Covering Oil: A Reporter’s Guide to Energy and Development

For the vast majority of people in most resource-rich countries, natural wealth does not translate into prosperity, but instead leads to environmental and economic devastation, and hampers democratic reform.

Only an informed public can hold leaders to account. Yet local reporting often overlooks the legal, economic, and environmental implications of resource extraction. Covering Oil: A Reporter’s Guide to Energy and Development, a collaborative work of the Open Society Institute’s Revenue Watch program and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, aims to encourage rigorous reporting on these issues by providing practical information about the petroleum industry and the impact of resource wealth on a producing country.

“Journalists can play a crucial role in educating people in resource-rich countries on how the petroleum industry affects their lives,” said Julie McCarthy, the acting director of Revenue Watch. “But those reporters need access to information in order to know what questions to ask.”

The guidebook comes out of a series of organized workshops for journalists in the oil-exporting countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria, during which participants expressed a need for more information to help them understand the issues surrounding resource exploitation. In response to these consultative workshops, Covering Oil outlines the fundamentals of petroleum contracts, provides a glossary of relevant economic theory, and presents case studies of major public policy issues.

Covering Oil is the second in a series of Revenue Watch guidebooks targeting different audiences involved in the promotion of transparency and democratic accountability. The first, Follow the Money: A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues, was aimed at nongovernmental organizations.