| Popis: |
Overcoming the problems of resource dependency has been a major preoccupation for mainstream and critical economists at least since the wave of decolonisation in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Newly independent countries, ostensibly masters of their own destiny, were bound hand and foot to international resource extraction. Unequal relations of production, on a world scale, created a form of structural servitude for the post-colonial world (Amin 1976). Escaping unequal development – or at least ameliorating it – became the key preoccupation of the thenemergent field of development studies. That development conundrum was directly transposed into debates about the ‘resource curse’, and how to overcome it. As with developmentalism more widely, the central debate is between ‘modernising’ approaches aiming to civilise resource dependence and more critical approaches seeking to break with it (Collins, this issue). More recently, in the context of widescale socio-ecological crisis, most notably climate disruption, the very idea of ‘resources’, whether as a curse or as a benefit has been radically revised. The implications of this transformation are directly played-out today in community-level struggles against extractivism - and nowhere more so than on the ‘fossil frontier’. |
