Suchergebnisse

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.

I wish to consider how industries exploiting natural resources may be expected to develop. It is not my purpose to consider their entire relation with the economy of which they form a part. Rather, I wish to examine the logic of their own changes in technology and technique in response to stimuli from the rest of the economy. In tracing this development, I shall stress the changing technology itself; the adjustment of property and tenure concepts; some aspects of location and transportation; and the impact of all these changes on industrial and market organization.As an analytical technique for tracing these changes, I shall make use of a "stages of development" approach. It will be shown that most industries working natural resources may be said to be in one of three, roughly consecutive stages. The precise dating of the transitions between the stages is highly arbitrary, but this defect is unimportant since the chief function of the stages approach in its present context is to bring out the successive impacts on resource exploitation of two outside forces. The first of these is a mechanical, capital-using technology. The second is the application of science to "control" the resource, biological or mineral, in the same sense that agricultural and manufacturing industries have control over their processes.In the model, stress is laid on the industries that today are still extracting raw materials from nature: fishing, hunting, logging, oil and gas, metals, and water. Agricultural activity also properly belongs with these industries. However, since agriculture has already passed well into the third stage, it is referred to chiefly for purposes of example and comparison. The farmer no longer "hunts" his cattle, nor "collects" wild rice or fruit.

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.

Part I: Theorizing and Contextualizing Extractive Bargains -- Chapter 1:Extractive Bargains and the State-Society Nexus: One World, Many Bargains -- Chapter 2: From Extractivism to Sustainability: Scenarios and Lessons from Latin America -- Chapter 3: Extractive Bargains and Indigenous Peoples: A Comparative Perspective -- Part II: Global North Case Studies -- Chapter 4: The Legacy of Sweden's Social Democratic State for Extractive Bargains with Indigenous Sami Reindeer Herding Communities -- Chapter 5: Extractive Settler Colonialism: Navigating Extractive Bargains on Indigenous Territories in Canada -- Chapter 6: Self-government and Resource Extraction in Greenland: From Independence to Diverse Bargains? -- Chapter 7: Keeping Oil in the Soil: National Bans on Oil Extraction as the Future of Global Climate Policy? -- Part III: Global South Case Studies -- Chapter 8: Extractive Policies in Mexico under López Obrador: Bargains for Whom? -- Chapter 9: Colombia: Contradictions of the Territorial Peace Extractive Bargain -- Chapter 10: Embedding Extractive Industries in Local Communities: The Chinese State's Response to the Local Resource Curse -- Chapter 11: Creating a Gender-Sensitive Extractive Bargain in Tanzania through Local Content and Women's Economic Empowerment -- Chapter 12: Contradictions of Privatized Developmentalist Bargains: Offshore Petroleum Extraction and Corporate Social Responsibility in Ghana -- Chapter 13: Extractive Bargains Reconciling Postcolonial Pluralism? Plural Economies in Bolivia and Ecuador -- Part: IV Beyond the National: Bargains at Other Scales -- Chapter 14: Global Extractive Bargains for Green New Deals -- Chapter 15: Conclusion: Debates and Extractive Bargains at Different Scales.

This article describes the fight of transnational civic networks to influence business development strategies and counter the threats to environmental and labor rights posed by the construction and exploitation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in Transcaucasia. The article starts by discussing the role of civil society in the global struggle for sustainable development. Then a brief overview of the geopolitical significance of the Transcaucasian-Caspian region in today's oil and gas markets is presented. The case study looks at how the actions of international and domestic nongovernmental organizations influenced the BTC's main shareholder and operator company, British Petroleum, as well as host countries' governments, to switch to more environmentally cognizant and socially responsive practices. The article discusses internationalization of civil society networks in response to the looming environmental crisis in the region, using the BTC case as an illustration. The article concludes by generalizing from this particular case study to the broader issue of transnational civic activism as a risk-mitigating factor in the world dominated by industry-related threats presented by globalization of the extractive technologies.

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.

The dominant scholarly approach to the analysis of nationalization of foreign extractive industries in Third World countries employs game theory or bargaining models. A commonly used framework in bargaining theory is the so-called "bilateral monopoly model," which posits the existence of two "non-colluding" parties—that is, the foreign investor and a government—each of whom has singular, noncontradictory objectives. The relationship is described in terms of a "balance of power" between the host country and the foreign investor based on the problem of joint-maximization. Each party has what the other needs to maximize their mutual benefits. The foreign investor has capital, organizational resources, expertise, international access to export markets, and marketing ability while the host government has control of natural resources such as ore and crude oil as well as the labor force, and control over taxation, the trade and foreign exchange regime, and other law and regulation.