Resource Booms and Institutional Pathways

Reviews / Votes

"This book makes a bold and timely contribution to the literature on natural resource wealth, much of which has emphasized the negative impact of wealth on institutional strength. In contrast, the authors of this important new book offer a more nuanced and fine-grained understanding of the relationship between resource extraction and institutional evolution. They do this by focusing on one particularly salient case, that of Peru, and by bringing to bear their expertise on a range of specific institutional arenas that were impacted by the recent mining boom - including revenue sharing rules, environmental regulation, and conflict management. Thus, a distinctive strength of this volume is that it asks similar theoretical questions about institutional development across numerous institutional landscapes, but all in the same country and in the same critical time period. This research design enables the book to advance a number of persuasive arguments about the design of institutions, the relative strength of institutions, and the timing of institutional change." (Kent Eaton, Professor of Politics, University of California Santa Cruz, USA)

"Abundant natural resources are a well-known curse on development and democracy-but this thought-provoking book tells us they do not have to be. Using intensive and well-chosen Peruvian case studies that range from university research funds to environmental impact assessment and conflict management, the authors show that new institutions can be created and go on to thrive even in the high pressure situation of an extractive commodity boom. If and when they do depends on patterns of state-society relations and the entrepreneurship of embedded individuals, an explanatory framework that looks very promising for extension to additional Latin American cases." (Kathryn Hochstetler, Professor of Environment and Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)