Kiiza David Maclaren

In order to understand how natural resources are governed, you have to do political analysis at three different levels, the international, the national, and the policy level. We're not going to talk very much about the international level today. If you open a newspaper you can see how important it is. Natural resources have impacted foreign policies, conflicts, the global balance of power for centuries. We will spend most of our time talking about the national level, so this is within a given resource-rich country. I'm going to describe a few of the ways that natural resources affect politics. I'll introduce some of the effects that natural resource wealth has on a particular country. This is drawing on the political science literature about the natural resource curse. Now of course, there's nothing deterministic about these effects. Some countries exhibit them, and some countries don't. They also tend to be more prominent in countries where oil or mining really is...

The natural resources are the biggest opportunity for rapid development that many poor countries have. And the supercycle of the last ten years has been the biggest opportunity that they've had in history. And for most of them, it's been a missed opportunity. And so it's really important, society by society, to discover what went wrong and what is needed to be understood in order for next time to go better. And there will be a next time. So, I'm giving two lectures. One will look at the challenge of discovering natural resources, getting them out of the ground, and getting them into revenue. The next lecture will look at what you do when you've got revenues, turning them into something that is sustainable. Because the revenues themselves are only temporary. If we look at what went wrong during the supercycle, most of the problems occur in that second half. It's using revenues for sustained development. And so, of the two lectures I'm giving, the more import...