International Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement is a peer-reviewed, open access e-journal that publishes original, interdisciplinary, policy-relevant papers in the field of international cooperation and development. Anchored in Geneva at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, it publishes contributions by researchers and reflective practitioners worldwide. Our articles aim to contribute both to scholarly discourse and to policy and practice in the field of international cooperation and development.

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The Globethics library contains articles of International Development Policy as of vol. 1(2010) to current.

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  • Green Masquerade: Neo-liberalism, Extractive Renewable Energy Transitions, and the ‘Good’ Anthropocene in South Africa

    Pressend, Michelle (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    This chapter examines the ‘green’ energy developments apparent in the South African government’s energy policy and renewable energy programme. In 2011, the South African government introduced the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme as a new policy imperative for electricity generation from renewable energy sources through publicprivate partnerships. The Programme has been hailed for attracting a huge amount of direct foreign investment in climate mitigation in South Africa. This chapter analyses the material nature of the Programme and the publicprivate partnership investment conditions, based on a case study of the Tsitsikamma Community Wind Farm in the Eastern Cape in South Africa, an electricity generation project initiated prior to the introduction of the Independent Power Producer renewable energy programme on community reclaimed land. This community was a willing partner in the wind energy investment partnership. Despite their inclusion in this techno-capitalist development project, however, the material well-being of members of this community remains unchanged, as does the degraded state of the commercial agricultural land involved. The chapter argues that the capitalist neo-liberal logic of alternative ‘green’ energy interventions in investment models such as this renewable energy programme is embedded in the machinations of the extractivist productivist model through ‘new’ forms of financialisaton for capital accumulation.
  • Aluminium in Suriname (1898–2020): An Industry Came and Went, but its Impacts on the Maroon Communities Remain

    Lobach, Simon (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    Suriname was one of the first countries in the global South to produce aluminium. The establishment of this industry, including the hydroelectric dam that was meant to power it, was the key idea upon which Suriname’s entire dream of modernity and independence was constructed. Negotiations with the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) resulted in Suriname accepting a treaty under which hardly any benefits accumulated in the country itself, while the establishment of the industry caused loss of land, environmental damage and the deculturation of the Surinamese Maroon communities. After these revolted against the state, Alcoa left the country, leaving behind an ‘aluminium landscape’ where aluminium is no longer produced, but where the original population, insofar as its members have not moved to the cities, is still heavily affected by the changes caused by the Surinamese aluminium boom.
  • Global Afterlives of Extraction

    Calvão, Filipe; Benya, Asanda; Archer, Matthew (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    This volume of International Development Policy brings together post-extractivist imaginaries, diverse and ever-evolving forms of resistance and contestation, and a growing recognition of the paradox of ‘green’ extractivism. Despite the pervasive narrative that more rather than less mining is necessary to achieve decarbonisation, there is now growing recognition that the current model of economic development based on fossil fuels and resource extraction is not sustainable in the long term. The introduction to this volume acknowledges the complex and ongoing legacies of extraction and the urgent need to move beyond extractive models of development and towards alternative pathways that prioritise social justice, environmental sustainability, democratic governance, and the well-being of both human and non-human beings.
  • The Afterlives of Extraction

    Archer, Matthew; Balcázar, Ramón M.; Barandiarán, Javiera; Benya, Asanda; Blair, James J. A.; Boulot, Emille; Calvão, Filipe; Collins, Ben; Dunlap, Alexander; Gilbert, Paul Robert (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
  • National Resources, Resistance, and the Afterlives of the New International Economic Order in Bangladesh

    Gilbert, Paul Robert (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    Over the last two decades in Bangladesh, a well-organised resistance to coal mining in the north-west, and to onshore and offshore gas exploration, has been animated by concerns over dispossession of land, and plans to export much of the coal and gas to be extracted in the name of financial viability. As such, these movements might be read as resistance to ‘extractivism’ in a ‘literal sense’. In scholarship on resistance to resource extraction in Bangladesh, significant attention has been given to the tensions that appear to arise between ‘resource nationalist’ opposition to foreign-owned or export-oriented extractive operations, and (some) supposed resource nationalists’ accommodation of fossil fuel extraction in the name of energy sovereignty and development. In this chapter, I argue that this apparent tension in understanding resistance to extractivism dissolves when the New International Economic Order (NIEO)―which centred on attempts to assert permanent sovereignty over natural resources and empower postcolonial states to negotiate with extractive corporations―is foregrounded. In Bangladesh, sovereignty over natural resources and the primacy of domestic courts in disputes over resource extraction are frequently enacted, much to the displeasure of international extractive industry corporations. Focusing on attempts to enact the spirit of the NIEO by Bangladeshi courts, and arbitrators locking horns with extractive industry corporations, I suggest that ‘resource nationalist’ mobilisation against unjust forms of resource extraction can at times be understood as resistance to the international legal architecture that frames extractive corporations’ relationships with postcolonial states, rather than to extractivism in the ‘literal sense’.
  • The ‘Alterlives’ of Green Extractivism: Lithium Mining and Exhausted Ecologies in the Atacama Desert

    Blair, James J. A.; Balcázar, Ramón M.; Barandiarán, Javiera; Maxwell, Amanda (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    Green technologies designed to mitigate climate change through renewable energy and zero-emissions transportation currently depend on lithium-ion batteries, which require ‘critical materials’. Like nickel, graphite, manganese and cobalt, lithium is a key component of batteries that store energy for electric vehicles, smart devices and renewable power plants. Although lithium is present all over the globe, one of the main commercial lithium reserves is in the Puna de Atacama, a desert region at the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Resulting from a collaborative study for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats, this chapter examines how the reliance on brine evaporation as an extraction method for lithium mining exacerbates conditions of ecological ‘exhaustion’ in the Puna de Atacama. The study is based on ethnographic and historical research primarily conducted in Chile with environmental activists, Indigenous leaders, scientists and policy practitioners. Furthering the concept of ‘alterlives’ to examine not only exposure to downstream chemicals but also the in situ alteration of life at mining sites upstream in the chemical supply chain, the chapter analyses environmental injustices inherent to green extractivism across multiple scales. It considers under what conditions Indigenous and local participation may contribute new models and standards for monitoring and offers policy recommendations to prevent further social harm and environmental damage.
  • ‘We are nature defending itself’—The Forest of Dannenrod Occupation as an Example of Contested Extractivism in the Global North

    Hamilton, Dorothea; Trölenberg, Sina (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    Extractive activity is not limited to mining; it also occurs in the other forms of large-scale landscape destruction, including the deforestation involved in extensive infrastructure projects. Yet while resistance to activities such as fracking and coal mining has been intensively investigated within the extractivism debate under the collective term ‘contested extractivism’, resistance to the extraction of renewable parts of nature such as woodland has, by comparison, been somewhat neglected. Likewise, the academic debate has focused mostly on case studies from the global South. We argue that opposition to the felling of more than 85 hectares of woodland in the Forest of Dannenrod (Germany) for the construction of a highway is an example of contested extractivism in the global North. We portray the protest as a clash between extractivist and anti-extractivist notions in Europe, the latter partly transitioning into post-extractivist imaginaries. And although the area was felled in 2020, we argue that this opposition marked a turning point for the German environmental justice movement and sparked a national debate, despite persistent support mechanisms for wood extraction and negative media reports.
  • Contesting Extraction: Challenges for Coalition Building between Agrarian and Anti-mining Movements

    Prause, Louisa (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    In the context of a global expansion of the extractive frontier, building broad protest coalitions is key for emancipatory and non-extractive future transformations of the countryside. Yet even though movements in both the agrarian and the mining sector struggle against the enclosure of land and the loss of livelihoods in rural areas, inter-sectoral coalitions remain scarce. This chapter therefore aims to identify challenges to inter-sectoral coalition building between movements struggling against extractive projects in the agrarian and the mining sector. Based on a case study of Senegal it shows that mutually exclusive identities, missing ‘bridge builders’, and different policy spaces constitute key challenges for the building of coalitions. Furthermore, extraction plays out differently in the agrarian and in the mining sector. Different regulations and economic histories as well as distinct impacts of extractive activities on land and nature provide different incentives and challenges for claim making in the two sectors. In order to understand resistance to extraction, it is therefore key to stay attuned to the different impacts extractive investments have on the ground.
  • Logics of Extraction and of the Valorisation of Culture: The Role of Post-extraction Investment in the Creation of Inequality in China

    Parsons, Ryan (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    What sort of social and economic arrangements are enabled by an extractive economy and its successors? How are patterns of social stratification influenced by these processes? Drawing on ethnographic evidence collected in a tourist destination town in Yunnan that is surrounded by iron mines, I argue that the underlying logics of extractivism persist into the development of a service sector economy (in this case, tourism). The specific case documents economic and social change in a community being reshaped by an emergent cultural tourism industry. New logics of extractivism are motivated by an assumption that peripheral capital is raw and unchanging and exists to be processed, monetised, and consumed by core elites. Even as the makeup of economic sectors change, the national periphery continues to be a site of raw resources to be extracted and valorised by elites and other stakeholders from urban cores. The effect of this extractive tourism industry is to flatten, ossify, and ‘legibilise’ culture in ways that prioritise performance and experience over the agency of local people. The resulting reformation of cultural practice creates new forms of inequality, here marked by gender and ethnicity.
  • Electric Vehicle Paradise? Exploring the Value Chains of Green Extractivism

    Remme, Devyn; Sareen, Siddharth; Haarstad, Håvard; Rommetveit, Kjetil (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    Norway has the world-class ambition to make transport more sustainable and climate friendly. Its electric vehicle (EV) rollout is celebrated by and aspirational for other countries, manifesting the imaginary of technological solutions for sustainable mobility. This chapter undertakes a critically constructive analysis of the value chains of this rollout, tracing the production, usage and discard of EVs. Our point of departure in Norway’s EV rollout serves to map broader implications of a rapid, massive shift towards electric transport. We map relevant externalities associated with, for example, the mining of raw materials and with modes of digitalisation that run counter to circular economy principles. The requisite resources for the transition to renewably powered, electrified transportation―notably batteries―are sourced in the global South, whereas their consumption and industries that reuse and recycle valuable minerals are emerging in the global North. The uneven distribution of benefits and burdens is increasingly being criticised as green extractivism for an imperial mode of living. By paying attention to site-specific struggles over resources, our mapping demonstrates that practices of legitimation have yet to be welded with holistic accountability. By piecing together some major links along the value chains of Norway’s EV rollout, we argue for a global perspective on this transition.
  • Expanding Extractivisms: Extractivisms as Modes of Extraction Sustaining Imperial Modes of Living

    Post, Erik (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    The rapacious planetary extraction of energy and materials and associated socioecological violence have culminated in overlapping ecological, social, and political crises. With the advent of global initiatives that seek to address these crises and signs of post-pandemic recovery programmes deepening extraction, ‘extractivisms’ are at a critical juncture. Discussions over extractivisms, their relation to capitalism, and implications for creating alternative post-extractivist futures have proliferated in recent years. As a result, definitions have multiplied and expanded, which has led to ambiguity and prompted calls to better define and conceptualise extractivisms. This chapter contributes to this exercise in three ways: First, it details a genealogy of extractivisms that originates in Latin American scholarship, expands to ‘global extractivisms’, and culminates in conceptual expansions that progressively divorce the concept from the extraction of energy and materials. Second, it addresses how Marxian thought has theorised the relationship between capitalism and the biophysical world and analyses four recent interventions to clarify why extractivisms are pivotal to but cannot be equated with capitalism. Third, the chapter synthesises insights from these discussions to argue that extractivisms are best conceived of as particular ‘modes of extraction’ that provide the energetic and material basis for ‘imperial modes of living’. It concludes with reflections on how more sustainable and peaceful futures must be premised on transitions to ‘post-extractivisms’ and ‘post-imperial solidarity modes of living’.
  • Regulating Mine Rehabilitation and Closure on Indigenous Held Lands: Insights from the Regulated Resource States of Australia and Canada

    Boulot, Emille; Collins, Ben (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-06-12)
    Countless environmental, social, and economic issues can stem from poor mine closure and post-mining land use planning practices. Such post-extractive landscapes have a disproportionate effect on local Indigenous communities that continue to live in these often remote areas on their traditional lands, with such peoples only recently being able to document and bring their values and stories to closure, rehabilitation, and post-mining land use policy. A strong regulatory environment is the often suggested response to such concerns, and this chapter examines the regulation of mine rehabilitation and closure (MR&C) practices in the developed resource states of Canada and Australia. Analysis of current regulation and policy along with examples from MR&C practice demonstrate that the regulatory state is failing to ensure social, economic, cultural, and environmentally safe landscapes for local Indigenous people on whose lands these mines were situated. This research highlights recent reform in both jurisdictions, primarily designed to limit state liability for abandoned mines, and the impact of that reform upon the influence and inclusion of Indigenous peoples’ interests and rights in MR&C. The chapter highlights the common structural, institutional, political and resource challenges that Indigenous peoples across Australia and Canada face in ensuring that their lands and country are effectively and safely rehabilitated, and argues that having a comprehensive regulatory environment is not enough. Greater Indigenous engagement, management, control and ownership of MR&C processes is required if we are to see better outcomes for local people in post-extractive landscapes.
  • Exploration, Storytelling and Frontier-Making in the Colombian Andes

    Hoff, Anneloes (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    This chapter shows how the speculative (pre-)lives and afterlives of resource extraction are put together through corporate narrative and imaginative practices. It shows that the expansion of extractive frontiers is not merely driven by abstract and asocial market forces, but that deeply social practices of storytelling and imagination are also vital for making mining exploration possible. Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork in Colombia, it discusses the spectacular narratives surrounding the exploration campaign of South African gold mining corporation AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) across the Colombian Andes. The chapter examines how corporate storytelling unfolds through corporate processes and individual narratives, and shows it to be integral to conjuring Colombia as the ‘last Andean frontier’ for gold exploration in the international investor’s imagination. Corporate narrative and performative practices were not only crucial to attracting and sustaining investor interest, but also served an important internal function in shaping the professional identity of exploration geologists and corporate identity more broadly. At the same time, the chapter shows that frontier expansion and the capitalisation of mineral finds are uneven and speculative processes, with room for alternative stories.
  • Anti-extractive Rumouring in the Russian North-East

    Nikolaeva, Sardana (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    This chapter discusses the potentiality of alternative Indigenous politicised discourses, arguing that diverse public narratives can reveal more subtle, yet still effective forms of agency, and, most importantly, highlight the plurality of Indigenous anti-extractive discourses. Building on ethnographic materials, I address the neglected subject of rumours that can open a specific productive space for alternative forms of evidence to understand, write, and most importantly, experience resistance. I demonstrate how localised rumours can mirror uneven power relations between local community, extractive company, and the state. Through the production and reproduction of certain rumouring narratives, the community expresses its fears and anxieties over changing environmental conditions (especially water pollution and radiation), concerns over health, and its members’ precarious and marginalised position within the extensive discourses on economic development, extractive profits and government interventions. Under these conditions of marginality, the community members resist with the only resource they have—rumours—reacting to and, sometimes, subverting their precarious positions.
  • Spaces of Extraction in Europe: The Corporate–State–Mining Complex and Resistance in Greece and Romania

    Petrakos, Konstantinos ‘Kostas’ (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    Despite the widespread attention paid to the spatial expansion of extractive frontiers around the globe, the multiple ways in which states and extractive transnational corporations interfere with and exercise authority over local populations in spaces of extraction remain underexplored. Drawing on insights from the literature on critical geography and on current debates over extractivism and neo-extractivism, this chapter explores the corporate strategies and techniques of power used in spaces of extraction, and discusses how states promote the forcible appropriation of land for mining operations. While most critical perspectives on extractivism have mainly focused on Latin America, Africa and Asia, where the expansion of extractive activities has intensified and become widespread, my focus is on the expansion of extractive activities in Europe, which has attracted renewed interest from extractive capital in the wake of the financial crisis. Two mining investments—by Eldorado Gold and Gabriel Resources, in Chalkidiki and Rosia Montană, respectively—have been reactivated in crisis-ridden Greece and Romania. In each country, a whole range of neo-liberal state strategies have paved the way for the expansion of the extractive frontier. Through an in-depth exploration of the two European cases examined here, this chapter builds on recent critical scholarship on new enclosures, extractivism, and the permanence of primitive accumulation in order to survey the inter-articulation of extractivist projects and neo-liberal policies in crisis-scapes. Attention given to social mobilisation at the extractive frontier highlights that social opposition arises due to some common agents of oppression. This social resistance leads to the formulation of a critique of development and highlights the importance of contesting neo-liberal policies at the international level.
  • Migrants and the Politics of Presence on the South African Platinum Mining Belt

    Nkomo, Melusi (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    The platinum mining regions of South Africa’s North West province attract numerous individuals from far and wide in search of mining jobs and other opportunities directly or indirectly related to the mines. Since the late 1990s many newcomers to the region have established informal settlements close to mining operations and nearby urban areas. Significant numbers of IsiXhosa-speaking migrants, primarily from the south-east of the country, reside in these settlements. This chapter examines particular social and cultural practices to argue that such mine-periphery settlements are significant sites for consequential social and political organisation and action. The chapter proposes that such politics, which can be termed the ‘politics of presence’, permits visible and audible claim-making and demands by the residents vis-à-vis the state and mining capital. Ordinary strategies for constructing and organising life entrench and expand their political presence, actions, and solidarity in a region that is, generally speaking, hostile to their presence. Instead of confronting, pathologising and marginalising the sociopolitical organisation and practices of informal settlement residence, policymakers would do well to view the political space and structures created in informal settlements as potentially fruitful for progressive political communication and deliberations aimed at improving the lives of poor people over the long term.
  • ‘Le fléau de la soude caustique’: Bauxite Refining, Social Reproduction, and the Role of Women’s Promotion Groups

    Lupo, Luisa (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    This chapter examines the entanglements between two seemingly separate economies, women’s promotion groups―grassroots arrangements bringing together self-employed women around shared activities to sustain their livelihoods―and bauxite refining. It starts by following the circulation of caustic soda, a chemical agent harmful to humans and used in soap making, fabric dyeing and aluminium production from bauxite, in and around the refinery of one of the leading aluminium companies in the world. The main argument is that diverse economies such as these women’s groups are significantly shaped by and sustain the bauxite industry, with which they are in mutual constitution and tension. Drawing on original interviews with members of these groups, civil society, and government representatives in Guinea, the analysis demonstrates that the bauxite industry directly sustains women’s promotion groups, both through the smuggling of caustic soda by factory guards and through corporate social responsibility initiatives. In turn, the groups subsidise extractive operations in times of crisis and factory closure, with many women becoming the sole income earners in their families and bearing the double burden of production and social reproduction. At the same time, women’s groups elude extractivist logics; they represent a terrain where resilience, solidarity, and sociality can emerge. Attending more closely to how they are entangled with extractivism is important, not only to make them more visible as sites of enquiry and development policy, but also to advance alternatives to extractivism that are more just and sustainable.
  • Muddled Times: Temporality and Gold Mining in Colombia and Venezuela

    Jonkman, Jesse; van Roekel, Eva (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    In current social theorising there is a burgeoning interest in the ‘afterlife’ of resource extraction. In this chapter, we maintain that while the assumption of a post-extractive afterlife might grasp certain social and extractive dynamics of mining areas, it is not necessarily indicative of how people in mining sites themselves conceive of being in time. To this end, we explore how different temporal experiences coincide and converge with one another in two informal gold-mining regions in Colombia and Venezuela. In particular, we reveal that during our fieldwork in these regions the extractive present was imagined as an afterlife and/or a thing of the past. In other words, miners who were extracting in the present nevertheless experienced and described their work through tropes of anteriority (of being stuck in an earlier time) and posteriority (of being stuck after history). In the gold rush of the Venezuelan Arco Minero region, miners encountered their ongoing mining practices as if having descended into a messy hereafter they had never imagined becoming part of. In the Colombian Chocó region, residents of post-boom towns and villages returned to pre-boom extractive practices, and described these practices as the tragic aftermath of a rich gold rush, while simultaneously relating them to pre-boom years of poverty. We couple both cases to highlight how lived experiences in present-day gold country cannot be analysed without considering previous booms and busts, as one resource frontier’s life is often another frontier’s afterlife. We present ‘muddled times’ as an alternative way to conceive of the temporality of the gold mine.
  • The Promise of Gold. Gold and Governance in China’s Borderlands, Then and Now

    Bingaman, Eveline (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    Eagleback Village is located in Eya Naxi Autonomous Township, deep in the mountains of southern Sichuan Province, an area whose history has been intimately bound up in the search for gold since at least the Ming dynasty. In the People’s Republic of China’s Reform era, efforts to extract Eagleback’s remaining gold resources have been fraught with controversy. Since 1984, reforms allowing individuals to pursue their own economic interests, combined with the difficulty of monitoring gold digging in such a remote area, have created a ‘grey area’ regarding ownership of the valley’s gold resources. A gold rush began when speculators, villagers and township cadres alike began engaging in artisanal and small-scale mining for gold in the hope of being able to participate in China’s growing economy and improve the standard of living of their families. At the county level in the early 2000s, efforts began to act on development and poverty alleviation policies, in particular the ‘Three Connects’ (三通) policy which aimed to connect every settlement in the county with roads, electricity, and water. County officials looking for contractors able to build roads made a deal with a Hunan gold mining multinational corporation (MNC) for mining rights throughout the county. However, when the project reached Eya Naxi Autonomous Township the damage done to the Longda River by the use of large-scale mining equipment led to a civil uprising in which villagers protested, eventually succeeding in bringing the mining to a halt in 2010. This chapter takes a historical approach while drawing on ethnographic fieldwork to present an example of ‘rightful resistance’ that offers a more nuanced understanding than that frequently offered with regard to state–society relations in China.
  • Struggles over Resource Decentralisation: Legislative Reform, Corporate Resistance and Canadian Aid Partnerships in Burkina Faso

    Ayeh, Diana (Institut de hautes études internationales et du développementInternational Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2023-05-22)
    In attempting to counter the various negative correlations associated with the mining–development nexus in the global South (for example, the ‘resource curse’ or ‘enclave economies’), the global mining sector experienced a mushrooming of ethical norms, practices and policies during the past three decades, many of them intended to strengthen local communities. In addition to the launch of various initiatives from the corporate world (ranging from multi-stakeholder partnerships on the global level to corporate social responsibility programmes in mining concessions), a number of West African countries have reformed their liberal mining legislation in recent years, thereby introducing new mechanisms for a more just local redistribution of mining revenues. In this spirit, the mining code of Burkina Faso, reformed in 2015, provides the implementation of a Mining Fund for Local Development (FMDL) to which multinational corporations are legally required to contribute 1 per cent of their national turnover (before tax). This chapter investigates multi-scalar policies for decentralised mining revenue allocation in and around Burkina Faso’s gold mining sector by engaging with and contributing to debates in post-structural geography and political ecology. It explores how ‘resource decentralisation’ became a priority of both the national government and of Canadian aid projects in Burkina Faso, while facing political resistance from mining companies. I argue that struggles for local profits from mining transcend specific scales (‘the global’, ‘the national’, or ‘the local’) in resource governance and focus either on promoting the various voluntary engagements of the corporate world or on calling for the state-centred enforcement of legal requirements. In Burkina Faso’s mining areas this has ambivalent outcomes: It leads to a reshuffling of responsibility for the (re-)distribution of mining revenues from corporate agents to municipal decision makers, on the one hand. On the other, it serves to engineer (potential) community unrest, and thus to eventually make large-scale mining feasible in the first place.

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