Measuring Stewardship, Not Wealth: The Guyana Sovereign Readiness Index and the Conversion Problem in One-Generation Windfalls

Why do small states experiencing rapid resource windfalls so consistently fail to convert gross wealth generation into durable domestic capacity? This paper introduces the Guyana Sovereign Readiness Index (GSRI), a practitioner-developed annual composite instrument that measures stewardship quality rather than wealth accumulation, and applies it to Guyana's 2020-2026 oil transition as a diagnostic case of the one-generation windfall problem. The GSRI is a 0-100 composite across six weighted pillars - Fiscal Stewardship (30%), Governance and Institutional Quality (20%), Economic Diversification (15%), Human Capital (15%), Infrastructure and Productive Capacity (10%), and Environmental and Local Content Integrity (10%) - built from roughly two dozen sub-indicators drawn from official sources and tagged by confidence status. The inaugural score places Guyana at approximately 48.5 of 100: the lower edge of the Developing band, on the Developing-Exposed boundary, robust across alternative weightings (48.5-50.3). The country scores strongly on growth and headline transparency architecture and weakly on savings retention, institutional quality, and broad-based productive-capacity formation. The paper's signature finding - the Stewardship Gap - measures the distance between gross oil-revenue generation and domestically retained productive capacity. In 2025 Guyana withdrew USD 2,463.85 million from its Natural Resource Fund, approximately 96 per cent of the prior year's fund deposits - the base on which the statutory ceiling is computed - under a withdrawal rule loosened in 2024 to permit removal of the entire first USD 1 billion of annual deposits; its per-citizen sovereign savings remain below USD 5,000 against a Norwegian benchmark above USD 390,000. The paper argues that the governing policy variable for windfall management is not gross foreign-exchange generation or headline growth but effective conversion, and that measuring conversion requires an instrument existing frameworks do not supply.