The Developmental Challenges of Mining and Oil Lessons from Africa and Latin America

The authors explain why the discovery and development of natural resources is commonly associated with unstable and unequal development, and frequently with violence. They demonstrate the need for policies and institutions by reflecting on both successes and failures in case studies on Botswana, Nigeria and Niger as well as Bolivia, Chile and Peru.

Rosemary Thorp is Emeritus Fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK, and also an Emeritus Reader of the University. She was Chair of Among her principal works ate Peru 1890-1977: Growth and Policy in an Open Economy (1978, with Geoff Bertram); Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the Twentieth Century (1998); and Ethnicity and the Persistence of Inequality: The Case of Peru (2010, with Maritza Paredes). Stefania Battistelli is a graduate of the University of Oxford, and University of Washington, USA. She has been working since 2008 as a consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Her work focuses on addressing social and economic inequalities in food security and rural development Research interests include institutional change and the political economy of natural resources management. Yvan Guichaoua is a lecturer in Politics and International Development at the University of East Anglia, UK. Previously, he was Research Officer at the Oxford Department Development, UK, and Research Fellow at Yale University, USA. His research focuses on political violence and the political economy of mineral resources in West Africa. Jos Carlos Orihuela is a postdoctoral scholar in International Studies at The Watson Institute, Brown University, USA, where he teaches courses on political economy and environmental governance. He was previously a doctoral fellow, for Global Environment and Conflict Resolution at CICR, Columbia University, USA, His current research deals with policy diffusion and the Latin American green state. Maritza Paredes is a research Fellow at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University, USA. She is completing her doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, UK, on mining and state formation in the Andes. Published work includes: Ethnicity and the Persistence of Inequalities: The Case of Peru (2010, with Rosemary Thorp), and an article on Group Inequalities and the Nature and Power of Collective Action: Case Studies from Peru (with Ismael Muoz and Rosemary Thorp) in World Development.