Managing Africa’s Natural Resource Endowments: New Dispensations And Good-Fit Approaches

Abstract

Managing a nation’s extractive natural resource endowments can advance
national development if done meaningfully. Unfortunately, across Africa, the
apparent mismanagement of such resources, poor growth rates, social tensions,
and civil strife in resource-rich countries have thrown up a great deal of
literature on what is now known as resource curse.It has also ignited calls for
enhanced governance and improved capacities for the myriad of actors engaged
in natural resource extraction. This article draws on the extant literature to
interrogate the complex entanglements of issues involved in the natural
resource value chain in Africa. It argues that in spite of the general ills,
economic challenges, and socio-political pains that resource-rich African
nations face in exploiting and managing their natural resources, the extractive
industry in Africa is evolving positively, and that the situation of resource-rich
African states is not immutable. Available evidence suggests that Africa is
emerging a new, more complex, participatory, and coordinated vision of NRM;
a development that offers opportunities and possibilities for Africa to engage
emerging actors especially in the global South. The article concludes that
what Africa needs is an approach with a good fit to local realities, and an
enhancement of individual and institutional capacities.