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There are more than 1,000 mining companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges, more than any other country and, as such, represent the most important source of investment in mining in Africa. This article provides a preliminary evaluation of the experience and report of the Canadian National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). It does so in the context of the surge of Canadian investment in mining in Africa and of increasing public awareness of the negative impacts of the activities of Canadian mining enterprises. It examines the issues of resource governance and the ‘securitisation’ of mining activities. The recommendations favouring adoption of a Canadian set of CSR Standards for Canadian extractive‐sector companies operating abroad is contextualised in the global expansion of transnational mining investment that since the 1990s led to increasing conflicts with local communities.

This article argues that certain aspects of the institutional reforms which seek to achieve good governance, by treating political institutions and processes as manageable and essentially technical issues, seems instead to have contributed to the narrowing of political space and to the informalisation of politics. The argument is illustrated with reference to the recent experience of political transition in Cote d'lvoire.The text analyses the compatibility between the institutional reforms introduced at the recommendation of the Bretton Woods institutions and the economic austerity which has resulted from recent decisions on the one hand, and on the other, the conditions necessary for the broadening of political space --the very issue on which depends the success of the transition itself. On the basis of the several observable current trends, the article concludes by raising the possibility that the transition may well result not only in the mere prolonging of past modes of political and economic regulation, but also in a gradual shifting away from a liberal pluralist model based on a participatory and inclusive ideal of politics, to an authoritarian one based on a technocratic ideal, likely to give rise to strategies of division and exclusion.