For centuries, Pacific Islands have been raided by mining interests with little to show for it. Harnessing their enormous green mineral wealth must be done justly.
A woman sells drinks on a street in Georgetown in Guyana, one of South America’s poorest countries, March 1, 2020.
Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images
Buyers are avoiding Russian oil in response to the war in Ukraine. Can smaller producers leverage this moment to strike favorable deals with big oil companies?
Pipes for Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline are loaded onto a ship at a German port, June 1, 2021.
Stefan Sauer/picture alliance via Getty Images
Nord Stream 2 is a pipeline that will deliver Russian gas to Western Europe – and, by extension, increase Putin’s influence across the continent. That makes Ukraine and some other countries nervous.
Mining is not just a physical engineering process. It requires social engineering as well.
Maps can be a tool in the defense of Indigenous communities against extractive industries.
Canadian Centre for Architecture; Grant Tigner, painter. Seagrams Limited, publisher. The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, in The St. Lawrence Seaway: The Realization of a Mighty Dream, 1954.
Historically, western corporate maps have been privileged over Indigenous ones. But given the essential debate of territory in resource conflicts, maps are a crucial tool.
Mining is a highly destructive endeavour towards our environment but demand for gems and minerals is non-stop; early colonial relationships continue to define these industries.
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Much of the devastation of our globe’s natural resources traces its origins to early colonialism. These relationships continue to define the extraction of resources that severely impact ecosystems.
‘Social licence to operate’ is a term describing how much community support a project or company has. As the Northern Rivers CSG experience shows, failing to get it can have costly impacts for firms.
Guyana, a former British colony on the north shore of South America, may soon supplant Trinidad and Tobago as the Caribbean region’s biggest oil producer.
Reuters/Andrea De Silva
Anthony T. Bryan, The University of the West Indies: St. Augustine Campus
Guyana is on the verge of an oil bonanza that could bring in US$1 million a day. But if it’s not careful, this poor nation – population 750,000 – could fall prey to the dreaded ‘resource curse.’
Grassroots protesters are questioning the logic of export-led ‘growth’ and renewed fiscal austerity pushed through the ‘Africa rising’ narrative. They want policies that meet their basic needs.
There is very little evidence that commodity producing countries diversify their economies by adding value to their raw materials.
Reuters/Siegfried Modola
The downturn in the commodity boom will not automatically lead to diversification of Africa’s economies. This can only be achieved through a focus on creating learning economies driven by innovation.
An oil worker stands on the deck of a tanker at Bonga off-shore oil field outside Lagos. Africa’s extractive industries are committed to local content but universities aren’t producing the right kind of graduates.
Reuters/Akintunde Akinleye
Huge investments have been made to develop Africa’s extractive industry. The challenge now is to forge collaboration between the industry and institutions of higher education to build a skills base.
The goals of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative are laudable; but an excessive focus on transparency and accountability doesn’t always benefit developing host countries.
A developed country, rich in natural resources, with relatively open and accountable governance lends its support to a global transparency initiative – what does this mean for the world’s poor? It depends…
Qualitative Research Manager, Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI), Honorary Lecturer, Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter, and Visiting Research Associate, African Leadership Centre (ALC), School of Global Affairs, King's College London, King's College London