The anthropology of extraction: critical perspectives on the resource curse

Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we show how the constellation of subaltern and elite agency at work within processes of resource extraction is vital in order to confront the complexities, incompatibilities, and inequities in the exploitation of mineral resources

Panama and the WTO : new constitutionalism of trade policy and global tax governance

"Corrigendum" in Review of International Political Economy, 24(4), p. 738 (DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2017.1332547).Tax havens and tax flight have lately received increasing attention, while interest toward multilateral trade policies has somewhat diminished. We argue that more attention needs to be paid exactly to the interrelations between trade and tax policies. Drawing from two case studies on Panama's trade disputes, we show how World Trade Organization (WTO) rules can be used both to resist attempts to sanction secrecy structures and to promote measures against tax flight. The theory of new constitutionalism can help to explain how trade treaties can 'lock in' tax policies. However, our case studies show that trade policy not only 'locks in' democratic policy-making, but also enables tax havens to use their commercialized sovereignty to resists anti-secrecy measures. What is being 'locked in' are the policy tools, not necessarily the policies. The changing relationship between trade and tax policies can also create new and unexpected tools for tackling tax evasion, underlining the importance of epistemic arbitrage in the context of new constitutionalism. In principle, political actors with sufficient technical and juridical knowledge can shape global tax governance to various directions regardless of their formal position in the world political hierarchies. This should be taken into account when trade treaties are being negotiated or revised.Peer reviewe

Farmer experiences of Tiyeni’s ‘deep-bed farming’ conservation agriculture system in Malawi

In the context of increasing NGO interest in the capacity of conservation agriculture methods to support sustainable agriculture across sub-Saharan Africa, this paper explores the experiences of farmers (n = 111) adopting the Tiyeni NGO’s deep-bed farming (DBF) system in northern Malawi. The results of a field survey suggest that whilst DBF delivers significant livelihood benefits for farmers relative to traditional techniques (a factor arguably driving its rapid spontaneous adoption throughout the area), some asset-poor farmers are unable to sustain DBF due to its labor demands. We argue that to widen its beneficial impacts in a manner that can be sustained, there is a need for Tiyeni’s DBF to be less prescriptive and more adaptive to specific social-ecological contexts