New Approaches to the Governance of Natural Resources

Insights from Africa

J. Grant, W. Compaoré, M. Mitchell, J. Grant, W. Compaoré, M. Mitchell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137280404
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137280411
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book provides an in-depth analysis of the governance of Africa's natural resource sectors (oil, biofuels, forestry, fisheries, minerals) and new insights for readers as they navigate the burgeoning research on global governance initiatives and regional/national strategies that seek to improve the governance of the continent's natural resources.

Part I

Introduction: Theoretical Approaches and Policy Implications

1

‘New’ Approaches to the Governance of Africa’s Natural Resources

J. Andrew Grant, W.R. Nadège Compaoré, Matthew I. Mitchell, and Mats Ingulstad

Introduction

Extant work on natural resources in Africa has made significant contributions towards our understanding of key challenges and prospects facing the sector, especially with regard to governance-related matters. Discussions on the multifaceted nature of relevant stakeholders in the resource sector have particularly been fruitful in yielding renewed engagement with previously neglected dynamics such as the role of corporate actors and the significance of global standards in the regulation of natural resources on the continent. In this context, the scholarship on natural resource governance in Africa has arguably evolved from a predominant view that held state actors as the primary actors of resource governance to one that acknowledges the powerful role of non-state actors such as multinational corporations and civil society organizations in the governance process. Yet, with a great number of analyses studying the significance of various state and non-state actors’ impacts on African natural resource governance, much remains to be deciphered with regard to the local and global norms and structures through, and within, which these various stakeholders operate. This book is innovative in its approach in that it aims to advance our understanding of such norms and structures, by presenting recent scholarship from various disciplinary perspectives, thus illustrating throughout the chapters an extensive coverage of a different number of natural resource sectors and resource-rich African countries.

The objective of this chapter is to invite readers to consider new approaches to resource governance – that is, various avenues for more innovative governance theorizing as well as more creative forms of policy and practice – that are being applied to natural resource sectors in Africa. To this end, the chapter begins by elucidating the volume’s core analytical perspectives and concepts, so as to better situate its theoretical framework. The next section argues that dominant approaches to the governance of natural resources in Africa are largely characterized by an actor-focused research. The section subsequently discusses the lacunae that result from this kind of focus, particularly through an assessment of the complex relationships between global governance initiatives and national governance strategies involved in the extraction and trade of natural resources. In the third section of the chapter, we engage the concepts and perspectives that support the characterization of our analytical framework as ‘new’ and provide a contrasting account of ‘old’ approaches to the governance of natural resources in Africa. The section also elaborates on the global–local dynamics that currently characterize the governance of natural resources in Africa – not as a clear dichotomy, but rather as a complex apparatus involving sub-national, national, and regional mechanisms. The fourth section of the chapter presents an outline of the structure of the book and a summary of the individual chapters. The final section provides a set of conclusions and reflections on some of the themes presented in the introduction to the volume.

Beyond a focus on actors: Making sense of governance as rules

Africa is a rich continent, because of the abundance of natural resources that it contains; Africa is a poor continent, because the vast number of its population remains in poverty. The simple juxtaposition of these two statements reflects a profound paradox that intuitively suggests a fundamental problem in the ways in which natural resources on the African continent are managed and the ways in which income from those natural resources are redistributed. As accurate as it is however, this acknowledgement is as far as intuition can take us. In an attempt to make sense of this problem and its root causes, scholars of Africa’s natural resources have advanced different approaches, frameworks, and theories to provide analysts, practitioners, and policy-makers with the tools necessary to understand the issues that perpetuate poverty in an otherwise wealthy continent. Using the concept of ‘governance’ as a starting point, researchers concerned with this problem have offered various explanations for the above paradox. This volume borrows its understanding of the term ‘governance’ from International Relations (IR) scholarship and understands it to be ‘concerned with the regime which constitutes the set of fundamental rules for the organization of the public realm, and not with government’ (Bøås, 1998: 120). This conceptualization does not deny the fact that governments remain a sine qua non component to the governance process. Rather, we posit the governance of natural resources as concerned with the fundamental rules that guide the management of natural resources, rather than merely concerned with actors (state and non-state) involved in the process. This is a critical distinction as the existing literature on the governance of natural resources in Africa tends to centre on actors, resulting in policy prescriptions that target a change in actor behaviour as a central means towards improving resource governance across the continent.

The focus on actors, particularly state actors, may be explained by the fact that influential literature on governance in Africa has typically placed the onus on African states, thus describing African modes of governance, for instance, as personalized rule that is largely accommodating of elite interests, whereas others described some resource-rich post-colonial African states as neo-patrimonial states (Bøås, 2003: 32). While the approaches within these various works have been largely successful in advancing existing knowledge of governance issues on the continent, they have also tended to overshadow key aspects to explain the contemporary behaviour of these states. Take, for instance, discussions on neo-patrimonialism in Africa. Neo-patrimonialism can be defined as a system in which, in theory, the public and private spheres are two separate realms, while in practice, the line between the two is blurred, with rulers depending on patron–client relationships to maintain power (Taylor, 2010). This is indeed a very useful concept that not only explains the nature of some African states in the post-colonial era, but also underlines key structures and norms underpinning and enabling the characteristics of these states. This conceptualization suggests that there are specific structural conditions that allow the blurring of the public and private spheres; though, such dynamics are not systematically addressed when examining scholarship on the subject, where concerns remain primarily focused on African states. To be sure, such structural conditions are not confined to the continent, as they do not exist in isolation from interactions with external powers outside Africa, such as China and its leading position within the growing geopolitical and economic grouping known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

Yet, despite these complicated structures-actors-norms mechanisms, characteristics of resource governance that tend to be emphasized in the literature are those that depict many African states as neo-patrimonial, as illustrated through the continued denunciation of corrupt political elites who enjoy personalized rule. This explains why state actors are often viewed as barriers that restrict efforts to promote effective governance on the continent. Less emphasized, however, are the circumstances under which these states came to be neo-patrimonial. In other words, addressing predominant issues such as neo-patrimonialism will require more than transforming the behaviour of political elites. We argue that analysts should carefully and systematically unpack the conditions through which states may emerge as neo-patrimonial in Africa, by locating the local, national, regional, and global dynamics that impact those states and are impacted by such forces.

Indeed, existing literature on natural resource governance – be it focused on Africa or more general in nature – illustrates the need to acknowledge the structural forces at local, national, regional, and global levels. This leads to the following questions: how does an uneven focus on actors play out in the relevant scholarship, and what does this mean insofar as policy implications in the resource sector? A survey of the literature on natural resources governance in Africa shows that the foci on the role of actors is illustrated through the common use of concepts such as the ‘resource curse’ and corporate social responsibility (CSR). To a large extent, the former highlights the role of state actors and the latter that of multinationals. To date, however, the concept of the resource curse is perhaps the most popularized one in work dealing with resource governance on the continent. The resource curse argument posits it as a paradox found in resource-rich countries in the Global South, whereby resource-abundant countries experience lower economic growth. Scholars who embrace the resource curse argument acknowledge the structural basis of this curse, by pointing to the fact that poor countries often lack the institutional capacities that would make their governments accountable to their populations. In the African context specifically, where many governments can access resource wealth without checks from their citizenry, resource abundance tends to increase opaque governance networks; this enables a plundering of natural resources by political elites and a worsening of the welfare of local populations.¹ In sum, the more profitable the resources, and the weaker the government institutions, the more likelihood there is that elites will appropriate national resources for personal gain. This explains why a highly profitable resource such as oil has been seen as the most susceptible to suffer the curse, which has led to the parallel conceptualization of the ‘oil curse’ (Yates, 1996; 2006; 2012; Shaxson, 2007; Ross, 2012).

As discussed in the above paragraph, weak institutions that lack the necessary means to hold governments accountable for their actions are acknowledged in the resource curse argument. So why do we maintain that such arguments focus on actors unevenly? Reconsidering the notable resource curse argument, for instance, its most commonly associated concept is corruption. We suggest that the heavy focus on corruption may silence much of what enables corruption to emerge and proliferate. Specifically, if one reviews the literature on natural resources exploitation in Africa, the common facts and figures that are easily found are those involving corrupt actors. For instance, using telling figures from oil-rich African countries, Magrin and van Vliet (2008) advance the argument that the resource curse is largely a product of corruption rather than the result of other pervasive issues such as violent conflicts. For example:

In Nigeria, despite $300 billion in oil revenues over 25 years, average per capita income is less than $1 a day; in real terms, it is now lower than it was in 1960 (Gary and Karl, 2003). In Angola, from 2000 to 2004, 2 million people survived thanks only to help from the World Food Program (WFP) (Gary and Karl, 2003). The two largest sub-Saharan African oil producers certainly have a long history of conflicts, more or less tied to black gold, but this only partially explains their persistent poverty.

(Magrin and van Vliet, 2008: 105)

Unfortunately, after such alarming data are acknowledged, one is often left wanting of the precise mechanisms within the global political economic structures that enable the misappropriation of funds in resource-rich African countries. What legislation (or lack thereof) exists in home countries that in turn enables transnational firms to behave the way they do when exploiting resources in African host countries? What policy measures from existing financial structures – ranging from national to global arenas – encourage or facilitate the illicit use of natural resource revenues? The chapters in this volume pay particular attention to the structural conditions in local, national, regional, and global political economies and serve to explore the various facets of the questions posed above.

‘Old’ versus ‘new’ approaches to the governance of natural resources in Africa

Given the above analysis, we propose an exploration of ‘new’ approaches that are comprehensive in nature. To be sure, this comprehensive approach engages a wide-variety of actors – state and non-state, at the macro and micro levels, be they sub-national, national, regional, or global actors (e.g., the BRICS). In this respect, our approach is not fundamentally new in the sense that it aligns with global governance literature within the discipline of International Relations (IR), which calls for a move away from state-centric views held by traditional paradigms such as realism and liberalism. Unlike realist and liberalist paradigms, which posit a hierarchical world dominated by unitary rational actors such as states, global governance literature conceptualizes the world as a complexity of networks, which comprises state and non-state actors, formal and informal, licit and illicit, at the global and local levels (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992; Weiss, 2000; Rosenau, 2002; Söderbaum, 2004). Before elaborating on the ‘newness’ of our approach, it will be useful to provide a contrasting example that is evocative of the type of ‘old’ approaches that once dominated natural resource governance in Africa.

The governance of natural resources in Africa in historical context: Reassessing rhetoric and realities

Studies of the history or international political economy of Africa’s natural resources often make a cursory reference to the ills of the so-called Scramble for Africa that occurred in the late-19th century and reached an apex during the Berlin Conference that began in late 1884 and ended in early 1885. The Berlin Conference is not only associated with the seemingly arbitrary partitioning of the African continent into what would become state boundaries, but it is also associated with the plunder of its natural resources by Europe’s colonial powers – principally the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Portugal, and Belgium – among others. Any reference to the United States notes merely that the country was little more than a passive observer during the Berlin Conference proceedings. While this is a rather superficial characterization of the American delegation present at the Berlin Conference, the United States took note of the importance that the European countries attached to the natural resources of their respective colonies in Africa. Before proceeding to a discussion of the impact of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) on Africa, the present section provides the historical context to the ‘old’ approaches to natural resource governance.

The traditionalist and state-centric orientation underlying much of the literature on African resource governance does in many ways resemble a caricature of the ‘Berlin Conference-form’ of colonialism, in which the rulers of the ‘metropolitan’ states wielded their own straight-rulers to damaging – and as a glance at a map of the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Acronyms
• Part I: Introduction: Theoretical Approaches and Policy Implications
• Part II: Governance Challenges in Africa’s Oil Sectors
• Part III: Governance Challenges in Africa’s Non-Petroleum Natural Resource Sectors
• Part IV: Concluding Remarks: New Challenges and Opportunities
• Index