Understanding oil contracts

While I worked at OpenOil in 2012, I helped coordinate a booksprint and took part in it as a target reader, which produced a book to help the non-expert navigate and actually understand oil contracts. It was produced in recognition that simply pushing for contracts to be published wasn’t that helpful for civil society, because the contracts were written in legalese, and it was difficult for non-lawyers to understand what the consequences were for their country, let alone their advocacy strategy. We brought together lawyers, activists, people from government ministries and campaigners, to produce the book from start to finish in five days. It’s now been translated into Arabic, French and Spanish, all available from the OpenOil site.