The Paradox of Plenty
Between 1980 and 2015, the world produced altogether 980 billion barrels of oil, worth a total of USD 54 trillion.1 For the biggest exportersâsuch as Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emiratesâoil has generated export revenues on a scale that other countries can only dream of. However, if these revenues are badly managed, not only do they go to waste, but the countries may be even worse off than they would have been otherwise. This is the âparadox of plentyâ (Karl 1997), which has become almost a clichĂ©, giving rise to what Bebbington (2013, 4) calls a âcottage industryâ of publications on how natural resource wealth affects societies.2 There has been less interest in the opposite relationship: how different societal configurations influence the management of natural resources. This book therefore flips the independent and dependent variables of the resource curse literature, so that society becomes the independent variable and the management of natural resource wealth the dependent variable.
The literature that does exist on this relationship holds that societal institutions are important for how natural resources are governed, but rarely goes into detail (see, e.g. Bulte et al. 2005; Mehlum et al. 2006). Many studies of institutions and the resource curse seek to determine whether institutions influence how resource revenues impact the economic development of countries. It mostly finds that having stronger institutions puts a country in a better position to handle its resource revenues.3 This amounts to a âwinner takes allâ logic: countries that happen to have strong social and political institutions before the discovery of valuable natural resources are more likely to manage the ensuing revenues successfullyâwhereas countries without strong institutions in place before resource revenues start flowing are âcursedâ.4 This argument has a fatalistic ring: what you have is what you get. The literature has less to say about why some countries have good institutions or how countries without such institutions might go about creating them. As Rosser (2006) noted, there is a lack of research into what specific social and political preconditions facilitate the good governance of natural resources.
Much of the literature does not even discuss how to define a âstrongâ institution. In fact, some central works on institutions and the resource curse even fail to define what an âinstitutionâ is in the first placeâfor example, Mehlum et al.âs (2006) much-quoted article âInstitutions and the Resource Curseâ. This is surprising, since âinstitutionâ may refer to anything from highly formalized events and organizational structures, such as elections and ministerial bureaucracies, to entirely informal patterns of cultural behaviour. (The narrower definition used in this book is presented towards the end of this chapter.)
How Big Is Your Brain?
With this book, I attempt to fill the gap in the literature by assessing the following hypothesis: it is not only formal aspects of institutions that are important for the success of natural resource governance but also their embeddedness in a conducive socio-political context and the dynamism of the long-term process of institution creation and re-creation. This implies that successful management of natural resources depends on freedom of speech, a dynamic and wide-ranging public debate through multiple independent media channels and an active civil society engaged in natural resource issues. Without these elements, a resource-rich country is less likely to develop appropriate and effective institutions for managing its resource wealth.
The hypothesis inspires a theoretical concept that I refer to as âpublic brainpowerâ. The main pillar of public brainpower is polycentricity, or the coexistence of many different public actors freely expressing their views: individual citizens, political parties, trade unions, charities, companies, research institutes, religious institutions, the mass media and government institutions. The more polycentric a society is, the greater is its âbrainpowerâ: its memory becomes more comprehensive and multifaceted, the various actors can perform quality control on each otherâs ideas and arguments, and it is more difficult to repress challenging thoughts. Above all, a polycentric society offers a broader base for creativity. Thus, the concept of public brainpower highlights the importance of creativity to successful long-term governanceâa point often overlooked in the literature on governance and certainly in the literature on natural resource management.
The concept of public brainpower draws inspiration from the work by Almond and Verba (1965) on civic culture, by Dahl (1956, 1989) on polyarchy, by Habermas (1962) on the public sphere, and by Putnam (1995, 2000) and Putnam et al. (1994) on civil society and social capital. These classics provide theoretical inspiration beyond the narrower and more contemporary literature on institutions and the resource curse discussed above.
With their work on civic culture, Almond and Verba (1965) made a breakthrough in the study of political culture. They held that the populations of different countries have different attitudes and expectations towards the state and their own participation in its affairs, and that these attitudes determine how well states function. This is similar to the concept of public brainpower but involves a stronger element of cultural determinism.
Polyarchy literally means ârule by manyâ and was used by Dahl (1989, 220) to describe a political system that is open to contestation and in which many different actors, though not necessarily all, can influence the system. However, polyarchy relates primarily to elections and non-coercion in politics and to members of society as individuals with individual rightsânone of which are major foci in this book. My interest is rather in the degree of multipolarity that exists in such a system and its contribution to good governance: how different social units contribute multiple competing voices to the governance of society and not only through the narrow confines of electoral politics.
The concept of public brainpower is also closely related to that of the âpublic sphereâ as defined by Habermas (1962): a historical space between the private domain and the state, where citizens could engage as equals in critical discussion about the state and society and influence their development in the process. In the words of Habermas (1962, xi), this was âa sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the peopleâ. However, he saw the public sphere as something specific to bourgeois society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, inextricably linked to face-to-face conversations between small groups of middle-class citizens, undisturbed by the mass media and their commercialization. The classic locus of the Habermasian public sphere was a cafĂ© or salon where people engaged in debates about art and literature. By contrast, my interest is in contemporary public debate, regardless of whether it is face-to-face or through the mass media and specifically how it affects natural resource management.
Finally, Putnamâs work on civil society and social capital is highly relevant for this book (Putnam 2000; Putnam et al. 1994). Drawing on the tradition of de Tocqueville, he sees civil society (including activities like bowling or visiting friends) as helping to create social capital in the form of trust and shared values (Putnam 2000). According to this line of thought, a society with a high level of social capital is more cohesive and functions better. The main connection between an active civil society and good governance is the presence of stronger networks, norms and trust, which enable society and the state to work together constructively, resulting in better governance (Putnam et al. 1994).
By referring to âpublic brainpowerâ, rather than simply recycling the terminology of Dahl, Habermas or Putnam, I aim to highlight the capacity of the public to aid decision-makers in the governance of society: the strengths inherent in a diverse civil society and public debate, and on which the state can draw to govern more effectively. A polycentric society is brimming with tensions and contradictions, and the sum of its often-opposing pa...