies in terms of facilitating public oversight, the White House is emphasising the entrepreneurial potential of this new data availability.

“One of the things we’re doing to fuel more private sector innovation and discovery is to make vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history,” President Obama said Thursday.

The administration is calling the executive order “historic”. But it also points to previous examples of government data leading to major consumer services, including regarding government weather satellites, agricultural advisory services and the Global Positioning System (GPS).

“This move will make troves of previously inaccessible or unmanageable data easily available to entrepreneurs, researchers and others who can use that data to generate new products and services, build businesses and create jobs,” Todd Park, the White House’s chief technology officer, told reporters Thursday.

“In fact, just … two types of open government data, weather and GPS, alone have added tens of billions of dollars in annual value to the American economy, as basically the government has given taxpayers back the data that they pay for.”

A website, data.gov, soon to be expanded, will serve as a central hub for the new initiatives. Indeed, while the new policies are unique in their application across the federal government, recent years have seen a substantial increase in “open data” projects in federal agencies, covering health, education, finance and other fields.

Foremost among these is the State Department’s foreign assistance “dashboard”, which began operating in late 2010 and is seen as a central component in bringing the United States in compliance with a global standards agreement known as the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Aimed at offering regular data updates on all federal agencies with foreign assistance budgets, the U.S. system is to be fully up and running by 2015.

“Endorsed by the [Obama] administration in 2011, IATI has demonstrated that it is only through the use of open data standards and a presumption to publish that information can be understood, compared and become useful to a wide range of users. To its great credit, the new Executive Order recognises these principles,” David Hall Matthews, managing director of Publish What You Fund, a London-based advocacy group, told IPS, calling the policy a “step change” in Washington’s approach to open data.

“In the specific area of foreign assistance, data from U.S. agencies will be most helpful to other agencies – as well as to other international donors and to recipients – when it is accessible, timely, complete and as granular as possible. We are delighted that the new policy indicates exactly that.”