The “Blind” State: Government Quest for Formalization and Conflict with Small‐Scale Miners in the Peruvian Amazon

The Peruvian government is attempting to implement a formalization plan to deal with the chaotic expansion of small‐scale mining activities in the Amazon. However, this plan has been contested, delayed and halted by local miners. Why exactly has it been so hard for the government to enforce a formalization plan in Madre de Dios? This article aims to answer this question by analysing both government efforts to establish control over the region and the challenges it faces in enforcing its formalization plan. It is argued that current resistance to and conflict over the formalization process in Madre de Dios reveals a state governance problem due to the region having been historically governed as a zone for exploitation rather than for social and economic development. Similarly, the analysis highlights the absence of major corporations through which the state can establish a basis for governance, as in other parts of the country.     

Structural Adjustment and Subsistence Industry: Artisanal Gold Mining in Ghana

Since the implementation of Ghana's national Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), policies associated with the programme have been criticized for perpetuating poverty within the country's subsistence economy. This article brings new evidence to bear on the contention that the SAP has both fuelled the uncontrolled growth of informal, poverty‐driven artisanal gold mining and further marginalized its impoverished participants. Throughout the adjustment period, it has been a central goal of the government to promote the expansion of large‐scale gold mining through foreign investment. Confronted with the challenge of resuscitating a deteriorating gold mining industry, the government introduced a number of tax breaks and policies in an effort to create an attractive investment climate for foreign multinational mining companies. The rapid rise in exploration and excavation activities that has since taken place has displaced thousands of previously‐undisturbed subsistence artisanal gold miners. This, along with a laissez faire land concession allocation procedure, has exacerbated conflicts between mining parties. Despite legalizing small‐scale mining in 1989, the Ghanaian government continues to implement procedurally complex and bureaucratically unwieldy regulations and policies for artisanal operators which have the effect of favouring the interests of established large‐scale miners.     

The Redevelopmental State: Governing Surplus Life and Land in the ‘Urban Age’

This article theorizes changing configurations of development governance emerging as states attempt to reconcile two contradictory pressures of global urbanization: dispossessing capitalist accumulation and demands for inclusive welfare. It introduces the ‘redevelopmental state’ as a dynamic spatio‐political framework for understanding how hegemonic rule is tenuously forged amid potentially volatile urban land struggles. Whereas Northern urban redevelopment theories are less attentive to post‐colonial urbanization processes and most developmental state scholarship has not focused on cities, the redevelopmental state offers an alternative conceptualization. It centres on how emerging regimes of territorial rule, development and political participation contour access to land and social benefits in Southern cities. Forged at key conjunctures of social pressure, these redevelopmental state spaces work through and beyond formal policies and institutions, and articulate with nationalist cultural politics of belonging and aspiration that foster consent for redevelopment while also legitimating exclusions, violence and dispossession. A case study of Mumbai illustrates redevelopmental state spaces that suture ethno‐religious nationalism, urbanized accumulation and populist welfare to unevenly distribute life capacities, garnering both cooperation and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting ways this spatially attuned framing can provide insights into the recent rise of ethno‐nationalism and authoritarian populism around the world.     

Global Environmental Governance and the Challenge of Shadow States: The Impact of Illicit Sapphire Mining in Madagascar

The environment has become a key site of global governance because of its transboundary nature: forests, wildlife and oceans have all become central foci for networks of global governance which link international organizations, international financial institutions, states and non‐governmental organizations. This article examines how contemporary forms of global governance can be challenged and even subverted. It uses the concept of shadow states introduced by William Reno to explore how invisible global networks flow through developing states, to show how they constitute important political and economic interest groups, and to assess what kinds of environmental impact they have. It explores how powerful these networks are, and whether they are able to challenge or subvert attempts to manage, control or govern the environment. The author provides an analysis of the ways in which the clandestine networks of shadow states impact on conservation initiatives in the developing world, focusing on the features of global environmental governance and the problems posed by illicit gem mining and trafficking in Madagascar.     

Unpacking Land Grabs: Subjects,Performances and the State in Ghana's ‘Small‐scale’ Gold Mining Sector

During the 2008 global financial crisis, gold‐backed reserves became a ‘safe haven’ for capital investment, causing gold prices to hit historic highs. Globally, small‐scale gold mining activities proliferated as prices climbed. Along the banks of Ghana's Offin River, abandoned, waterlogged mining pits now stretch for kilometres where agricultural and other land uses recently existed. While small‐scale mining is a right reserved for Ghanaian citizens, many mining sites are foreign‐operated and almost all go unremediated. There is thus a stark tension between Ghanaian minerals laws and environmental regulations and the ongoing transformation of rural landscapes. Based on 112 interviews and long‐term observation in Ghana since 2010, this article untangles the relationships and practices mediating ‘illegal’ foreign mining operations. Shifting subjectivities, performances and practices bring land grabbing into being as state actors weave together legal and extra‐legal domains to facilitate, and profit from, foreign mining. Other officials experience fear and frustration in the face of powerful mining interests, demonstrating the complex workings and conflicts between government actors and agencies. Detailing co‐productions between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ domains in official licensing procedures complicates understandings of the state and its role in foreign land grabbing, breaking down the ontological binaries — rational/irrational, official/unofficial — used to uphold an image of state legitimacy and cohesion. Finally, given the spatial extent of small‐scale mining deals and ensuing social and environmental transformations, the authors urge land‐grab scholars not to dismiss the importance of small‐scale deals alongside larger transactions.     

Rushing for Gold: Mobility and Small‐Scale Mining in East Africa

African rural dwellers have faced depressed economic prospects for several decades. Now, in a number of mineral‐rich countries, multiple discoveries of gold and precious stones have attracted large numbers of prospective small‐scale miners. While their ‘rush’ to, and activities within, mining sites are increasingly being noted, there is little analysis of miners' mobility patterns and material outcomes. In this article, on the basis of a sample survey and interviews at two gold‐mining sites in Tanzania, we probe when and why miners leave one site in favour of another. Our findings indicate that movement is often ‘rushed’ but rarely rash. Whereas movement to the first site may be an adventure, movement to subsequent sites is calculated with knowledge of the many risks entailed. Miners spend considerable time at each site before migrating onwards. Those with the highest site mobility tend to be more affluent than the others, suggesting that movement can be rewarding for those willing to ‘try their luck’ with the hard work and social networking demands of mining another site.     

The OECD and the Reconfiguration of the State in Emerging Economies: Manufacturing ‘Regulatory Capacity’

This article explores attempts to construct ‘regulatory capacity’ in developing countries, focusing on the work of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) and its role as an international standard‐setting institution in regulatory governance. The article explores how the construction of specific forms of regulatory capacity, and attempts to orchestrate the adoption of regulatory reform agendas in emerging economies, reflect broader processes of political‐policy transfer that impact state capacity and the ability of developing states to manage economic development. By analysing the OECD's engagement practices with third party organizations such as APEC (Asia‐Pacific Economic Cooperation organization) and ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and its specific engagement with emerging economies through country ‘reviews’ and ‘audits’, the author explores the implications for state capacity in terms of the adoption of regulatory systems of governance.     

Shifting Winds: Explaining Variation in State Policies to Promote Small‐Scale Wind Energy

States have increasingly taken leading roles in U.S. environmental policymaking over the past two decades. As laboratories of democracy, states have developed different levels and mixes of policies to address climate change, nonpoint source pollution, alternative energy, and other challenging environmental issues. Policy scholars have sought to explain variation in state environmental policy through two primary theoretical lenses: internal determinants and regional diffusion. While our understanding of state environmental policy adoption has grown to identify which variables are most important, less is known about how these variables interact in particular states to influence policy adoption. This study examines the interactions of variables from both theories to explain how state policies for small‐scale wind energy promotion were adopted in three U.S. states. Our results highlight the nuanced role of citizen ideology, which may be important in contexts at either end of the ideological spectrum but less important in the middle—where economic development is more critical. Results also indicate that interstate competition may be over environmental as well as economic leadership. Interestingly, strength of the wind resource is not necessarily correlated with policy adoption for small‐scale wind energy promotion.     

Dimensions of State Environmental Policies

States have developed an array of environmental programs in response to a variety of political and environmental factors. This article examines three state clean air programs—setting ambient standards, ambient monitoring, and enforcement—and shows how each program has a distinct set of empirical determinants, reflecting the programs' diverse purposes. States' ambient standards policies allocate resources among competing claimants, and consequently they reflect the balance of environmental politics in each state. Ambient monitoring programs reflect the degree to which states need and can process information about air pollution problems. The level of states' enforcement programs reflects the scope of the environmental problem in each state.     

What is the Alternative? Youth,Entrepreneurship and the Developmental State in Urban Ethiopia

This article investigates the implementation of small‐scale entrepreneurship programmes in inner‐city Addis Ababa. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it discusses the failure of these programmes to open up opportunities for social improvement for young people. It also analyses how young people confronted with this failure suggest ways of conceptualizing ‘alternatives’ to established development concepts of poverty reduction, such as microfinance and small‐scale entrepreneurship. In doing this, the author does not pretend either to offer a grand solution or to invent a brand new developmental concept. Rather, the aim is to provide a critical commentary on the reasons why some of the current academic debate on alternatives to neoliberalism have, de facto, amounted to an endorsement Ethiopia's political authoritarianism.     

The wartime Slovak state: a case study in the relationship between ethnic nationalism and authoritarian patterns of governance

This is a case study of the clerical‐nationalist Slovak state established under Nazi protection during World War II. As the only example of Slovak political independence prior to the break‐up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, nationalist interpretations of its legacy have helped shape the Slovak discourse on post‐communist state‐ and nation‐building. To explore the impact of the Slovak state on the development of Slovak nationalism, this article examines how the ideology of the Slovak state structured the relationship between the individual, state and nation; the roots of the regime's ideology; and the ramifications of this ideology for governance during the period of statehood. Through this exploration, I hope both to contribute to a fuller understanding of the relationship between ethnic nationalism and authoritarian patterns of governance and to lay the groundwork for further study of the sources of post‐communist Slovak political culture.     

New State Spaces,Agency and Scale: Devolution and the Regionalisation of Transport Governance in Scotland

Abstract: New state spaces can be seen as products of the interaction between emerging initiatives and pre‐existing institutional arrangements ( Peck 1998 , Space and Polity 2:5–31). In the devolved territories of the UK devolution has created new political centres of policy formulation and this paper is concerned with how devolved policy initiatives are reshaping and rescaling sub‐national spaces of governance. We focus on the rescaling of transport governance in Scotland through a nationally orchestrated process of regionalisation involving the creation of Regional Transport Partnerships (RTPs), an initiative that has been shaped by tensions between changing national political objectives and local interests. Our approach draws on Neil Brenner's “new state spaces” (NSS) framework, which has value in emphasising the historically embedded and path‐dependent nature of restructuring processes. At the same time, its abstract nature leads the NSS approach to privilege the broad processes that generate new configurations of state power over the complex politics associated with the restructuring of particular spaces. In response, we suggest a new theoretical synthesis that draws NSS together with the ancillary notions of “regional armatures” and “the politics of scale” to provide a stronger purchase on the political agency and struggles that “form” and “mould” particular spaces.     

Occupying the Margins: Labour Integration and Social Exclusion in Artisanal Mining in Tanzania

This article examines the marginal position of artisanal miners in sub‐Saharan Africa, and considers how they are incorporated into mineral sector change in the context of institutional and legal integration. Taking the case of diamond and gold mining in Tanzania, the concept of social exclusion is used to explore the consequences of marginalization on people's access to mineral resources and ability to make a living from artisanal mining. Because existing inequalities and forms of discrimination are ignored by the Tanzanian state, the institutionalization of mineral titles conceals social and power relations that perpetuate highly unequal access to resources. The article highlights the complexity of these processes, and shows that while legal integration can benefit certain wealthier categories of people, who fit into the model of an ‘entrepreneurial small‐scale miner’, for others adverse incorporation contributes to socio‐economic dependence, exploitation and insecurity. For the issue of marginality to be addressed within integration processes, the existence of local forms of organization, institutions and relationships, which underpin inequalities and discrimination, need to be recognized.     

State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.     

The Gender of the Gold: an Ethnographic and Historical Account of Women's Involvement in Artisanal and Small‐scale Mining in Mount Kaindi,Papua New Guinea

The Kaindi area of Papua New Guinea is home to a large community of Anga small‐scale miners. While they constitute nearly half of the local population, women do not participate in mining to the same extent as the men. Drawing on ethnographic data this paper shows that this is not just due to personal choice but also to a series of limiting factors that include pollution beliefs, land tenure practices, the unequal control of household resources, and the gendered division of labour. Far from being simply intrinsic to Anga culture, these impediments also relate to the gendered history of the colonial goldfields and to contemporary national law and company practice in the extractive sector. Similarly, they are neither unambiguous nor resistant to change. Indeed, since the Anga first entered the mines their women have engaged in resource extraction in ever increasing numbers, both independently and alongside male relatives and partners. Through an analysis of this historical trend, my paper will show that historically conscious ethnography can help specify not only the main obstacles women face in entering artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM), but also the conditions that lead to their strengthening or weakening through time, thus identifying factors to be stimulated or countered in policies and strategies for equitable development within the sector.     

State production of cultural nationalism: political leaders and preservation policies for historic buildings in France and Italy

Although cultural and political nationalism have often been treated as separate, recent studies argue that they are linked because the state produces policies such as promotion of cultural heritage to further nation building. The article examines the conditions that favour national political leaders adopting policies to protect historic buildings for aims of political nationalism. It compares France and Italy, focusing on the period after 1870. It finds that in both countries, national political leaders have introduced extensive protection of historic buildings when faced with major challenges such as war, regime change or pressures from localism or supporters of cultural nationalism as part of wider strategies to build and reinforce the nation state. But Italy extended protection earlier and more deeply than France, suggesting in a later nation state with strong inherited cultural nationalism but major political weaknesses and, national political leaders may introduce earlier, more far‐reaching and more layered legal protection than in states created earlier and with fewer weaknesses.     

Neoliberalism,the Developmental State and Civil Society in Korea

Following the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, some scholars predicted that the introduction of neoliberal ideas and policies would result in the definitive passing of the Korean developmental state. Despite these predictions, Korean state elites have retained their influential position as economic managers by, for instance, practicing a revised form of industrial policy. Neoliberal reform has, however, had significant social implications. Rather than neoliberalism acting as a democratising force that curtails the power of the state, this article illustrates that the Korean state has used the reform agenda to justify an expansion of its powers. The state presented itself as an agent capable of resolving long-standing economic problems, and of defending law and order. By doing so, the state reduced the political space available to non-state actors. The article concludes that for some states, neoliberalism is a means of retaining economic and political influence, and that former developmental states may be particularly adept at co-opting elements of civil society into governing alliances.     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

Regulating Regional Uneven Development and the Politics of Reconfiguring Belgian State Space

Abstract: This article mobilises a strategic‐relational approach to state spatial restructuring to overcome the weaknesses of the conventional “New Regionalist” account in economic geography of the resurgence of the region as a strategic site for economic governance. Focusing on hegemonic projects and the shifting nexus of spatial dependencies and engagements through which these are reproduced, undermined and transformed, the role and geography of political agency in state spatial restructuring is highlighted. To illustrate this point, I analyse the construction of new regional state spaces in Belgium, paying particular attention to the hegemonic projects that create a social basis for particular state spaces, the construction of collective agency on different scales (Belgian‐national and Flemish‐regional) and the various ways in which these processes are informed by pre‐existing state spatial and scalar selectivities.