Mapping the Bonanza: Geographies of Mining Investment in an Era of Neoliberal Reform

By G. Bridge. Professional Geographer, 2004

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Geographic analyses of how national policies of economic liberalization influence global patterns of economic activity often draw their conclusions from studies of the paradigmatic sectors of manufacturing and, to a lesser extent, services. There is, by contrast, relatively little work examining how neoliberal policy reforms in the developing world may be driving changes in the geography of primary sector (i.e., extractive) activities at the global scale. This article presents and analyzes new data on direct investment in the international mining industry. It reports methods and results from a research project to systematically map and evaluate changes in the commodity mix and geographical spread of mining-related investment in the world economy since 1990. It confirms and quantifies what was hitherto anecdotal evidence of a geographic shift in investment during the 1990s away from mature targets toward a small number of “rising stars” in the developing world, following the adoption in many countries of neoliberal economic policies from the mid-1980s onward. However, the findings challenge conventional interpretations of this shift as an investment “bonanza” in the periphery and highlight how recent investment trends are highly specific in geographical scope, concentrated within a few commodities, and how the allocation of investment between established and emerging targets is variable over both time and space.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e096bea7beeb2bcd980be9607ad798b32f5dd467

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Citations in the corpus

Climate change and the transition to neoliberal environmental governance (2017, background): “” Scholarship on neoliberalism has often been critiqued for analytical imprecision of the concept and its application to local and transnational contexts of governance (Castree, 2008a; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Mans ﬁ eld, 2004).”
Diamond Wars? Conflict Diamonds and Geographies of Resource Wars (2008, background): “The last is the interplay of resource extraction with accumulation strategies and contestations in resource peripheries ( Bridge 2000 , 2004 ; Peluso and Watts 2001 ; Hayter 2003 ; Hayter, Barnes, and Bradshaw 2003 ; Simmons 2004 ).”
De-agrarianization, re-agrarianization and local economic development: Re-orientating livelihoods in African artisanal mining communities (2010, background): “However, in the 1990s, several African governments, with support from the World Bank, overhauled national mineral policies in a desperate attempt to attract foreign investment to finance large-scale mine development (Otto 1997; Bridge 2004).”
Neoliberalizing Nature? Market Environmentalism in Water Supply in England and Wales (2005, background): “The transformation of the English and Welsh water supply industry is an example of the neoliberalization of nature, a subject that has received growing attention within geography ( Bridge 2004 ; Mansfield 2004a ; McCarthy 2004 ; McCarthy and Prudham 2004 ; Prudham 2004 ).”
Environmental Justice and Economic Degrowth: An Alliance between Two Movements (2012, background): “, deforestation, defending mangrove forests, the imposition of monoculture tree plantations, agro-fuels, land grabbing, overfishing); mining (for gold, bauxite, iron ore, copper, uranium, and other minerals); oil and gas exploration and extraction; and the appropriation of water, such as the constru”
The energy‐extractives nexus and the just transition (2021, background): “(Bridge, 2004), and by deregulating labour markets to enable companies to appropriate cheap labour-power.”
Are Alternative Livelihood Projects Alleviating Poverty in Mining Communities? Experiences from Ghana (2009, background): “Over the past two decades, more than 90 – mainly developing – countries have redrafted their mineral codes in order to attract outside investment (Bridge, 2004).”