Autonomy and Natural Resources: the self-Determination process in New Caledonia as a Counter-Lesson for Western Sahara

Abstract

ABSTRACT New Caledonia-Kanaky and Western Sahara have several features in common, beyond the fact that both geographical entities appear on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories. However, each territory has followed a very different process in its search for a definitive status. Since the late 1980s, New Caledonia has been the site of a bilateral political negotiation process with France that recently reached a milestone: two referendums held on the future of the territory. In Western Sahara, where a Settlement Plan was promoted by the UN, no significant advances have been made in the last 20 years. For New Caledonia, the results of the most recent regional elections and the 2018 and 2020 referendums provide the data to do a critical reading of the strategy deployed by the French government to give the territory significant autonomy and a new development model based on natural resources; instead of achieving the expected objective of winning loyalties, the New Caledonian identity was affirmed and independentist sympathies strengthened. In Western Sahara, Morocco has deployed an autonomist rhetoric and a new model of economic development in the south, but nothing has effectively materialised. New Caledonia has shown that, instead of ensuring loyalties, allowing self-government and partial control over natural resources in a territory in the midst of a decolonisation process fuels independentist movements and broadens their base.