Imagining Booms and Busts: Conflicting Temporalities and the Extraction-“Development” nexus in Mozambique

Abstract

This article presents three sets of divergent and competing understandings of temporalities in relation to the extractive industry in Mozambique, in order to explore the dynamics of power within expectations of “development” raised by extractive mega projects. The first set of understandings involves a forward-looking, long-term view of the extractive industry’s potential to bring transformational “development” to Mozambique and its people, generally expressed by the extractive industry and associated actors. Subsequently, the article zooms in on a specific extractive sector; the coal industry in Tete province. The second set is characterized by expressions of volatility by an elite group of businesspeople who were lured by the promise of a coal boom, and who explain the urban “development” in terms of before, during and after “the boom”. The third set delves into the experience and expressions of “waiting” by people who were resettled by coal mining companies in Tete. By presenting these three sets, the article aims to go beyond binary analyses of the local versus the national, and the community versus the company or state, and offers a layered analysis of the disconnections between understandings of “development” and the expected wealth of resource extraction.