The right to benefit: Using videos to encourage citizen involvement in resource revenue management

The governance of natural resource wealth is a key factor in promoting strong institutions and economic development in resource-rich countries. In this article, we explore how individuals’ engagement in local natural resource revenue (NRR) management can be enhanced and encouraged. We focus on Indonesia, which is a large gold and petroleum producer, among other natural resources, with local challenges such as underdevelopment of resource-rich areas and corruption. We run a randomized survey experiment among 807 local community members in an oil-rich district using videos with three information treatments that give citizens salient and easily understandable information on local NRR and additional motivation to use this information to engage in NRR management. Our outcomes include survey questions on stated behavior and citizen rights perceptions and two behavioral measures. We find that providing information increases respondents’ sense of the right to personally influence how NRR are used and the propensity to donate to an anti-corruption NGO. Our positive-example treatment strengthened respondents’ sense of their right to benefit from NRR and their right to influence NRR management, while our negative-example treatment had no impact on our outcomes. The mechanism analysis shows that the information and positive-example treatments act through changing the salience of the issue; the negative-example treatment instead increases grievance without affecting our outcomes. We find that individuals who are already concerned about the local impacts of the extractives sector are most responsive to our interventions. Providing the population of resource-rich areas with clear and locally relevant information on NRR management can change attitudes, but encouraging action for better NRR governance is more challenging.