Skip to main content
  • News
  • Events
  • Blog
  • Search

Natural Resource Governance Institute

  • Topics
    Beneficial ownership
    Economic diversification
    Measurement of environmental and social impacts
    Sovereign wealth funds
    Civic space
    Global initiatives
    Measurement of governance
    State-owned enterprises
    Commodity prices
    Legislation and regulation
    Open data
    Subnational governance
    Contract transparency and monitoring
    Licensing and negotiation
    Revenue management
    Tax policy and revenue collection
    Corruption
    Mandatory payment disclosure
    Revenue sharing
  • Approach
    • Stakeholders
      • Civil society actors
      • Government officials
      • Journalists and media
      • Parliaments and political parties
      • Private sector
    • Natural Resource Charter
    • Regional knowledge hubs
  • Countries
    NRGI Priority Countries
    Colombia
    Guinea
    Mongolia
    Tanzania
    Dem. Rep. of Congo
    Indonesia
    Myanmar
    Tunisia
    Ghana
    Mexico
    Nigeria
    NRGI Limited Engagement Countries
    Azerbaijan
    Lebanon
    Senegal
    Ukraine
    Bolivia
    Peru
    Uganda
    Zambia
    Kyrgyz Republic
    Philippines
    OTHER COUNTRIES
  • Learning
    • Training
      • Residential training courses
        • Advanced
        • Executive
        • Anglophone Africa
        • Francophone Africa
        • Asia-Pacific
        • Eurasia
        • Latin America
        • Middle East and North Africa
      • Online training courses
        • Massive open online course (MOOC)
        • Interactive course: Petronia
        • Massive Online Open Course (Español/Spanish)
      • Trainers' modules
        • (empty)
    • Primers
    • Glossary
  • Analysis & Tools
    • Publications
    • Tools
    • Economic models
  • About Us
    • What we do
      • Strategic plan
      • Country prioritization
    • NRGI impact
    • Board of Directors
    • Advisory Council
    • Leadership team
    • Experts and staff
    • Careers and opportunities
    • Contact us
    • Financials
    • Grant-making
    • Privacy policy
  • News
  • Events
  • Blog

You are here

  1. Home
  2. Blog

Philippines Has New Repository of Hydrocarbon and Mining Contracts, Powered by ResourceContracts.org

4 December 2015
Author
Alessandra Ordenes, Anders Pedersen, Charles Young
Topics
Contract transparency and monitoring, Open data
Countries
Philippines
Stakeholders
Civil society actors, Government officials, Journalists and media, Parliaments and political parties, Private sector
Precepts
P2 What are Natural Resource Charter precepts?
Social Sharing

This year, NRGI and EITI Philippines (PH-EITI) partnered to develop contracts.ph-eiti.org, a country site that uses the ResourceContracts.org platform for publishing contracts in an open data format. The collaboration was initiated in May, when PH-EITI participated in the Extractives Open Data Leaders program at the International Open Data Conference in Ottawa.

In total, 87 contracts—44 main contracts and 43 supporting documents—are disclosed at contracts.ph-eiti.org. All contracts contain associated metadata covering mineral and hydrocarbon resources, and annotations and detailed technical summaries of the key contract terms are underway.

ResourceContracts.org—an open-source platform relaunched at the Open Government Partnership Conference in Mexico by NRGI, the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the World Bank—is the key piece of technical infrastructure enabling the publication of the contracts. As an early adopter of the platform, PH-EITI provided important input on its development.

With the use of ResourceContracts.org as a publication platform, the Philippines also becomes the first EITI country to utilize the Open Contracting Data Standard for contract publication.

From PDFs to machine-readable, searchable contracts

Prior to development of the new platform, EITI Philippines released Philippines extractive contracts in the static PDF format. This meant they were not machine-readable and largely unsearchable. Consequently, finding key terms in extractive contracts was challenging for users, who often had to sift through numerous clauses to find a definition or the conditions of a specific obligation. Publication of contracts in machine-readable/open data format (as in ResourceContracts.org), allows interested parties to search, copy and download them easily. The new site also enables easier navigation of multiple types of documents relating to the same main contract.

At the recent Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership NRGI arranged a workshop focused on extractives contracts and open data for CSOs. This offered PH-EITI an opportunity to present their site and receive feedback from participants.

 

The platform organizes information on a company and project basis according to company name, commodity type and the year the contract was signed. This is valuable for stakeholders who don't know what commodities are being produced in their locality, or the number of companies and extractive projects in their area.

Disclosure of supporting documents

Beyond contract disclosure, PH-EITI recognizes the importance of providing easy access to auxiliary permits, licenses and other supporting documents that provide additional information on contractual stipulations. The ResourceContracts.org platform enabled PH-EITI to disclose all attachments to the contracts in an effort to go further than simple disclosure.

The collaboration has fostered several takeaways and ideas for next steps:

  • NRGI has gained valuable input on improvements to the design, data collection process and administrator interface.
  • For PH-EITI, the search options of the platform will be complemented by annotations that will provide further explanation of concepts and contractual stipulations; information on related laws and jurisprudence; and cross references to other relevant documents. Contractual stipulations related to EITI requirements will be annotated. Additional features are forthcoming: one is an indication of the project's location, i.e. whether a project is within mineral reservations or within ancestral domain.
At the recent Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership NRGI arranged a workshop focused on extractives contracts and open data for CSOs. This offered PH-EITI an opportunity to present their site and receive feedback from participants.

 

Technical assistance

In order to ensure strong, continued collaboration and learning, NRGI and PH-EITI scheduled weekly calls during the project's implementation period. These calls provided technical assistance and immediately identified and addressed potential concerns regarding the platform and around technical issues that arose.

A ResourceContracts.org administrator's guide provided PH-EITI with step-by-step guidance for uploading contracts, adding metadata and annotating contracts. It also defined technical standards. The guide is continually updated as new functionality is added to ResourceContracts.org.

Benefit to stakeholders

While developing the platform, PH-EITI gathered stakeholders from government agencies and civil society to collect input on how they might best benefit from the project; as a result, agencies in charge of regulation and revenue collection will be able to use the platform to scrutinize company obligations. Aside from what is mandated by law, these agencies will be able to examine whether and if there are additional contractual obligations that companies should be liable for under certain conditions. Officials at agencies in charge of policy formulation, on the other hand, expressed their interest in using the platform to compare contractual obligations of various companies and see if this can inform the ongoing reforms being undertaken in the country's mining fiscal regime. Members of civil society and the media have welcomed the platform's search functions and usability, noting that this will enable them to better hold companies to account in instances where there are alleged violations of the law or contract.

Seeking government partners

With the successful completion of the PH-EITI contract site, the partners behind ResourceContracts.org now invite other interested government agencies or EITI offices to collaborate on similar country sites. We invite interested parties to get in touch directly here.

About ResourceContracts.org

The ResourceContracts platform is an online, searchable and user-friendly database of publicly available oil, gas and mining contracts from around the world. Users can search contracts by country, by natural resource or by type of contract; view summaries of key social, environmental, fiscal and operational provisions; and download full contracts. ResourceContracts.org seeks to maximize public access to, and comprehension of, mining, oil, and gas contracts, helping to reduce information asymmetries in natural resource contracting. ResourceContracts.org is jointly managed by the Natural Resource Governance Institute, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the World Bank.

Marie Gay Alessandra Ordenes is the national coordinator for EITI Philippines and took part in the Extractives Open Data Leaders program hosted by NRGI in 2015. Anders Pedersen is an open data officer with NRGI. Charles Young is a technical consultant working with NRGI.

Related content

Improving OGP Action Plans: Beneficial Ownership, Contract Transparency and Environmental Data

Marie Lintzer, Christina Tecson
23 March 2016

Closing the Gap: Strengthening the Development and Implementation of Natural Resource Commitments in the Open Government Partnership

13 November 2017

Open Contracting for Oil, Gas and Mineral Rights: Shining a Light on Good Practice

26 June 2018

Passation de marchés ouverte pour les droits pétroliers, gaziers et miniers: gros plan sur les bonnes pratiques

28 June 2018

Contrataciones abiertas para los derechos de petróleo, gas y minería: arrojar luz sobre las buenas practices

Briefing
9 January 2019

Recent Tweets

  • NRGI
    NRGI
    @NRGInstitute
    Follow @NRGInstitute
    .@MaguiBatlle conversa de la #TransiciónEnergética con la Secretaria de Política Minera de #Argentina después de as… t.co/tHREAnsH6a
    15 hours 50 min ago.
    Reply Retweet Favorite
  • NRGI
    NRGI
    @NRGInstitute
    Follow @NRGInstitute
    Who owns extractive companies in #Myanmar, and why does it matter? #beneficialownership 👉 t.co/Dex3oBFe4J t.co/at0f2kNLWf
    16 hours 1 min ago.
    Reply Retweet Favorite
  • NRGI
    NRGI
    @NRGInstitute
    Follow @NRGInstitute
    "#ElectricVehicles Supply Chain Presents Opportunities and Risks for Mineral Producers"-- new blog post from NRGI's… t.co/OTtJG9vEVl
    18 hours 35 min ago.
    Reply Retweet Favorite
  • NRGI
    NRGI
    @NRGInstitute
    Follow @NRGInstitute
    National Oil Company Database update alert 📊 As of this morning this one-of-a-kind resource includes data through 2… t.co/V1wbHEcAeU
    19 hours 18 min ago.
    Reply Retweet Favorite
  • NRGI
    NRGI
    @NRGInstitute
    Follow @NRGInstitute
    Learn more about critical aspects of state oil company governance with NRGI's National #Oil Company Database:… t.co/aLPPJ3PacE
    1 day 17 hours ago.
    Reply Retweet Favorite
Helping people to realize the benefits of their countries’ endowments of oil, gas and minerals.
Follow on Facebook Follow on Twitter Subscribe to Updates
  • Topics
    Beneficial ownership
    Civic space
    Commodity prices
    Contract transparency and monitoring
    Corruption
    Economic diversification
    Global initiatives
    Legislation and regulation
    Licensing and negotiation
    Mandatory payment disclosure
    Measurement of environmental and social impacts
    Measurement of governance
    Open data
    Revenue management
    Revenue sharing
    Sovereign wealth funds
    State-owned enterprises
    Subnational governance
    Tax policy and revenue collection
  • Approach
    Array
  • Priority
    Countries
    • Colombia
    • Dem. Rep. of Congo
    • Ghana
    • Guinea
    • Indonesia
    • Mexico
    • Mongolia
    • Myanmar
    • Nigeria
    • Tanzania
    • Tunisia
  • Learning
    • Training
    • Primers
  • Analysis & Tools
    Array
  • About Us
    • What we do
    • NRGI impact
    • Board of Directors
    • Advisory Council
    • Leadership team
    • Experts and staff
    • Careers and opportunities
    • Contact us
    • Financials
    • Grant-making
    • Privacy policy
  • News
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Search