Indigenous identity, natural resources, and contentious politics in Bolivia: a disaggregated conflict analysis; 2000-2011

How do natural resources and ethnic identity interact to incite or to mitigate social conflict? This article argues that high-value natural resources can act as an important catalyst for the politicization of ethnic, specifically indigenous identity, and contribute to social conflict as they limit the malleability of identity frames and raise the stakes of confrontations. We test this argument using unique subnational data from Bolivian provinces. Drawing on Bolivian newspaper reports, we code conflict events for all of the 112 provinces from 2000 to 2011. We join this conflict data with information on local ethnic composition from the census, the political representation of ethnic groups at the national level, as well as geo-spatial information on gas deposits. Using time-series cross-sectional count models, we show a significant conflict-promoting effect of the share of indigenous people in provinces with gas reserves, but not without

Psychological responses to the proximity of climate change

A frequent suggestion to increase individuals’ willingness to take action on climate change and to support relevant policies is to highlight its proximal consequences. However, previous studies that have tested this proximising approach have not revealed the expected positive effects on individual action and support for addressing climate change. We present three lines of psychological reasoning that provide compelling arguments as to why highlighting proximal impacts of climate change might not be as effective a way to increase individual mitigation and adaptation efforts as is often assumed. Our contextualisation of the proximising approach within established psychological research suggests that, depending on the particular theoretical perspective one takes to this issue, and on specific individual characteristics suggested by these perspectives, proximising can bring about the intended positive effects, can have no (visible) effect, or can even backfire. Thus, the effects of proximising are much more complex than is commonly assumed. Revealing this complexity contributes to a refined theoretical understanding of the role psychological distance plays in the context of climate change and opens up further avenues for future research and for interventions

Comment on Benjamin Smith (2004): 'Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999'

In “Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999“ Benjamin Smith examines the effects of oil wealth, as well as of sudden changes in oil prices, on regime failure, political protest and civil war. He finds that oil wealth is robustly associated with more durable regimes, and significantly related to lower levels of anti-state protest and civil war. In this comment, I discuss Smith's empirical approach - especially his treatment of possible reverse causality between conflict and economic performance, his use of the Polity democracy index, and his choice of the resource dependence variable - and provide suggestions for improvement

Replication data: The role of personal experiences in Norwegian perceptions of climate change

This is the replication data for the article: Lujala, Päivi and Haakon Lein 2020. The role of personal experiences in Norwegian perceptions of climate change. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography For details on the data and the analysis, please, see the article

An analysis of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative implementation process

Abstract The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has become an international hallmark of the efforts to promote better extractive-sector management and improved societal development in natural resource-rich countries. Since its establishment in 2003, a large number of resource-dependent countries have committed to the EITI Standard, and support of the EITI from donors, nongovernmental organizations, and extractive industry companies has been vast. To understand whether and how adherence to the EITI Standard can affect resource governance and development, it is crucial to examine what factors influence a country’s decision to join and implement the Standard. This article examines why and how rapidly countries adopt the Standard using survival analysis methods and a global dataset on countries’ progress in implementing the EITI Standard. It finds that several factors influence progress and proposes that these can be categorized as internal motivation, internal capacity, and external pressure to implement the Standard. This article contributes to understanding why the EITI Standard implementation stalls in some countries whereas it progresses in others. Importantly, it outlines which factors need to be controlled for in studies that seek to evaluate the impact of the EITI on resource governance and societal development, and argues that such impact evaluations need to correct for the selection biases in countries’ decisions to commit to and implement the EITI Standard