Publish What You Pay Wins the 2010 Commitment to Development Award

Washington, D.C. (November 15, 2010) - Publish What You Pay, a global civil society coalition dedicated to promoting revenue transparency in the oil, gas, and mining industries, is the 2010 winner of the Commitment to Development “Ideas to Action” Award, sponsored jointly by the Center for Global Development (CGD) and Foreign Policy magazine.

The award, bestowed annually since 2003, honors an individual or organization from the rich world that has made a significant contribution to changing attitudes and policies toward the developing world. CGD and Foreign Policy will present Publish What You Pay with the award during a public event on December 1, 2010.

Publish What You Pay works around the globe to help citizens of resource-rich countries hold their governments accountable for the payment, receipt, and management of revenues derived from oil, gas, and mining. It is a global civil society coalition with member organizations in more than 70 nations-industrialized as well as developing countries. The 2010 Commitment to Development Award gives special recognition to Publish What You Pay United States for its role this year in promoting the Cardin-Lugar Transparency Provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This landmark provision requires all oil, gas, and mining companies registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to publish how much they pay to foreign countries and the U.S. government.

"Publish What You Pay's dedication to increasing openness about revenues in resource-rich countries reflects CGD's conviction that development is about more than aid," said CGD president Nancy Birdsall. "We hope this award shines a spotlight on the passage of the Cardin-Lugar Amendment and encourages the Securities and Exchange Commission to move quickly to put into place regulations that effectively enforce the provision."

"This award is a testament to the commitment and hard work of the over 600 organizations that work together around the world as Publish What You Pay," said Publish What You Pay United States director Isabel Munilla. "The success of our campaign to pass the Cardin-Lugar provision shows that transparency is not a partisan issue."

"In a time when aid budgets are tight, this measure will go a long way to unlocking resources to fight poverty," Munilla said. "But we're not done. Other key markets must sign on to this effort to cover the largest possible number of oil, gas and mining companies. With the help of our congressional champions, the Center for Global Development, and others, we are confident that we can make this happen."

"The efforts of Publish What You Pay to promote transparency within governments and extractive industries are an innovative approach that epitomize the kind of smart, practical interventions that have large consequences that deserve to be widely recognized," said Moisés Naím, former Foreign Policy editor-in-chief.

Birdsall and Naím co-chair the award's distinguished selection panel which includes: Eveline Herfkens, founder of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Campaign and former Dutch minister of development cooperation; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director at the World Bank and former minister of finance and foreign affairs in Nigeria; Sebastian Mallaby, director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; Kevin Watkins, director of UNESCO's Education for All Global Monitoring Report; Diego Hidalgo Schnur, winner of the 2009 Commitment to Development Award; and Susan Glasser, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine.

Previous winners of the Commitment to Development Award include: the European ministers of international development who constitute the Utstein Group (2003); Oxfam's Make Trade Fair Campaign (2004); then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown (2005), then-U.S. Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) (2006), Global Witness (2007), the ONE Campaign (2008), and Diego Hidalgo Schnur (2009).

For more information on the Commitment to Development Award, see /section/initiatives/_active/cdaward.