Paper short abstract:

Contemporary resource nationalism in Africa has featured prominently in the rhetoric of Zimbabwe’s government. However, regulatory innovations in the 2000s have produced contradictory outcomes in the context of elite interests and corporate power. Is a popular extractivist agenda still feasible?

Paper long abstract:

Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF has been an active proponent of regulatory reforms in the extractives sector aimed at recovering greater revenue, local participation and strengthened local supply chains. These initiatives have been accompanied by a strident political vocabulary which has drawn on key themes emerging from contemporary resource nationalism in Southern Africa. However, the persistence of contradictory political-economic dynamics in the extractive sector – elite interests embedded in state power, weak state institutional capacity, corporate resilience and volatile state-society relations – have blunted the potential of policy advances. This paper explores these dynamics and their outcomes through case studies of indigenisation and local content reforms in the mining sector. It focuses on the disconnect between policy formulation and implementation on the one hand, and the role and influence of intended policy beneficiaries, on the other. It argues that the trajectories of resource nationalist policy innovations have been consistently derailed by the exigencies of elite political and corporate structural power, and sees institutional weaknesses in the state as a critical obstacle to the mounting of a more robust, inclusive, popular and consensus-based approach to extractives-led development in Zimbabwe. Despite the Zimbabwe government’s extractives-based developmentalist policy thrust, the structural and narrow political underpinnings of its approach raise important questions about the feasibility of its neo-extractivist agenda.