Corruption in the extractive industry sector reinventing trusted governance "Iraqi Case"

Abstract

In the natural resource governance, corruption and transparency both got high attraction from the public and worldwide institutions, which focus on transparency, corruption and good governance. Tackling corruption in extractive industry in countries endowed with natural resources is the core concern for the people, yet governments in most developing countries are not concerned about being prepared for the transparency and accountability initiatives for creating open governments. This study offers a review existing literature aiming at evaluating the impact of E-Government for transparency and accountability in the extractive industry sector in Iraq since 2003. In fact, the natural resource governance needs good governance principles to be enforced for improving transparency and accountability between the government and the companies during, licensing, exploration, contracting, extraction, revenue generation and the allocation process of the revenues. While, E- Governance has got international attention from developed and developing countries, the initiative started with Kimberly Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), followed by the Global Witness/ Publish What You Pay Coalition (PWYP), with the recent emergence of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Many resource abundant countries such as Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, Angola, etc, underperform in terms of socio-economic development, those countries face the ‘the resource curse’ as an economic phenomenon, which is interlinked to the politics of resource governance. Indeed, corruption and transparency as the main principles of pure governance in natural resources set the picture of government for being accountable for his populations. This study aims in answering this thesis:

In the absence of E-Government, corruption hampered the revenues in Iraq similarly as many other rentier states