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Why is armed civil conflict more common in resource-dependent countries than in others? Several studies have attempted to unravel mechanisms on why natural resources are linked to armed conflict, but no coherent picture has yet emerged. This article seeks to address this puzzle by concentrating on the issue of how rebel access to natural resources affects conflict. It uses data on gemstone and hydrocarbon localities throughout the world and controls for the spatial and temporal overlap of resources and conflict. The results show that the location of resources is crucial to their impact on conflict duration. If resources are located inside the actual conflict zone, the duration of conflict is doubled. Interestingly, oil and gas reserves have this effect on duration regardless of whether there has been production or not. In addition, a country-level analysis suggests that oil production increases the risk of conflict onset when located onshore; offshore production has no effect on onset. These results support the assertion that natural resources play a central role in armed civil conflicts because of the incentives and opportunities they present for rebel groups.

Abstract
Participatory governance at the community level natural resource revenue management is thought to promote local stakeholders' interests in how benefits from extraction are shared, strengthen the legitimacy of decisions, and enhance the quality of development projects financed by resource revenues. This article develops a framework to study the potential of localized participatory governance platforms in natural resource revenue management from the viewpoint of the intended beneficiaries, the local community members living in communities hosting large-scale extraction. The study focuses on local benefit-sharing trust funds that receive substantial amounts of funding to finance community development projects. Analysing in-depth two trust funds in Ghana, the article finds that the studied trust funds face three key challenges related to their participatory governance platforms: inadequate inclusion of community members in the processes that established the platforms, lack of relevant knowledge among the platform participants, and power asymmetries. The findings suggest that there is a need to include all intended platform stakeholders already in the processes leading to the platform establishment; ensure the platform's legitimacy and independence in the eyes of the weaker stakeholders; and build capacity among the platform participants to ensure knowledge-based decisions.

In many resource-rich developing countries, policymakers, academics, and practitioners alike seek to promote citizen engagement and monitoring in the management of natural resource revenues. However, many of the approaches to improve citizen engagement have not been effective as citizens often lack access to relevant information and opportunities to voice their concerns, and governments have faced financial challenges in engaging citizens. In this article, the authors propose spatial crowdsourcing as an alternative to the traditional ways of encouraging citizen engagement. The proposed approach is illustrated using a simple, intuitive multimedia-based spatial crowdsourcing platform that was tested among farmers who were benefiting from a petroleum-funded project in Ghana. The farmers accessed the platform via their mobile phones and completed a survey relating to the project and petroleum revenue management in Ghana. The findings suggest that spatial crowdsourcing is a promising approach to promote informed citizen engagement in the context of natural resource revenue management. In particular, the farmers indicated that an opportunity to give feedback on the project through a user-friendly platform was very important for them. Furthermore, the representatives of both the government and an oversight body for petroleum revenue management regarded spatial crowdsourcing as a useful tool for collecting feedback on petroleum-funded projects and to increase citizen engagement in natural resource management in general. The authors conclude that although spatial crowdsourcing can help in citizen engagement, its effectiveness in the management of natural resource revenues depends on behavioural changes in governments and citizens. ; publishedVersion

Mining companies increasingly adopt trusts, foundations, and funds as part of their efforts to obtain and maintain a social license to operate and corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies for community development. Using qualitative methodology, this article examined host communities' perceptions of two mining company-financed trust funds in Ghana. The interviews revealed that although the community members considered some aspects of the trust funds positively, the trust funds' overall objectives to promote meaningful participation of local community members and contribute to local development had not been met. Inadequate planning and needs assessments, and inflexibility in externally framed CSR practices that were unfavorable to the operational contexts, were among the key factors undermining the success of the trust funds.

Global warming is expected to make the climate warmer, wetter, and wilder. It is predicted that such climate change will increase the severity and frequency of climate-related disasters like flash floods, surges, cyclones, and severe storms. This article uses econometric methods to study the consequences of climate-induced natural disasters on economic growth, and how these disasters are linked to the onset of armed civil conflict either directly or via their impact on economic growth. The results show that climate-related natural disasters have a negative effect on growth and that the impact is considerable. The analysis of conflict onset shows that climate-related natural disasters do not increase the risk of armed conflict. This is also true when we instrument the change in GDP growth by climatic disasters. The result is robust to inclusion of country and time fixed effects, different estimation techniques, and various operationalization of the disasters measure, as well as for conflict incidence and war onset. These findings have two major implications: if climate change increases the frequency or makes weather-related natural disasters more severe, it is an economic concern for countries susceptible to these types of hazards. However, our results suggest – based on historical data – that more frequent and severe climate-related disasters will not lead to more armed conflicts through their effects on GDP growth.

AbstractThe large empirical conflict literature has established that there is a strong negative link between economic variables and the onset of an armed civil conflict. However, it has been difficult to demonstrate a clear causality between poor economic performance and increased risk of conflict because of potential endogeneity issues, especially for large country samples. Most existing studies that analyse the causal links focus on the effects of economic growth on conflict, even though conventional conflict studies find the strongest relationship for income levels. In this article, we use three new exogenous instruments for income per capita, based on historical data for mailing times, telegram charges and urbanization rates. Using instrumental variables methods and global panel data for the period 1946–2014, we show that the negative effect of income per capita on the probability of conflict onset is consistently strong and larger than in conventional estimations using pooled ordinary least square regressions.