‘Is mining good for development?’

Abstract

The paper presents a general overview of the intellectual history of the question of mining in the development field. It describes the leading development theories and their normative claims with respect to mining, based upon the work of landmark theorists in the field. The contention of this paper is that development theories, swinging like a pendulum back and forth with the question ‘Is mining good for development?’, have a troubled relationship with the question about mining. The theories that embrace a positive view of capitalism in the classical political economy tradition and mainstream development economics generally support mining for development. The theories that are critical of the capitalist order, including structuralism, dependency, neodependency, world-system, feminist and discourse theory, generally have a strong opposition to mining for development. The unsettled question of mining shows that important questions about the relationship between development and technology, and the equity requirements of such a relationship, remain unsettled in the scholarship. The overarching goal of the paper is to provide initial ground upon which to discuss the normative history of the topic of mining in the development scholarship.