Paper short abstract:

State-mandated local development refers to both the process and the instruments that the state has used to revise the sub-national distribution of resource rents. The paper argues that it is co-produced by multiple actors through their adaptive interpretations and selective implementation.

Paper long abstract:

State-mandated local development refers to both the process and the instruments that the state has used to revise the sub-national distribution of resource rents. In the Guinean context, it is through the creation of new tax (superficial tax), tax-like funds (funds for local economic development) and the formalisation of voluntary corporate payments (Community development agreements) that the state seeks additional resource rent through intervention/mediation in business-social relations. The paper argues that state-mandated local development is increasingly co-produced by multiple actors through their adaptive interpretations and selective implementation of post-neoliberal resource governance policies. Local decentralised state agents, traditional authorities, Chinese professionals, and community members interact with each other based on adaptive interpretations and selective implementations of 'local development' with rules and resources provided by normative texts. This paper uses controversy as a prism of analysis that disentangles intertwined positions, interpretations and practices to reveal general patterns of business-society relations in three mining zones in which Chinese companies operate in Guinea. Controversies are grouped into three clusters: expectations of corporate contribution, administrative encroachment on local lifeworlds, and autochtonisation of local content.