Turning natural resources in the ground into improved well-being for citizens takes a series of steps that together can be termed the ‘resource chain’. As described on page 31, the objective of maximizing benefits to current and future generations of citizens and achieving sustainable development can be broken down into several stages: the decision to extract; awarding contracts, actual extraction/operations, revenue collection and finally revenue expenditure (see the figure below). Each of these poses substantial challenges. Maximizing the benefits requires that different questions are raised at each stage.