Jessica Steinberg’s new book aims to explain the logic and outcomes of the “three-actor strategic contexts” (p. 21) in which firms, communities, and states interact. She does so with an innovative mixed-methodology approach that combines formal (game-theoretic) modeling, fieldwork-based case studies, and statistical analysis. The ambition of this book is staggering. Steinberg purports to unify three distinct literatures on social conflict within a single framework to explain why firms provide goods to communities, when communities choose to mobilize, and how states respond to mobilization. The book delivers on this promise. Indeed, I think it may be the most important intellectual contribution to scholarship on resource conflicts in a decade. It certainly joins a small club of analyses that have opened new intellectual vistas and methodologies for the study of local resource conflicts. Consequently, this book is a must-read for anyone working in the highly dynamic subfield of subnational resource conflicts, regardless of geographical expertise.
The innovative core of the book—that is to say the formal (game-theoretical) model of the three-actor strategic context—is found in chapter 3, pp. 66–82. Readers who are short on time or commitment should focus their effort on these pages. It is hard reading for those from intellectual and disciplinary traditions that do not embrace formal modeling (such as this reviewer), but it’s worth it. Steinberg provides the required equations and proofs, but her qualitative explanation is accessible and not overrun by modeler’s jargon. Chapters 5 and 6 test the internal validity of the model with case studies from Mozambique, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Chapters 9 and 10 test the external validity of the model with statistical analyses of when communities mobilize and when governments choose to repress protest. Chapter 11 draws together the main conclusions of the book and provides an interesting sketch of avenues for future research.
As Steinberg puts it, she develops a single theoretical frame that explains “incentives for goods provision by firms, mobilization by communities in extractive regions, and the use of government repression” (p. 23). She starts from the observation that local resource conflicts are territorialized by definition, and therefore they compel the interaction of the three actors examined in the book: the mining firm, local populations, and the government. In this context, actor beliefs about each other’s behavior, as well as contextual characteristics (such as the interruptibility of the mine, the cost of mitigating environmental externalities, the costs of engaging in protest), shape the incentives for actor behavior. The complexity of the model makes the argument difficult to summarize briefly in written format, but the figure on p. 74 provides a useful summary of the sequence of play and key decision points.
Her model begins with the firm figuring out the value of a “transfer” to local populations that is necessary to compensate for the externalities associated with the mine and that constitutes the bundle of contractual and voluntary undertakings promised as a result of the environmental impact assessment, relocation plan processes, and corporate social responsibility. At the first decision point, the firm decides whether to honor that promise or to renege on it. If it honors the promise, communities do not protest and all is good. But firms, weighing the cost of the transfer to them against the cost and likelihood of protest, are more likely to renege on the promise if the costs of providing it are high or if they believe that communities are unlikely to protest. If the firm reneges on its promise, at the second decision point local populations must decide whether to protest or acquiesce (do nothing and suffer the externalities of mineral production). Local populations are more likely to protest when the cost of doing so is low, which depends on the vulnerability of the mine to protest (how easily production can be interrupted) and on beliefs about the likelihood and severity of government repression. Frequently, communities will not protest due to fears of government reprisals. But when communities protest, they impose economic costs on the firm and government, compelling the government to intervene. At the third decision point, governments decide whether to support the protestors by regulating the firm to honor its promises to the local population (incurring economic costs, but political gain) or repressing the protestors (incurring political costs, but economic gain). When the economic value of the mine increases for the government (higher taxation rates, larger mines) and local populations are politically marginal, it is more likely to repress protest.
The formal model is elegant, parsimonious, and insightful. We must, of course, accept that the real world is messier, but the simplified interactions of the model give a lot of leverage over understanding the problem of local resource conflicts. My reading of resource conflicts in Latin America, however, leads me to ask how the theory advanced in this book may accommodate certain empirical anomalies to the pattern examined in Africa.
For example, Steinberg sees the distinction between environmental conflicts (defend livelihoods) and distributive conflicts (get a better deal), which is a cornerstone of the Latin American literature, as an “artificial division” (p. 62), allowing her to compensate for both sets of concerns within the single concept of a transfer to communities. Certainly, that makes sense for distributive conflicts. But in the Latin American literature, a certain class of resource conflicts is characterized as “all-or-nothing” conflicts, in which activists reject all compensation and indeed the ideology of capitalist resource development in favor of alternative imaginaries. In these cases, local populations protest before the firm faces its first decision point on whether to honor the promised transfer. Also, in Latin America, states tend not be drawn into militarized repression of protest in ways that Steinberg describes in the African context, but it is true that activists, through protest, often try to pull the state into the conflict as an ally against the firm. Can these regional variations be accommodated within Steinberg’s theory?
The case studies are compelling validations of the internal logic of the model, although the game in the Democratic Republic of Congo seems to be overdetermined by activist beliefs that protest will be repressed by the state. The statistical analyses provide convincing evidence for the external validity of the theory, and especially given the data constraints for this type of work, Steinberg comes up with some creative proxy indicators to test key ideas. Some of Steinberg’s findings that conflict with the existing quantitative literature from Latin America (for example, that richer areas are more prone to conflict, that foreign firms are not more associated with conflict than local firms) will require further investigation to explain the discrepancy.
