NRGI’s board of directors consists of:

 

Smita Singh Smita Singh
Interim Chair

Smita Singh was the founding director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development Program. Under her leadership, the program carried out extensive international grant-making and started several new initiatives, including the Think Tank Initiative, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and the Partnership for Quality Education in Developing Countries.

At the foundation, Singh also helped create the International Initiative in Impact Evaluation, a new international agency devoted to improving the measurement of results in development interventions. She also initiated the foundation’s efforts to reform development assistance policy and practices, which included seeding the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

Singh has lived and worked in several countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, her research interests focus on the comparative political economy of developing countries. She has also worked for the Commission on National and Community Service (now the Corporation for National Service), developing higher education initiatives and funding strategies for dispersing grants to community service and service-learning projects at over 200 colleges and universities. Before joining the commission, she worked at ABC News “Nightline” and, prior to that, with community-based women's organizations in India.

Beyond NRGI, Singh sits on the governing boards of Oxfam America, Twaweza, the International Budget Partnership, and the Center for Global Development. She is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and serves on the U.S. President’s Global Development Council.

Ernest Aryeetey Ernest Aryeetey

Ernest Aryeetey, vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, brings deep technical expertise to NRGI. He formerly ran the Institute of Statistical and Economic Research, and is a nonresident senior fellow with the Africa Growth Initiative in the Global Economy and Development program of the Brookings Institution, where he served as director from 2009-2010. He is a well-known and respected scholar who has expressed his deep concern about Ghana’s development trajectory and is well placed to impact its course.


Joseph Bell Joseph Bell (ex officio)

Joseph Bell is senior counsel at Hogan Lovells. His focus since 2004 has been on natural resource issues—policy and commercial. Working mostly pro-bono and principally in Africa and Asia, he has represented governments in mining and agricultural concession negotiations and has advised regarding tax and royalty policies, stabilization agreements and other economic issues related to large concessions. He has also advised with respect to the establishment of natural resource management funds and general issues of transparency and governance. He was one of the authors of the initial draft of the Natural Resource Charter.

He was an advisor in 1989-1990 to the Polish Ministry of Finance. In the same period, he co-founded the Project for Economic Reform in Ukraine. Later he established the Warsaw office of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells). In 2014 the Polish government awarded him the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit for his support and work "at the initial and most difficult stage of [Poland's] transformation.”

Prior to private practice, he worked for the U.S. Justice and Treasury Departments, the Federal Energy Administration and the Cabinet Task Force on Oil Import Control. He also taught at the Duke Law and Public Policy Schools.

He is the former chair of the International Senior Lawyers Project, a founding director of the Polish American Freedom Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2010 he received the American Lawyer Life Time Achievement Award.


Paul Collier Paul Collier

Sir Paul Collier is professor of economics and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a professorial fellow of St. Antony’s College. Until September 2012, he was a professor at Oxford’s Department of Economics and director of its Centre for the Study of African Economies. He is currently a professeur invité at Sciences Po.

From 1998 to 2003, Collier took a public service leave to direct the Research Development Department of the World Bank. Today he advises the bank’s International Finance Corporation, as well as the International Monetary Fund’s strategy and policy department.

In 2008 Collier was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire “for services to scholarship and development.” In 2013, he won the A.SK Social Science Award. In 2014, he was knighted.

Collier has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His books include The Bottom Billion (Oxford University Press, 2007), which won the Lionel Gelber, Arthur Ross and Corine prizes and was the joint winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book prize; Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (Vintage Books, 2009); The Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press and Penguin, 2013). His current research concerns the use of natural resources for development, urbanization, the economics of HIV/AIDS, and the economics and social psychology of culture.

Alan Detheridge Alan Detheridge

Alan Detheridge spent 30 years with the Royal Dutch Shell Group, retiring in April 2007 as the group’s vice president for external affairs. In addition to NRGI’s board, where he chairs the finance and audit committee, he sits on the boards of Management Sciences for Health, the Open Contracting Partnership and Publish What You Pay.

Sean Hinton Sean Hinton

Sean Hinton joined the Open Society Foundations in September 2015 as chief executive officer of the Soros Economic Development Fund and director of the Economic Advancement Program.

Prior to this, Sean was principal of Terbish Partners, which he founded in 2007 to provide strategic advisory services on cross-border transactions in China, Mongolia and Africa, focusing on the social and economic impact of large-scale extractive investments. He was a long-term senior advisor to Goldman Sachs (Asia) and the Rio Tinto group. Sean’s other roles included: deputy-chairman of SouthGobi Resources; special advisor to the CEO of SOHO China; and chairman of China Networks.

Sean has over 25 years of experience in China and Mongolia particularly, where he first lived from 1988-1995. He subsequently served as Mongolia’s first honorary consul-general in Australia.

Sean began his career as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in its Sydney and London offices, and was a specialist in McKinsey’s media and entertainment practice. He studied at the GSMD in London, the University of Cambridge and the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and serves on the International Advisory Board of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland. On the NRGI board, Sean chairs the nominations committee.

Yuli Ismartono Yuli Ismartono

Yuli Ismartono is the publisher of Tempo English, a unit of Tempo, Indonesia’s largest news weekly magazine, and the founder and managing editor of AsiaViews, a monthly regional magazine distributed as a news supplement in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

An expert in journalism and media relations, Ismartono worked for Tempo from 1983 to 1994, covering conflict areas and interviewing leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Benazir Bhutto, Dim Dae Jung, and King Norodom Sihanouk. When Indonesia’s New Order regime banned Tempo in 1994, Ismartono provided strategic communications support to a number of companies, including Freeport Indonesia. She rejoined Tempo in 2002, when the magazine resumed publishing following the establishment of a reformist government, as chief editor of Tempo English, a unit of the newly-formed Tempo Media Group.

Beyond NRGI, Ismartono sits on the board of the Bali-based Coral Triangle Center, launched by the Nature Conservancy in 2000 to assist in the capacity-building of tropical marine conservation managers and practitioners in seven Asia-Pacific countries, and Prestasi Junior Indonesia, a foundation that provides young Indonesians with extra-curricular training to value free enterprise, business and economics through school-to-work initiatives. She also supports Altsean-Burma, a non-profit organization working to advocate democracy in Myanmar, and the Washington-based consultancy firm APCO, where she is a member of the International Advisory Council.

Ismartono completed her undergraduate studies in political science in New Delhi, India, and her graduate studies in journalism at Syracuse University in New York. She is a member of AJI (Alliance of Independence Journalists), the Jakarta Editors Club, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand, and the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club. She is also an Eisenhower Fellow.

Warren Krafchik Warren Krafchik

Warren Krafchik is the executive director of the International Budget Partnership.

He joined IBP in 2001 from South Africa, where he founded one of the first institutions to pioneer independent budget monitoring in the global South. Under his leadership, IBP grew from a small convening organization to a globally recognized international hub for civil society public finance research, capacity building and advocacy.

Krafchik is a founding member and past civil society chair of the Open Government Partnership, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the Impumelelo Innovations Award program. Beyond NRGI, he sits on the board of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative.

Krafchik is an economist by training and a frequent author and speaker on public finance systems, accountability and development.

Lourdes Melgar Lourdes Melgar

Lourdes Melgar, Ph.D., is a nonresident fellow at the Baker Institute Center for Energy. She is also a research affiliate at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was the 2016-17 Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow.

From February 2014 to July 2016, Melgar served as Mexico’s deputy secretary of energy for hydrocarbons and was a member of Pemex’s board of directors. She was Mexico’s under-secretary for electricity from December 2012 to February 2014, during which she also served on the board of the Federal Electricity Commission. During her tenure, she played a key role in the design, negotiation and implementation of Mexico’s energy reform. Previously, she held various positions in Mexico's Foreign Service.

Melgar was founding director of the Center for Sustainability and Business at the Tecnológico de Monterrey’s EGADE Business School. She has been a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also a national researcher with the Mexican Council on Science and Technology (CONACYT). Melgar received a bachelor’s degree with honors from Mount Holyoke College and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT.

Carole Nakhle Carole Nakhle

Dr. Carole Nakhle is the founder and CEO of Crystol Energy. An energy economist, she has worked with oil and gas companies (IOCs and NOCs), governments and policy-makers, international organizations, academic institutions and think tanks, globally. She is active on the board of NRGI, a program advisor to the Washington, D.C.-based International Tax and Investment Centre, and a regular contributor to Geopolitical Intelligence Services and the Executive Sessions on the Political Economy of Extractive Industries at Columbia University in New York.

She is also involved in the OECD Policy Dialogue on natural resource-based development and acts as a visiting lecturer at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. She lectures and supervises postgraduate research at the University of Surrey in the U.K., and Saint Joseph University in Beirut.

Nakhle is a respected contributor to the global debate on energy matters, with more than 150 articles in academic journals, newspapers and magazines to her credit, as well as being a prominent speaker at international industry conferences. She has reviewed studies, books and reports for leading publishing houses and major consulting firms and is an avid commentator on energy in the international media. She has appeared on Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNBC and CNN, among others. She is the executive editor of Newsweek’s special edition, “The Future of Innovation in the Oil and Gas Industry.”

Nakhle is also the author of two widely acclaimed books: “Petroleum Taxation: Sharing the Wealth,” published in 2008, re-printed in 2012, and used as primary reference in leading universities and industry training courses; and “Out of the Energy Labyrinth,” co-authored with Lord David Howell, former secretary of state for energy in the U.K. She is currently working on a new book, “Petroleum Fiscal Regimes and Wealth Management.”

Nakhle has worked on energy projects in more than 40 countries and has been on exploratory visits to the Arctic and North Sea. She is also the director of the not-for-profit organization Access for Women in Energy, which she founded in 2007 to support the development of women in the energy sector worldwide.

In 2017, she gave evidence to the U.K. Parliament International Relations Committee on oil markets and the transformation of power in the Middle East and implications for the U.K. policy. In the same year, she received the Honorary Professional Recognition Award from the Tunisian minister of energy, mines and renewable energy.

Elena Panfilova Elena Panfilova

Elena A. Panfilova is the chair of the Center for Anti-Corruption Research and Initiative Transparency International - Russia, TI’s Russian chapter, which she founded in 1999. She served as its executive director until July 2014, when she became the chapter’s chair. She has been an academic, consultant and activist, held positions in the OECD and the Institute for Economy in Transition and became a member of the Russian Governmental Commission on Open Government. In August 2014, she became head of the Laboratory for Anti-Corruption Policy (which she founded in 2008), working to promote transparency and civil society. Since 2007, she has taught anti-corruption at the State University Higher School of Economics and Moscow State University. Elena was elected to the TI Board in 2011 and elected vice-chair in 2014.

Elena Panfilova Anthony Paul

Anthony Paul is a Trinidad & Tobago national. He has spent over 35 years in the oil and gas industry, in technical, commercial, managerial and leadership roles across the value and decision chains. As a strategy consultant, he uses the unique experience of having worked at senior levels with governments, investors and operators to find mutually beneficial ways of ensuring that more value from extractive resources is retained in locations of oil, gas and minerals production.

In designing and implementing governance frameworks, he draws heavily on the risk-management and business strategy best practice approaches utilized by industry. Through resource and situational analyses, he connects to national development aspirations by aligning policy through regulatory and administrative instruments to operational delivery systems and procedures that hold stakeholders accountable by enshrining transparency in decision-making.

Working with NGOs, he has published and taught on value creation and retention through good governance, capacity development and local content and participation.

He is chairman of the Trinidad & Tobago Permanent Local Content Committee, which is charged with increasing the level of participation of Trinidad & Tobago individuals and firms in providing skills, goods and services to the petroleum sector and the transfer of knowledge and technology to locals. He has been a member of the advisory council of NRGI and its precursors (Revenue Watch Institute and Natural Resource Charter) since 2007.

He has advised governments, companies, multilateral agencies and NGOs in several countries in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, as well as Timor-Leste and Iraq.

He has worked with the Trinidad & Tobago Ministry of Energy as director of geology and geophysics; senior geophysicist at Petrotrin, Trinidad & Tobago’s national oil company; exploration and appraisal program manager at Amoco Trinidad and BP Trinidad & Tobago; resource manager for producing oil assets and sustainable developments manager for natural gas fields at BP Trinidad & Tobago; and e-business strategy consultant with BP.

He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in geology from Imperial College of Science & Technology, University of London, and an M.S. in geophysics from the University of Houston, Texas.


Michael Spence Michael Spence (ex officio)

Michael Spence served as the chairman of an Independent Commission on Growth in Developing Countries from 2006-2010, the life of the commission.

He is professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, professor emeritus of management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Spence received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001, and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1982, for work on markets with asymmetrical information.

He is the author of the book The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2011). His research and teaching focus mainly on growth patterns and policies in a wide range of developed and developing countries.

He served as dean of the Stanford Business School from 1990 to 1999. As dean, he oversaw the finances, organization and educational policies of the school. He served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard from 1984-1990.

Spence serves on the board of MercadoLibre. He is a member of the board of the Stanford Management Company. He is a senior advisor to Oak Hill Investment Management and a consultant to PIMCO. He is the co-chair of the advisory board of the Asia Global Institute, based in Hong Kong. He recently became a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University.

Spence writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate, which are published globally.


Charles Wanguhu Charles Wanguhu

Charles Wanguhu is a Kenyan national and a human rights and governance practitioner. He is the founding coordinator of the Kenya Civil Society Platform on Oil and Gas. At the platform he coordinates civil society to provide a collective voice on oil, gas and broader extractive issues. He is an analyst on oil and gas in the African continent and has written widely on the political economy of oil exploration and production in Kenya.

Wanguhu previously headed the programme department at the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG), a think tank with a focus on the structural causes of corruption. He currently sits on its board. Prior to joining AfriCOG he worked with the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) and the Danish Institute for Human rights (DIHR) in Copenhagen undertaking research on business and human rights. Wanguhu is an alumnus of the Draper Hills Fellow Program at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He holds an LLM in international and commercial dispute resolution.