The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI): Using Global Hybrid Regulation to Promote Domestic Governance Reform

preprint current to 22 March 2020.preprint current to 22 March 2020.preprint current to 22 March 2020.Preprint current as of 22 March 2020 of chapter in Benedict Kingsbury and Richard B. Stewart, eds, Global Hybrid and Private Governance: Standard-setting, Market Regulation, and Institutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2020).

This chapter examines the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a public-private regulatory partnership that jointly creates and oversees transparency and accountability standards in the extractive sector. The chapter argues that EITI has added something new to the landscape of global regulatory mechanisms, not by creating a set of global transparency standards in the extractive sector, but by designing a combination of three institutional elements to influence domestic compliance with global norms: a public-private system of implementation oversight, a mechanism for external review, and allowing for the creation of flexible, context-specific national plans. EITI is best understood as a pioneer model for a growing number of “public governance-oriented multi-stakeholder initiatives,” whose main objective is to improve domestic governance systems in countries implementing global standards.