The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been dire around the world, and resource-rich countries are no exception. Arguably, lower-income resource-dependent countries face the direst challenges. A “perfect storm” of the pandemic itself, acute governance challenges, socioeconomic crises, and a drop in commodity prices (particularly oil) has left resource-rich countries struggling to cope.

Further, and fundamentally, democratic institutions are under threat in some of these countries, as in other settings around the globe. Some governments have seized the crisis to further repress civil society and constrain consultation processes with local communities. At the same time, pre-pandemic challenges have not gone away, but are further magnified with the onset of COVID-19. These include the urgent need to mitigate climate change through transitioning from fossil fuels to green energy; rising poverty levels; and persistent corruption and misgovernance in the extractive industries of oil, gas, and mining.

Against this daunting backdrop of multiple overlapping crises, the Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption project, the Natural Resource Governance Institute, and the Transparency and Accountability Initiative hosted a virtual convening in late October 2020 to discuss the future of natural resource governance. Over 40 participants came from around the world and included experts in natural resource governance as well as the development, climate, governance, and transparency fields more broadly, with the goals of opening new ways of thinking about natural resource governance global (and local) architecture and better responding to the short- and long-term challenges posed by COVID-19.

Read the full article about natural resource governance by Norman Eisen et al. at Brookings.