Resourcenmanagement und Innerstaatliche Konflikte
Ressourcenmanagement und Innerstaatliche Konflikte
The resource course literature has argued that an abundance of natural resources depresses a country’s economic growth and spurs the risk of the intrastate war. Yet, not all resource-rich countries experience violent conflict. Understanding such variation between peace and social instability requires a systematic analysis of how states regulate access to these abundant resources and try to solve uprisings and conflicts over them. This is the basic premise of the research project “Governing the Resource-Violence Nexus” (GRVN); it advances the proposition that this puzzling diversity of outcomes can be traced with considerable accuracy to the governance of commodities and resources.
For this purpose, the GRVN project will focus on two interrelated topics, namely resource access governance and the design of natural resource management. While we will test whether the type of ownership structure (private versus public / domestic versus foreign) is associated with the conflict potential of a country or region, we further differentiate between specific characteristics of resource management designs (e.g., specific contractual terms of resource exploration, competition structure within the resource extracting sector, inclusion of the local population in managerial decisions, among others) in a more detailed manner. Thus, the project will also explore the conditions under which specific resource governance structures affect the risk of domestic conflict.
As the comprehensive analysis of resource conflicts and their avoidance requires a systematic database, we will build a global dataset on resource governance covering commodities such as oil or natural gas. Relying on a mixture of advanced tools in formal theory, econometrics and qualitative research techniques, the project intends to show which form of resource conflict management allows states to evade unjust arrangements and political violence. Internal conflict will be defined in broad terms, ranging from major civil wars over coup d’états to the exertion of violence against ethnic minorities.
Project duration: 36 months (ab 2011) and extended project 01.07.2015 - 30.06.2017
Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Gerald Schneider (University of Konstanz) - Dr. Tim Wegenast (University of Konstanz)
- FB Politik- und Verwaltungswissenschaft
| (2020): Moving from Norms Rhetorics to Norms Empirics : A Rejoinder to ‚Local Gender Norms : Persistence or Change?‘ by Clara Neupert-Wentz Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung. Springer VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. 2020, 9(2), pp. 455-462. ISSN 2192-1741. eISSN 2524-6976. Available under: doi: 10.1007/s42597-020-00030-4 | ||
| (2020): The Micro-Foundations of the Resource Curse : Mineral Ownership and Local Economic Well-Being in Sub-Saharan Africa International Studies Quarterly. Oxford University Press. 2020, 64(3), pp. 530-543. ISSN 0020-8833. eISSN 1468-2478. Available under: doi: 10.1093/isq/sqaa033 |
The quantitative evidence on whether extractive industries generate economic wealth at the local level is far from conclusive. In line with recent studies highlighting the moderating role of institutions and governance structures in the resource–development nexus, we argue that the effect of mining on local economic well-being is largely driven by different control rights regimes. We claim that domestic mineral production stimulates local income more than internationally controlled extraction, since national mining companies promote more backward economic linkages and have higher incentives to engage in local capacity building. To test our micro-level arguments, we combine information on districts’ economic well-being as well as individual's assessments of their personal economic situation with our own dataset on the control rights of copper, gold, and diamond mines. Relying on these data, we perform district- and individual-level analyses of sub-Saharan Africa covering the period from 1997 to 2015. Our instrumental variable estimations and fixed effects models show that the presence of domestic mining companies is associated with increased local wealth. Multinational firms, by contrast, are linked to increased regional unemployment. They largely fail to promote subnational economic well-being. Forschungszusammenhang (Projekte) |
| Name | Finanzierungstyp | Kategorie | Kennziffer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sachbeihilfe/Normalverfahren | Drittmittel | Forschungsförderprogramm | 626/15 |
| Laufzeit: | 01.07.2015 – 30.06.2017 |