Critical reflections on 15 years of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)

This special section of The Extractive Industries and Society brings together viewpoints and research articles 15 years after the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) was launched, which reflect critically on the extent to which the EITI informs, empowers and improves resource governance. The papers provide important insight into the impact and effectiveness of the EITI, the role of civil society in the EITI process, the need to make disclosure more relevant to citizens and local communities, and the national politics of transparency in resource governance. While transparency itself is insufficient in addressing the multifaceted problems resource-rich countries face, revenue transparency can be viewed as an ‘entry point’ into a conflicting conversation between companies, governments and civil society where trust and consensus can be built on issues beyond revenue. Future work needs to evaluate the effect of EITI more fully in the context of other initiatives operating globally and at the national and subnational levels, and for what and for whom these spaces of policy and practice are being framed and produced

Neopatrimonialism, good governance, corruption and accounting in Africa: idealism vs pragmatism

Purpose: The aim is to reflect on how best to design, implement and assess accounting reforms in Africa. Design/methodology/approach: A cross-disciplinary literature review Findings: Whilst neopatrimonialism inhibits optimal development some forms do not block it. Such governance often permeates African politics and reforms directed at its elimination may fail due to lack of political will. Thus accounting reforms should recognise their political feasibility and be directed at areas congruent with strengthening attributes of a developmental state. Research limitations/implications: There is a need to evaluate accounting reforms with respect to the level of a country’s development, relate them to its political governance, and evaluate them with respect to incremental rather than absolute achievement of their aims. Practical implications: Rather than relying on imported ‘best practice’ accounting standards and systems, there is a need for greater indigenous involvement to create systems that meet local needs and circumstances to increase indigenous accounting capacity and will to reform. Social implications: Whilst the push to good governance is a desirable ideal, reforms need to be pragmatic with respect to feasibility. Originality/value: The paper relates recent work on development to accounting reform in Africa which has been neglected by accounting scholars and practitioners

Object-Oriented Integration of Legacy Systems -

This paper presents an overview of the Persistence product, an objected-oriented interface to relational databases, that has been tested on the integration of multiple heterogeneous relational systems. We describe a sample active multidatabase application and propose extensions of the active properties offered by Persistence in order to use it as a mediator capable of managing global integrity constraints