Resource Nationalism in Southern Africa is a collaborative research project on the emergence of a new politics of resource governance in the 2000s and its impact on mining sector reforms and development outcomes in the region.

Using a comparative approach, our multidisciplinary team seeks to strengthen understanding of the dynamics of policy-making in the extractives industries in Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe by focusing on critical points of contestation involving ASM, mining fiscal regimes and productive linkages.

Announcements

Visit our Twitter (‘X’) page @RNSADC for all the latest updates on the project!

You can now view our Project Publications!

You can now view our project’s publications here. Be sure to check regularly for recently released documents and links to journal articles.

Research Workshop Lusaka, Zambia 2023

(July 28, 2023): The Resource Nationalism in Southern Africa partnership held a 3-day research workshop in Lusaka in July 2023 to review two years of the project’s field research. The directors and researchers of the partnership’s 7 investigative studies and 3 sets of national baseline studies from Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe presented their research findings, which were reviewed by 3 invited peer reviewers with extensive experience in extractives research in Southern Africa – Sheila Khama (Botswana), Ben Radley (DRC/UK) and Michael Smith (South Africa). Workshop participants discussed final revisions and research gaps for attention and prioritised follow-up knowledge mobilisation activities. Workshop participants agreed that working papers from the presentations will be finalized and post as open access documents on the PDG’s website. We expect to post these papers in the coming months as they are completed. On the final day of the workshop the partnership’s research team hosted a public briefing for Zambian mining stakeholders on the key findings and recommendations of the partnership’s research. We hope to undertake similar briefings in the other regional sites of our work in the near future – stay tuned for further news on this.

New 6-Year Project Funding Announced

(September 1, 2023): We are delighted to announce that our project team, including an expanded group of scholars and development practitioners from across sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe, has been awarded a Partnership Grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to explore ‘African Extractivism and the Green Transition.’ The six-year partnership $2.5 million project, which welcomes researchers based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) alongside our current network’s members in Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Canada, will also include new international regional research partners active in Southern Africa’s extractives sector. For a full list of the partners and research team members in the new project, please visit the SSHRC website announcing Partnership Grant recipients in this year’s competition. We look forward to bringing your further updates on this exciting new project as it is initiated in the coming months.

Special Issue Published

(October 31, 2023) We are pleased to announce the recent publication of a Special Issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS) on ‘The Return of Resource Nationalism to Southern Africa’ (Volume 49, Issue 3) https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjss20/49/3/.

The Special Issue – co-edited by our Principal Investigator Dr. Richard Saunders and Grant Coordinator Alex Caramento, together with Dr. Miles Larmer, Director of the Center of African Studies at the University of Florida – features articles authored by project co-applicants, collaborators, and researchers. It will be launched at the upcoming 66^th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in San Francisco, where JSAS and the project will co-host two panels on Friday, December 1 featuring presentations by contributors to the Special Issue.

To celebrate the Special Issue launch, JSAS publishers Taylor & Francis will provide Open Access to the entire issue from November 24 to December 31, 2023.

Please be sure to check our Twitter’(X’) account for more details on the Special Issue launch and our two ASA panels.