On Wednesday September 6th, the Ministry of Natural Resources issued a media release on what it says was the first in a planned series of Stakeholder Engagements on the draft Local Content Policy Framework for the country’s oil and gas sector. The desirability of recognizing and acceding to a culture of transparency in matters pertaining to the oil and gas industry has already become an issue for some measure of public discourse though it has to be said that what is unfolding at this time is what one might call a multi-level discourse with most of the questions being raised by a handful of individuals and institutions whose inquiries and concerns appear to derive from investigations into the experiences in the oil and gas sector elsewhere in the world.
On the other hand, there is the considerably larger group of ordinary Guyanese who are, as well, keen to be kept abreast of developments in the sector as they unfold, but whose basic knowledge of the sector and the issues that are important at this stage is rather more limited than that of the smaller, better-informed group.
