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"New initiatives recognize that resource wealth can provide a means, when properly used, for poorer nations to decisively break with poverty by diversifying economies and funding development spending. Extractive Industries: The Management of Resources as a Driver of Sustainable Development explores the challenges and opportunities facing developing countries in using oil, gas, and mining to achieve inclusive change. While resource wealth can yield prosperity it can also, when mismanaged, cause acute social inequality, deep poverty, environmental damage, and political instability. There is a new determination to improve the benefits of extractive industries to their host countries, and to strengthen the sector's governance. Extractive Industries provides a comprehensive contribution to what must be done in this sector to deliver development, protect often fragile environments from damage, enhance the rights of affected communities, and support climate change action. It brings together international experts to offer ideas and recommendations in the main policy areas. With a breadth of collective insight and experience, it argues that more attention must be given to the development role of extractive industries, and looks to the future to explain how action on climate change will profoundly shape the sector's prospects."

The oil and natural gas reserves under the Caspian Sea have sparked the interest of international investors and oil firms. The political, economic, and social turmoil in the five countries bordering the Caspian Sea, however, pose significant challenges for effective regulation of multinational interaction with the five Caspian states. A joint-effort approach to regulation involving the World Bank, multinational enterprises, and the individual Caspian states' governments poses the most functional and efficient means of instituting international oversight. Such a tripartite structure connects the fortunes of all the parties and provides safeguards against default by any single entity. A mutually beneficial relationship may be established whereby Caspian states benefit from receiving loans at below-market interest rates and establishing sound relationships with multinational enterprises and developed economies. This tripartite structure promotes accelerating the sustained development of the Caspian states while introducing international norms of corporate behavior. This Note addresses the benefits, challenges, and potential that this joint-effort approach to regulation of multinational enterprises holds for the Caspian region.

Natural resources can become a catalyst for growth and development in resource-abundant developing countries if they are governed in a transparent and accountable manner. Despite the popularization of transparency and accountability in academic and public policy discussions, we know little about how they become part of daily interactions. This article critically analyses how and what kind of transparency and accountability is discursively enacted by community actors in politically unstable settings with weak institutions such as Kyrgyzstan. The case study shows the extension of the transparency and accountability agenda from right-to-know and environmental-financial reporting to direct engagement and livelihood improvement. The analysis suggests that politicaleconomic opportunities and youth-led community activism define the local approach to transparency and accountability. This article calls for studying transparency and accountability beyond formal institutionalism and top-down (elite) politics.

Following the recent call to 'put the ocean's agitation and historicity back onto our mental maps and into the study of literature' (Yaeger 2010), this article addresses the histories and cultures of marine energy extraction in modern Scottish literature. The burgeoning discipline of the Energy Humanities has recently turned its attentions towards Scottish literature as a valuable area of study when contemplating the relationships between energy and cultural production. Most recently, scholars have focused their analysis on the histories of North Sea oil and gas production and have worked to juxtapose the long histories of land clearance in the Highlands and islands alongside contemporary narratives of exile and exploitation experienced by Scotland's coastal oil communities. The forms of spatial injustice incurred through the recent histories of what Derek Gladwin terms 'Oil Clearance' (Gladwin 2017) or Graeme Macdonald identifies as 'petro-marginalisation' (Macdonald 2015), is often solely registered through terrestrial environments. This article urges the adoption of an oceanic perspective, one which registers how the extractive politics of modern petroculture in Scotland not only presents major challenges for terrestrial environments and communities, but holds specific ramifications for the ways in which we currently imagine and interact with oceanic space. Indeed, as Macdonald has noted, the North Sea is in many ways 'wholly regarded as a productive environment of marine capitalism synonymous with oil' (2015). What does it mean to read the ocean through oil? By adopting an oceanic perspective, this article considers the ways in which the exploitative dynamics of offshore petroculture in the 1970s coincides with an incredibly damaging and problematic cultural construction of the ocean. But as Scotland moves towards a new era of low-carbon energy production, how might this construction of the ocean change? The closing half of this article considers the ways in which the extractivist histories and spatial injustices of petroculture are resisted through contemporary poetic engagements with new marine-based energy technologies, namely, wave and tidal power. In examining a range of work from artists and poets such as Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, Lila Matsumoto and Hannah Imlach, this article further argues that the recent turn towards marine renewables not only signals a new future for a low-carbon Scotland, but that the advent of renewable technologies provides contemporary poets with new materials through which to imagine alternative models of community, power, and relation in an era of environmental change.

Following the recent call to 'put the ocean's agitation and historicity back onto our mental maps and into the study of literature' (Yaeger 2010), this article addresses the histories and cultures of marine energy extraction in modern Scottish literature. The burgeoning discipline of the Energy Humanities has recently turned its attentions towards Scottish literature as a valuable area of study when contemplating the relationships between energy and cultural production. Most recently, scholars have focused their analysis on the histories of North Sea oil and gas production and have worked to juxtapose the long histories of land clearance in the Highlands and islands alongside contemporary narratives of exile and exploitation experienced by Scotland's coastal oil communities. The forms of spatial injustice incurred through the recent histories of what Derek Gladwin terms 'Oil Clearance' (Gladwin 2017) or Graeme Macdonald identifies as 'petro-marginalisation' (Macdonald 2015), is often solely registered through terrestrial environments. This article urges the adoption of an oceanic perspective, one which registers how the extractive politics of modern petroculture in Scotland not only presents major challenges for terrestrial environments and communities, but holds specific ramifications for the ways in which we currently imagine and interact with oceanic space. Indeed, as Macdonald has noted, the North Sea is in many ways 'wholly regarded as a productive environment of marine capitalism synonymous with oil' (2015). What does it mean to read the ocean through oil? By adopting an oceanic perspective, this article considers the ways in which the exploitative dynamics of offshore petroculture in the 1970s coincides with an incredibly damaging and problematic cultural construction of the ocean. But as Scotland moves towards a new era of low-carbon energy production, how might this construction of the ocean change? The closing half of this article considers the ways in which the extractivist histories and spatial ...

This study examines the relationship between political governance and extractive industry performance in Nigeria. It tends to know the contributions of political governance structures in the Nigerian extractive economy sector and whether the political sector has been able to achieve effective regulatory framework leading to revenue transparency which is the key factor in the attainment of sustainable development. In carrying out this research we made use of secondary data, mostly, the relevant literatures on the subject matter. Descriptive analytical approach was employed, while structural functionalism approach was adopted as the framework of analysis. The study revealed among other things that weak political institutions to undertake effective checks and balances and the virtual absence of regulatory framework created opportunistic gaps for predatory elites to institutionalized corruption in the oil extractive industry. The end result is loss of revenue, deep poverty and poor standard of living. Based on this, the paper recommended amongst others, the development of effective framework for transparency and accountability through strengthening of political governance, effective implementations of the Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) Act of 2007, and fundamental restructuring of the Nigerian political and administrative structure and socialization of the social mode of production. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s1p596

Following the recent call to 'put the ocean's agitation and historicity back onto our mental maps and into the study of literature' (Yaeger 2010), this article addresses the histories and cultures of marine energy extraction in modern Scottish literature. The burgeoning discipline of the Energy Humanities has recently turned its attentions towards Scottish literature as a valuable area of study when contemplating the relationships between energy and cultural production. Most recently, scholars have focused their analysis on the histories of North Sea oil and gas production and have worked to juxtapose the long histories of land clearance in the Highlands and islands alongside contemporary narratives of exile and exploitation experienced by Scotland's coastal oil communities. The forms of spatial injustice incurred through the recent histories of what Derek Gladwin terms 'Oil Clearance' (Gladwin 2017) or Graeme Macdonald identifies as 'petro-marginalisation' (Macdonald 2015), is often solely registered through terrestrial environments. This article urges the adoption of an oceanic perspective, one which registers how the extractive politics of modern petroculture in Scotland not only presents major challenges for terrestrial environments and communities, but holds specific ramifications for the ways in which we currently imagine and interact with oceanic space. Indeed, as Macdonald has noted, the North Sea is in many ways 'wholly regarded as a productive environment of marine capitalism synonymous with oil' (2015). What does it mean to read the ocean through oil? By adopting an oceanic perspective, this article considers the ways in which the exploitative dynamics of offshore petroculture in the 1970s coincides with an incredibly damaging and problematic cultural construction of the ocean. But as Scotland moves towards a new era of low-carbon energy production, how might this construction of the ocean change? The closing half of this article considers the ways in which the extractivist histories and spatial injustices of petroculture are resisted through contemporary poetic engagements with new marine-based energy technologies, namely, wave and tidal power. In examining a range of work from artists and poets such as Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, Lila Matsumoto and Hannah Imlach, this article further argues that the recent turn towards marine renewables not only signals a new future for a low-carbon Scotland, but that the advent of renewable technologies provides contemporary poets with new materials through which to imagine alternative models of community, power, and relation in an era of environmental change.

Idiomatic English expressions such as "oil and water don't mix" or "like oil and water" – to describe a profound incompatibility – take on a specific political meaning in the context of water rights and Indigenous opposition to the extractive oil industry. Most recently, opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (the #NoDAPL movement, which started in 2016) highlights the threat to clean water supplies to the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. Originally planned to run further north, near the city of Bismarck, North Dakota and thus avoiding the reservation, the pipeline route was changed because of the risk of toxic crude-oil leakage into the city's water supply. This redirection – and the transfer of risk from US to Sioux communities – has been termed "environmental racism" and an expression of "environmental colonialism" by activists, to which is added the charge of cultural genocide because construction of the pipeline desecrates tribal burial grounds and has destroyed other sites of sacred and archeological value. NoDAPL protesters emphasize that while the environmental threat posed by the pipeline impacts the Sioux Nation most immediately, it is not restricted to the Standing Rock Reservation but affects the quality of water supplies to all communities downstream of the point where the pipeline crosses the Missouri River. The powerful public response to the NoDAPL movement – by Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies – was provoked in important ways by the mobilization of social media specifically and digital media more generally. Evoking the title of the United Nations International Decade for Action (2005-2015) – "Water for Life" – activists gathered, physically at Standing Rock and virtually through online platforms, under the slogan "Mni Wichoni" – "Water is Life" – to protest environmental destruction, the erasure of Sioux tribal sovereignty (Sioux jurisdiction over the Missouri River and its shorelines as defined by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, affirmed by the US Supreme Court in 1904) by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and also the global threat to water posed by extractive industries. A significant recent deployment of digital media to raise public consciousness of such urgent environmental issues is Anishinaabe/Métis artist Elizabeth LaPensée's Open Access video-game Thunderbird Strike (2017), which has been condemned by Republican Minnesota State Senator David Osmek as "an eco-terrorist version of Angry Birds." The game uses interactive digital narrative to perform Indigenous concepts of environmental care-taking and social justice, concepts that motivate ethical action – if only within the virtual diegetic environment of the game-world. This presentation engages the notion of "aesthetic activism," in the context of "social impact" video-games, by exposing the primary narrative strategies by which the player is positioned in the virtual role of "eco-terrorist" or Water Protector. By rehearsing a restorative Indigenous relation to the environment and other-than-human nature, based on the values of respect, reciprocity, and preservation, Thunderbird Strike proposes an alternative to exploitative, colonialist, and literally toxic valuations of environment.

Abstract : African countries endowed with natural resources, especially oil have seen violent conflicts due to poor management of the natural resources. Violent conflicts largely where local communities have been systematically excluded from decision-making processes and when the economic benefits are concentrated in the hands of a few thereby causing economic disequilibrium in the society. Misuse of the natural resources has frequently been cited as the main factor that activates, increase or support violent conflicts around the world. When the key stakeholders disagree on the management, distribution and protection of natural resources and related bionetworks. Natural resource conflicts arise when parties disagree about the management, distribution and protection of natural resources and related ecosystems. These conflicts can heighten into brutal relations and violence when the parties are incapable or reluctant to engage in a positive process of dialogue and conflict resolution. While there are many issues associated with extractive industries, the role of natural resources in triggering, escalating or sustaining violent conflict is the focus of this survey and consequently offer relevant in reducing these conflicts so that the natural resources found in Turkana County can truly be a blessing and a catalyst for poverty reduction in Turkana County. Conflict turns out to be difficult once societal mechanisms and institutions for handling and determining conflict break down, giving way to violence. Societies with weak institutions, fragile political systems and divisive social relations can be drawn into cycles of conflict and violence. Preventing this negative spiral and ensuring the peaceful resolution of disputes is a core interest of the international community. The general objective of the survey was to offer strategies in reducing conflicts associated with extractive industries. The methodology used in this survey was both qualitative and quantitative. The research design employed was descriptive survey ...

The consequences of foreign direct investment (FDI) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the impact of FDI varies across industries. In particular, extractive firms in the oil and mining industries go where the resources are located and are bound to such investment, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting repressive rulers ("location-bound effect"). The same is not true for non-extractive MNCs in manufacturing or services, which can, in comparison, exit problematic countries more easily. We also propose that strong democratic institutions can alleviate negative impacts of extractive FDI on human rights ("democratic safeguard effect"). Using US FDI broken up into extractive and non-extractive industries in 157 host countries (1999-2015), we find support for these propositions. Extractive FDI is associated with more human rights abuse, but non-extractive FDI is associated with less abuse, after controlling for other factors, including concerns about endogeneity. We find also that the negative human rights impact of extractive FDI vanishes in countries where democratic institutions are stronger. Our results are robust to a range of alternative estimation techniques.

In Ecuador, following the late 2000's commodity boom, a populist government invested increased oil revenues into social spending, reducing inequality, and gaining a rare period of political stability. The Yasuní National Park has been the focal point of this dynamic since 2006 when the government endorsed a ground-breaking plan to protect the park called the Yasuni ITT initiative. The initiative's demise in 2013 raises the question: what explains the government's initial support of, and then rejection of the ITT initiative? Upon combining the theories of extractive imperative and limited access order, this paper's thesis is that, given Ecuador's choice to fund public services through extractive industry rents, reducing extractive industry rents through constraining extractive industries is too painful politically. These theories help to structure a narrative, producing insights into the political dynamic impacting the ITT initiative and its eventual collapse. This thesis pursues its investigation through a case study of Yasuní National Park. Discipline: Political Sciences (Honours) Faculty Mentor: Dr. Andrea Wagner

In Ecuador, following the late 2000's commodity boom, a populist government invested increased oil revenues into social spending, reducing inequality, and gaining a rare period of political stability. The Yasuní National Park has been the focal point of this dynamic since 2006 when the government endorsed a ground-breaking plan to protect the park called the Yasuni ITT initiative. The initiative's demise in 2013 raises the question: what explains the government's initial support of, and then rejection of the ITT initiative? Upon combining the theories of extractive imperative and limited access order, this paper's thesis is that, given Ecuador's choice to fund public services through extractive industry rents, reducing extractive industry rents through constraining extractive industries is too painful politically.These theories help to structure a narrative, producing insights into the political dynamic impacting the ITT initiative and its eventual collapse. This thesis pursues its investigation through a case study of Yasuní National Park.

For a long time, Cameroon was a success story in the context of Africa's development. Unfortunately, the economic crises of the eighties and early nineties led to the failure of the development strategies that had been pursued until then, resulting in a severe deterioration of the country's economy and the living standards of the Cameroonian people (Mentan, 2003). However, this country possesses significant oil wealth which if properly managed can generate abundant revenue to boost economic growth and fund anti-poverty measures. In 2005, Cameroon adhered to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). A proper implementation of this initiative will improve transparency in the country's oil sector and support national efforts against poverty and underdevelopment. In recent years though, donor organizations have made good governance and democracy cardinal conditions for the flow of development assistance (Degnbol-Martinussen and Engberg-Pedersen, 2003). A situation that has encouraged the proliferation of "pseudo" or "virtual" democracies across Sub-Saharan Africa (Diamond, 2002; 1999; 1996; Joseph, 1999). Is Cameroon's adherence to the EITI part of a pseudo-democratic scheme? Is it merely aimed at gaining international approval and assistance without any desire for reform? The significant problems affecting the EITI program in Cameroon seem to confirm this opinion. On the basis of the experiences and opinions expressed by the key actors in Cameroon's oil sector (interviews) and in line with previous studies (Diamond, 2002; 1999; 1996; Joseph, 1999) this thesis argues that Cameroon is an "arche-typical" virtual democracy. It then describes and explains how this mode of political organisation relates to and inhibits the efficacy of the national EITI program. The thesis ultimately suggests proposals - after identifying the various actors with the authority to initiate reforms - for a more efficient and sustainable EITI implementation in this Central African state.

This introductory paper analyses historical and contemporary developments in the social and political mobilisation of what are termed 'extractive communities' in Africa. It demonstrates the centrality of diverse contestations, both between extractive corporations and extractive communities, and within communities themselves, over the real and envisioned benefits of mining and oil production. In contextualising the articles carried in this special section of Extractive Industries and Society, it places these dynamics in an assessment of Africa's past and current position in global economic and political processes of extractive exploitation, and, building on the insights of these articles, suggests ways in which research on these communities may be developed in the future.

This report provides a baseline institutional and regulatory assessment of the oil and gas, mining (including jade and gemstones) and the hydropower sectors in Myanmar. As such the report is an input to Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in Myanmar. However, it is not exhaustive with respect to all the sectors that may be considered under a scoping study for EITI .This report is the first in-depth study of the context within which EITI will be implemented in Myanmar, and can inform broader efforts to improve natural resource governance. This includes support for developing natural resource policy, law and regulations, fiscal regime design, tax administration (including support to the Large Tax Payers Office on the extractive industries sector), license management and cadaster systems, community development agreements, strategic environmental and social mitigation and management, training needs assessments and capacity building. The follow-up to this baseline assessment is a scoping study, which will determine which companies should be included within the first MEITI report and what payment flows they will need to report on.