What the Forest Knows
A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse Article 8 of 12 The Norway deal, Indigenous consent, and a resource that pays by standing still. By Nabaclis Piknee · September…
A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse Article 8 of 12 The Norway deal, Indigenous consent, and a resource that pays by standing still. By Nabaclis Piknee · September…
At its 26th anniversary gala in New York, the Health and Educational Relief Organization (H.E.R.O.) kept silence for the lives lost on the MV Barima, remembered co-founder Dr. Collie Oudkerk, and honoured five people who carry its medical and educational missions to Guyana. Terrence Blackman reflects on an institution that began among student friends and now reproduces itself.
Guyana has never had more ways to transmit and fewer places to encounter one another. With Stabroek News gone and oil decisions compounding, the national question is not only who gets to speak. It is who is required to listen.
The authors of the 64/80 paradox answer Rory Fraser, Errol Benn and the readers who pressed them on why the failures they measured outlast governments — and argue that an independent audit body is a political device, not a technocratic one.
Rory Fraser’s study of land tenure, forestry enforcement and the public service reaches the same conclusion as Gampat and Mahabir’s 64/80 paradox by a different road, and asks why the failures they measure outlast changes of government.
For decades Guyana exported its most capable people and imported their remittances. Oil money has not yet broken the pattern. Article 7 of twelve in Beyond the Resource Curse.
Drawing on a book-length comparative study of eighteen countries, Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir document what they call the 64/80 paradox: Guyana out-invests 64 per cent of its comparators in health and education, yet 80 per cent of them obtain better human capital outcomes. Efficiency deficits, inequality and governance failure explain the gap — and the oil window for closing it will not stay open for ever.
Bauxite, gold and timber gave Guyana three booms, three different ownership structures, and the same outcome each time. Article 6 of twelve in Beyond the Resource Curse.
Nearly seventy-five years after Martin Carter first refused to still his voice, the closing line of “Looking at Your Hands” has become a national slogan. This Sunday Essay asks what it would mean to treat it instead as a standard, and to hold the M/V Barima inquiry, the closure of Stabroek News, and the institutions of the oil era answerable to the poem.
A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse Article 5 of 12 Independence morning, the nationalizations, and the gap between the deed and the doing. By Nabaclis Piknee · September…