Political Settlements and the Governance of Extractive Industry: A Comparative Analysis of the Longue Duree in Africa and Latin America

This paper synthesises findings from research in Bolivia, Ghana, Peru and Zambia to address the following three questions: 1) How does the nature of political settlements affect the governance of the mining and hydrocarbon sectors and the relationships between those sectors and patterns of social inclusion and exclusion? 2) How do the circulation of ideas and the materiality of the resources in question affect this relationship? 3) What is the role of transnational ideational, institutional and political economic factors in these relationships? These questions are approached by considering the relationships between political settlements and extractive industry since the late 19th century, with special emphasis on the last three decades. The paper concludes that the nature of settlements has had important implications for the relationships between resource-dependent economies and the nature and degree of social inclusion, but far less effect on productive structure, with no political settlement having particular success in fostering economic diversification or reducing the weight of resource rents within the national economy.