About
Guyana Energy Leadership Institute
GELI is a virtual think tank publishing research on Guyana’s energy and extractive economy. Its contributors are specialists based in Guyana and the wider Caribbean alongside others working internationally.
Our Mission
We work to promote economic development in Guyana through independent, transparent analysis of its extractive sector. We want the decisions that shape the country’s oil, gas and mining economy to rest on evidence anyone can examine.
The sector is growing faster than the analysis available to the people building it. Our goal is to close that gap for the policymakers, operators, financiers, civil society organizations, communities and journalists who depend on it.
Our Values
- Intellectual diversity
- We commission specialists from different disciplines, backgrounds and career stages: engineers and metallurgists alongside economists, former officials alongside early-career researchers. Our panels and surveys report the full spread of judgment across contributors, and our fellows write under their own names.
- Open access
- Our public research is free to read, cite, and republish with attribution.
What is a virtual think tank?
A virtual think tank produces research the way any policy institute does, but without a building. We contract analysts where they live and publish our work online, and we assemble teams around a specific question and dissolve them once it is answered.
The advantages follow from that structure: expertise is our only hiring constraint, so our coverage of Guyana’s oil sector comes from specialists based in Georgetown and across the region; the resources that would go to offices and permanent salaries fund commissioned primary research instead; and practitioners can contribute while remaining active in the industries they analyze.
Sponsorship
GELI is sponsored by Wikistrat, a crowdsourced consulting firm in Washington, DC.