Governing Extractive Industries

Abstract

Proposals for more effective natural resource governance emphasize the importance of institutions and governance, but say less about the political conditions under which institutional change occurs. This book synthesizes findings regarding the political drivers of institutional change in extractive industry governance. The authors analyse resource governance from the late nineteenth century to the present in Bolivia, Ghana, Peru, and Zambia. They focus on the ways in which resource governance and national political settlements interact. Special attention is paid to the nature of elite politics, the emergence of new political actors, forms of political contention, changing ideas regarding natural resources and development, the geography of natural resource deposits, and the influence of the transnational political economy of global commodity production. National elites and subnational actors are in continuous contention over extractive industry governance. Resource rents are used by elites to manage this contention and incorporate actors into governing coalitions and overall political settlements. Periodically, new resource frontiers are opened, and new political actors emerge with the power to redefine how extractive industries are governed and used as instruments for development. Colonial and post-colonial histories of resource extraction continue to give political valence to ideas of resource nationalism that mobilize actors who challenge existing institutional arrangements. The book is innovative in its focus on the political longue durée, and the use of in-depth, comparative, country-level analysis in Africa and Latin America, to build a theoretical argument that accounts for both similarity and divergence between these regions.

Shades of Conflict in Kyrgyzstan: National Actor Perceptions and Behaviour in Mining

“…The framework enabled us to establish a formal foundation for studying informal motivations in a convoluted and tense political setting while maintaining a critical distance to the rhetoric employed by actors. This analytical lens rendered possible a formal analytical inquiry into how the perceived materiality of resources interacts with individual beliefs and norms to reproduce, reaffirm or challenge different patterns of human behaviour that govern mineral resources (Bakker and Bridge 2006;Bebbington et al 2018).…”

A Comparative Study of the Introduction of Restrictions to Large‐Scale Mining in Four Latin American Countries

“…The political settlements literature stresses that institutional change will take place only if economic and political elites change the way they frame policy problems and their potential solutions Elites defend and behave according to a national development trajectory to varying degrees that depend on the need that political elites have of building coalitions for remaining in power, or on their capacity to act as dominant actors. The former will privilege short-term gains during political cycles while the latter will enjoy more latitude to implement a preferred policy course (Bebbington, Abdulai, Bebbington, Hinfelaar, & Sanborn, 2018). These macro-political dynamics are largely ignored by the ACF where the strategies of coalitions are largely oriented by policy issues and not constrained by development trajectories and governing pacts.…”

“…With assistance from the World Bank, mining authorities enacted several legal instruments to ease the viability of mining in protected areas between 1996 and 1997. These were years of intense anti-mining activity in the regions of Intag, the Southern Amazon, and the province of Azuay (Avci, 2015;Bebbington, 2009;Cisneros, 2011). Activists worked with peers from other countries, especially Peru, to learn about the effects of mining and strengthen their organizations and campaigns.…”

Tactics of dispossession: Access, power, and subjectivity at the extractive frontier

“…We are also keenly aware that subject formation at the extractive frontier occurs in relation to multiple contextual factors like existing social divisions (racial, ethnic, gendered, generational, etc.) and within histories of previous encounters with resource economies (Bebbington et al, ; Frederiksen, ; Himley, ; Lu et al, ). Nonetheless, we suggest that socio‐political life in these areas often becomes dominated by the extractive enterprise to the extent that “extractive subjects” come into being.…”