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The State, Resources and Developmental Prospects in Sub-Saharan Africa

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The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy

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Abstract

This chapter returns to the relationship between natural resource abundance and the prospects of state-led development in resource-rich African countries. It re-engages with the debate on the nexus between the political economy of resource extraction and prospects of state-led development and examines the conceptual and analytical challenge of resource-rich states becoming developmental, and the conditions under which this can be achieved. The chapter interrogates the dominant literature on natural resource wealth-development discourses that seeks to draw a determinate linkage between the ‘resource curse’ on the one hand, and resource-rich African states on the other hand, and how this linkage renders democratic and developmental projects impossible, impracticable or problematic in Africa. At the heart of the discourse is the question of whether Africa can produce developmental states or not. The chapter delves into the theoretical and empirical interrogation of natural resource sectors as key components of development in resource-rich African states, the examination of the rather gloomy prognosis on which Africa’s resource curse is premised and the articulation of an alternative view for rethinking the nexus between resources and the state in Africa.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The first-tier NIEs are Hong Kong, Taiwan, Republic of Korea and Singapore, while the second-tier NIEs are Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

  2. 2.

    South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong (now part of China).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Princeton, NJ, USA

    Godwin Onuoha

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  1. Godwin Onuoha
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

    Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba

  2. Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba

  3. Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Toyin Falola

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Onuoha, G. (2020). The State, Resources and Developmental Prospects in Sub-Saharan Africa. In: Oloruntoba, S.O., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy. Palgrave Handbooks in IPE. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38922-2_34

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