Can Voluntary Corporate Transparency Curb Corruption? Community-Level Evidence from Oil and Gas Fields in Africa

Voluntary corporate transparency seeks to promote accountability through disclosure, but substantive reporting does not by itself guarantee societal benefits. We examine whether this form of self-regulation can help curb corruption where formal oversight is weak, focusing on corporate support for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a multistakeholder initiative that promotes disclosure of company payments to host governments. We link geolocated data on African oil and gas fields and their operators to Afrobarometer surveys and satellite nighttime-light measures and estimate difference-in-differences models that track changes in outcomes around the same fields before and after operators endorse the EITI. We find that corporate EITI support is associated with lower perceived corruption and less reported bribery, greater civic engagement, greater perceived freedom to speak, and higher nighttime-light intensity, a proxy for local economic activity. The association with lower perceived corruption is stronger around fields with nearby NGO or aid-project activity, among residents living closer to fields, and among frequent users of traditional news media. Supplementary analyses provide indirect evidence that supporting firms were more transparent before mandatory disclosure laws took effect, and show that they had fewer joint-venture partners and larger ownership stakes after endorsement. Archival cases from Nigeria and Ghana illustrate how civil-society organizations and journalists use extractive-industry information to question firms and public authorities. The findings point to local governance benefits of voluntary transparency commitments and are consistent with an information-to-accountability account in which these benefits depend on both substantive reporting and local opportunities to scrutinize and use the information.