A country's abundant natural resources may serve as a curse or a blessing, with the outcome often dependent on prevailing governance structures and experience managing these assets. Despite natural resource advantages, many African countries have failed to transform their enormous economic potential and wealth into tangible benefits such as sustainable socio-economic development, human security, or peace.
Governance, Conflict, and Natural Resources in Africa reevaluates the role that foreign state-owned and private-sector actors play in resource-rich states – whether stable, post-conflict, or fragile – in sub-Saharan Africa. Through research and an analysis of in-depth interviews with local stakeholders in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia, Hany Besada explains how foreign state-owned and private-sector corporations have contributed to economic growth at both the national and local levels in different resource-rich countries. This book reveals the unique challenges and opportunities created by these investors, demonstrating that new policies in business practices and operations have the potential to generate sustainable development and positive economic transformation.
Governance, Conflict, and Natural Resources in Africa puts forward a novel framework for understanding the role of private economic actors in extractive industries in Africa and sheds new light on foreign private-sector contributions to capacity building and economic development.

Hany Gamil Besada is research professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, and a non-resident senior research fellow at the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa. Besada is also executive director of the Institute for Natural Resources and Sustainable Development.

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"This ambitious book helps us better understand how firms that extract Africa's natural resources contribute to economic development. Governance, Conflict, and Natural Resources in Africa offers comparative case studies that shed new light on the potential for foreign investors to build capacity in stable, fragile, and post-conflict states. The book's detailed coverage of governance realities 'on the ground' is informative and engaging." Adam Sneyd, University of Guelph and author of Politics Rules: Power, Globalization and Development