Natural Resource Governance Institute


The Natural Resource Governance Institute is an independent nonprofit organisation dedicated to improving countries' governance over their natural resources to promote sustainable and inclusive development. The headquarters of NRGI are based in New York.

History

The Natural Resource Governance Institute was established through the merger of the Revenue Watch Institute and the Natural Resource Charter in 2013. Originally based in New York, NRGI has opened offices in London, Accra, Lima, Washington, D.C., Jakarta and Dar Es Salaam. This partly reflects its focus on Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Indonesia, Mexico Mongolia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Tunisia as "priority countries".

Organisation and Activities

The Natural Resource Governance Institute is led by a president, with Daniel Kaufmann currently serving in that role. Its activities are supervised by a board of directors, with Ernesto Zedillo as chair and Smita Singh as vice-chair. Finally, NRGI's leadership team and its board of directors benefit are supported by an Advisory Council co-chaired by Michael Spence and Joseph Bell. Other prominent figures affiliated with NRGI include Paul Collier, Ernest Aryeetey, Elena Panfilova, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, Peter Eigen, Antonio La Viña, Ilgar Mammadov, José Antonio Ocampo, Anya Schiffrin, Andrés Velasco, and Tony Venables.
In line with its mission, NRGI supports civil society organisations, government institutions, private sector enterprises, and the media with technical advice, advocacy, applied research, policy analysis, and capacity development with regard to natural resource governance. Key tools developed in that context include for example the 2017 Resource Governance Index, a map of resource projects, the Natural Resource Charter Benchmarking Framework, or the 2010 Revenue Watch Index. Notably, research and resources from NRGI have been featured by international media such as The Atlantic, Financial Times or Forbes, as well as national media in the concerned countries.

The Natural Resource Charter

The Natural Resource Charter is a document aimed at providing advice and policy options with regard to the management of resource wealth in order to help resource-rich countries use their natural resources for sustainable development. NRGI promotes the implementation of the Natural Resource Charter and provides policy advice with regard to this implementation process. The Natural Resource Charter consists of the following 12 Precepts, which are organised into three parts based on the chain of decisions involved in natural resource management:
The Resource Governance Index, developed by NRGI, measures the quality of countries' resource governance and ranks them accordingly. The index is constructed by sending a 149-item questionnaire to 150 experts in 81 countries, who research the issues raised in the questionnaire, compile documentation and complete the questionnaire. The quality of the survey data is then assessed by NRGI and enriched by further data on countries "enabling environments". Finally, NRGI calculates the index as a composite score out of the:
with higher scores indicating a better resource governance process.