Dear Editor,
It is Day 1 of an executive workshop on the theme “Reversing the Resource Curse” organised by the Natural Resource Governance Institute and the School for Public Policy, Central European University, Budapest. Participants were given an overview of the so-called National Resource Charter Decision Chain: Domestic foundations for resource governance, discovery and deciding to extract, getting a good deal, managing revenues and investing for sustainable development.
All interesting indeed, but the most important thing to emerge is that the discussions (and the contentious issues!) that swirl in Guyana as we develop the oil sector are not in any way unique to Guyana. Additionally, it was good to note that Guyanese are very current in the discussion of the strategic areas of concern as we move to First Oil in 2020. While the media and civil society are castigated for the role they are playing, it is to their enormous credit that we are this current and relevant just four years after the oil discovery in 2015.
One final point is that there is a recurring view that it is not sufficient to be able to say that we have checks and balances, laws, mechanisms and institutions, as these mechanisms can easily be undermined. In the quest to get things right, we must go to root causes, i.e., political institutions and state capacity. No doubt, we are not ignoring these latter issues, and hopefully can work together to “get it right.”
Yours faithfully,
Thomas B. Singh
Director
University of Guyana GREEN
Institute
Faculty of Social Sciences
UG
