Conclusions

Institutions and place: bringing context back into the study of the resource curse

“…These entities could support contentious collective action and/or provide social capital to maximize spill-over effects and linkage-formation policy. Overall, the legacy of state–society relationships will heavily influence the size of the state and its involvement in national economic development and the mining industry (Dargent et al 2017). I illustrate this contention below with examples from Latin America.…”

“…That it exists in theory, and that it identifies one way to predict an equilibrium type previously described in a set of case studies, does not prove that it holds true in practice, everywhere and every time, as it constitutes one type of resource curse trap out of many feasible ones, in a world of multiple equilibria (see Table 1). Within mineral-abundant Latin America, Peru under Fujimori (1990–2000) provides an excellent example of good economic growth in spite of bad institutions, and economic growth not automatically creating good-for-all institutional development (Dargent et al 2017): while there was little accountability under this non-democratic regime, state competence developed almost exclusively in “islands of efficiency” (such as the Ministry of Finance). Transparency International's 2004 Global Corruption Report ranked Fujimori seventh in a list of the top ten corrupt presidents, citing his embezzlement of US$600 million.…”

“…Historically oriented political economy, yet another family of research, focuses on contextualized explanations of whether and how natural resource dependence “curses” nations. Case studies trace historical processes of institutions building (Brooks and Kurtz 2009; Dargent et al 2017; Saylor 2014; Thorp et al 2012). A review of the paved road in research reveals a need to critically integrate approaches to studying the resource curse, as well as more insightful research on which institutions matter, how , when , and where .…”