Resource Extraction and Transparency (June 2006)

Part of the emerging discourse around economic justice has increasingly focused on public resource management – incorporating natural resources extraction, processing and utilisation, especially in the resource rich countries where the economies largely depend on these.

The emergent debates have also put on the agenda budgetary processes – calling on governments to account for how budgets are formulated and expended in the respective countries. We have seen a number of initiatives tracking resource extraction and expenditure, as well as the related issues of public service delivery in a number of countries and the emergence of movements such as ecological debt and reparations, and campaigns such as Publish What You Pay, among others.

Articles are available in pdf format [approximate file sizes in square brackets].

In this issue:

• Editorial (by Alice Kwaramba) [77 KB]
• The Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW): a project of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (by Tawanda Mutasah) [81 KB]
• Who Cursed Natural Resources in Southern Africa (by André Standing and Hennie van Vuuren) [174 KB]
• Multinational Capital's Responsibility for Africa's Resource Extraction Crisis (by Professor Patrick Bond) [203 KB]
• The China Factor in Southern Africa: New Partner or Patron (by Deprose Muchena) [144 KB]
• "Arrogant, Disrespectful, Aloof and Careless": South African Corporations in Africa (by Professor Patrick Bond and Tapera Kapuya) [113 KB]
• Effects of Extractive Industry on Communities in Southern Africa (by Ben van Tonder) [166 KB]
• Public Budgeting Transparency (by Masimba J. Manyana) [432 KB]
• Oil and Diamond revenue Transparency in Angola: Rhetoric and Reality (by Elias Isaac and Albertina Delgrado) [158 KB]
• Globalisation and its Challenges for Public Resource Management in Southern Africa (by Patricia Feeney) [150 KB]
• The State versus the People: Governance, Mining and the Transitional Regime in the DRC: the Case of Katanga (by Kirsten Hund and Didier Verbruggen) [124 KB]
• Legal Remedies for the Resource Curse in Home and Host Countries (by the Open Society Justice Initiative) [176 KB]
• Access to Information Key to Good Practice in Public resource Management (by Mzi Memeza) [165 KB]
• Resource Extraction in Southern Africa: Providing an Effective Regulatory Framework (by Louise Olivier) [97 KB]
• The State of Public Resource Management Regulation in Southern Africa (by Patrick Matibini) [190 KB]
• Enhancing Transparency in Budgets and Oil Revenues in the Caspian Basin: Civil Society has a Key Role (by Vugar Bayramov) [148 KB]
• Monitoring Public Service Delivery: AfriMAP's Approach (by Bronwyn Manby) [142 KB]
• The Private-Public Partnership Model: the Debswana Case (by Silibaziso Mtunzi) [243 KB]

OPENSPACE is the quarterly digest of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa. To order copies of the digest, please e-mail publications@osisa.org, or contact us.

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