Political Economies of Extractive Industry: From Documenting Complexity to Informing Current Debates

Abstract

The literature on extractive industries has grown rapidly in recent years both because the empirical significance of resource extraction has increased and because resource extraction necessarily invokes other questions of wider purchase in development studies. This virtual issue brings together articles published in Development and Change on mining, oil and gas extraction since the early 1980s that explore these inter‐connections. They focus on certain interfaces: extraction and rural political economy; extraction and policies of economic adjustment; and extraction and development politics. The articles often document the complexity and contextual specificity of these interconnections, but we draw particular attention here to the insights they offer on broader issues such as the relationship between resource extraction, adjustment and neoliberalization.