Investigating extraction: How journalism methods can serve resource governance research

Investigative journalism can improve social and environmental outcomes for extractive projects by exposing governance failures and information asymmetries. This paper offers a replicable methodological template for extractives coverage by reverse-engineering thirteen published investigations into oil and mining projects in Canada, Brazil, Guyana, and Ecuador. Many journalists already combine ground-truth interviews with primary records. Our contribution is to codify how that combination operates across jurisdictions and to translate it into a research design template for scholars, NGOs, and transparency advocates. The analysis draws on 77 original interviews and 63 primary records, examined through systematic qualitative content analysis with thematic synthesis. We also explicitly defend the autoethnographic dimension of the study, in which one author reflexively analyzes their own published reporting. We link journalistic sourcing strategies including field-based testimony, access-to-information releases, court filings, corporate registries, and regulatory data to extractives scholarship on transparency and governance. Journalism methods, we argue, can serve as a research methodology for resource governance inquiry.