The extractive industries and development: The resource curse at the micro, meso and macro levels

• There is a need to bridge the different fragments of research on the resource curse.
• These have been largely determined across disciplinary lines and levels of scale.
• The paper critically assesses the current status of resource curse debates.
• We emphasise the need for an integration of the various multi-scale approaches.

The resource curse literature has necessarily evolved in a rather fragmented way. While economists, political economists and political scientists have largely focused on the role of mineral abundance in long-term growth with the analysis largely confined to the country (macro) or regional (meso) level, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists have explored the development impacts of extractive industries at the community (micro) level. While this has provided a rigorous and comprehensive exploration of extractive industries and their impacts, causal factors that bridge and/or leap-frog these levels tend not to be accounted for. In this paper we examine the evolution of the literature across disciplinary lines and different levels of scale to assess the current status of resource curse debates. In so doing, we aim to explore how an integration of the various multi-scale approaches can help address the persistent problem of the resource curse.