African Mining 91

The second 'African Mining' conference is planned for June 1991, and follows the first, very successful, event held in May 1987. That full four-year period was characterized by substantial changes in the political and economic climate of many countries in both hemispheres. Copper prices were relatively firm, and the advance and steady demand for nickel and ferrochromium stabilized important sectors of the mineral industry, certainly in Zimbabwe. The promise for gold remained unfulfilled, but the smaller, relatively flexible, mines survived and only the large, deep and low-value mines seem seriously at risk. None of this has affected the hungry, and intensive exploitations from surface to the water-table have revealed many targets of promise to those willing to take the risks. The pattern in Southern Africa was extraordinarily stable among the turmoil, with independence for Namibia, adjustments in South Africa and a gradual shift to market economies in the region. The pace of exploration has increased to recover some part of the progress that was lost in the Independence struggle, and atthe end of the first decade in Zimbabwe, for example, oil is being sought in the Zambesi Rift, following the investigation of the Luangwa in Zambia, and there are exciting exploration projects for methane released from coal, deep in its basins.

Liberalisation of the mining sector in Africa in the 1980s: a developmental perspective. II.

Academics, policy-makers and practitioners from Africa and beyond document new ways of thinking about issues concerning governance and revenue flows in mining activities in Ghana, Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This book takes a fresh approach to the puzzle of sub-Saharan Africa’s resource curse. Moving beyond current scholarship’s state-centric approach, it presents cutting-edge evidence gathered through interviews with mining company executives and industry representatives to demonstrate that firms are actively controlling the regulation of the gold mining sector. It shows how large mining firms with significant private authority in South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania are able to engender rules and regulations that are acknowledged by other actors, and in some cases even adopted by the state. In doing so, it establishes that firms are co-governing Africa’s gold mining sector. By exploring the implications for resource-cursed states, this significant work argues that firm-led regulation can improve governance, but that many of these initiatives fail to address country/mine specific issues where there remains a role for the state in ensuring the benefits of mining flow to local communities. It will appeal to economists, political scientists, and policy-makers and practitioners working in the field of mining and extractives.

This book is a pacesetter in matters of mining and the environment in Africa from multidisciplinary and spatio-temporal perspectives. The book approaches mining from the perspectives of law, politics, archaeology, anthropology, African studies, geography, human ecology, sociology, history, economics and development. It interrogates mining and environment from the perspectives of customary law as well as from the perspectives of Euro-modern laws. In this sense, the book straddles precolonial, colonial and postcolonial mining and environmental perspectives. In all this, it maintains a Pan-Africanist perspective that also speaks to contemporary debates on African Renaissance and to the unity of Africa. From scrutinising the lived realities of African miners who are often insensitively and unjustly addressed as “illegal” miners, the book also interrogates transnational mining corporations; matters of corporate social responsibility as well as matters of tax evasions by transnational corporations whose commitment to accountability to African governments is questioned. With both theoretical chapters and chapter based on empirical studies on mining and the environment across the African continent, the book provides a much needed holistic, one stop shop for scholars, activists, researchers and policy makers who need a comprehensive treatise on African mining and the environment. The book comes at the right time when matters of African mining and environment are increasingly coming to the fore in the light of discourses about the new 21st century scramble for African resources, in which big transnational corporations and nations are jostling to suck Africa dry in their race to control planetary resources. It is a book that speaks to contemporary broader issues of (de-)coloniality and transformation of African minds and African environmental resources.