Competitive Clientelism and the Political Economy of Mining in Ghana
Competitive Clientelism and the Political Economy of Mining in Ghana

Author: Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 51

ISBN-13:

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This paper offers a political economy explanation to the question of why over 100 years of mineral resource extraction in Ghana has failed to translate into broad-based development. It does so through the lens of political settlements, which draws attention to how relations of power and ideas shape elite commitment to allocating mineral resources towards long-term development goals. The analysis draws attention to how clientelist political pressures engendered by Ghana's highly competitive electoral system have historically underpinned the diversion of mineral revenues towards shorter-term goals of maintaining the stability of ruling coalitions. In particular, all ruling coalitions have allocated significant shares of mineral rents to chiefs not necessarily for the socio-economic development of their communities, but mainly because political elites want to avoid provoking resistance from a group in society that brokers land and votes in rural areas. These findings challenge recent suggestions concerning the centrality of inclusive political settlements for the effective management of mineral rents. As the analyses reveal, broad-based elite inclusion can also carry the danger of undermining the effective management of rents for long-term development if mineral rents are deployed with the aim of 'buying-off' elites who can potentially undermine the stability of ruling coalitions. Under such circumstances, inclusive political settlements may at best result in unproductive peace, as substantial mineral resources are shared for consumption rather than development.

Governing Extractive Industries
Governing Extractive Industries

Author: Anthony Bebbington

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-11

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0192552880

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Proposals for more effective natural resource governance emphasize the importance of institutions and governance, but say less about the political conditions under which institutional change occurs. Governing Extractive Industries synthesizes findings regarding the political drivers of institutional change in extractive industry governance. It analyses resource governance from the late nineteenth century to the present in Bolivia, Ghana, Peru, and Zambia, focusing on the ways in which resource governance and national political settlements interact. The authors focus on the ways in which resource governance and national political settlements interact, exploring the nature of elite politics, the emergence of new political actors, forms of political contention, changing ideas regarding natural resources and development, the geography of natural resource deposits, and the influence of the transnational political economy of global commodity production.

Political Economy of the Mining Sector in Ghana
Political Economy of the Mining Sector in Ghana

Author: Joseph Ayee

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13:

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With a focus on the institutional set-up and the political environment as central to understanding and rectifying the poor impact of mining on Ghana's economic development, this paper highlights the vulnerabilities in mining sector governance along the industry value chain. The authors explain why it has been difficult to implement policies that would have improved social welfare. They find that incentive problems in institutions directly or peripherally involved in mining governance are a major factor, as are an excessively centralized policy-making process, a powerful executive president, strong party loyalty, a system of political patronage, lack of transparency, and weak institutional capacity at the political and regulatory levels. The paper argues that the net impact of mining on economic development is likely to be enhanced with appropriate reforms in governance. Most importantly, there should be a greater awareness of incentive problems at the political level and their possible implications for sector performance and the economy at large. The set of checks and balances, as stipulated by the Constitution, have to be reinforced. Furthermore, capacity building at different levels and institutions is needed and should be combined with efforts to enhance incentives for institutional performance.

Deals and Development
Deals and Development

Author: Lant Pritchett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-11-03

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 0192521659

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. When are developing countries able to initiate periods of rapid growth and why have so few of these countries been able to sustain growth over decades? Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes seeks to answer these questions and many more through a novel conceptual framework built from a political economy of business-government relations. Economic growth for most developing countries is not a linear process. Growth instead proceeds in booms and busts, yet most frameworks for thinking about economic growth are built on the faulty assumption that a country's economic performance is largely stable. Deals and Development explains how growth episodes emerge and when growth, once ignited, is maintained for a sustained period. It applies its new framework to examine the growth of countries across a range of institutional and political contexts in Africa and Asia, using the examples of Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda and Uganda. Through these country analyses it demonstrates the explanatory power of its framework and the importance of feedback cycles in which economic trends interact with political behaviour to either sustain or terminate a growth episode. Offering a lens through which to analyse complex scenarios and unwieldy amounts of information, this book provides actionable levers of intervention to bring around reform and improve a country's chance at achieving transformative economic growth.

Varieties of Clientelism
Varieties of Clientelism

Author: Edward Aspinall

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-26

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1000818438

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Clientelism is a prominent feature of many of the world’s democracies and electoral authoritarian regimes. Yet the comparative study of this practice, which involves exchanging personal favours for electoral support, remains strikingly underdeveloped. This book makes the case that clientelistic politics take different forms in different countries, and that this variation matters for understanding democracy, elections, and governance. Involving collaboration by experienced observers of politics in several countries – Mexico, Ghana, Sudan to Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines, Caribbean and Pacific Island states, and Malaysia – the chapters in this volume unpack the concept of clientelism and show that it is possible to identify different types of patronage democracies. The book proposes a comparative framework that focuses on the networks that politicians use, the type of resources they hand out, their degree of control over the distribution of state resources, and shows that the comparative study of a key informal dimension of politics offers much analytical promise for scholars of democracy and governance. Varieties of Clientelism is essential reading for scholars and students interested in clientelism, patronage democracies, comparative political economy, as well as party politics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Democratization.