With reference to global governance initiatives aimed at promoting ethical business practices, this volume offers a timely examination of Canada-Africa relations and natural resource governance.

There is no question that Africa is endowed with abundant natural resources of different magnitudes. However, more than a decade of high commodity prices and new hydrocarbon discoveries across the continent has led countless international organizations, donor agencies, and non-governmental organizations to devote considerable attention to the potential of natural resource–based development. Natural Resource–Based Development in Africa places a particular emphasis on the actors that help us understand the extent to which resources could be transformed into broader developmental outcomes. Based on a wide variety of primary sources and fieldwork, including in-person interviews and participant observations, this collection contributes to both scholarly and policy discussions around the governance and economic development roles of local entrepreneurs, transnational firms, civil society groups, local communities, and government agencies in Africa’s natural resource sectors. Natural Resource–Based Development in Africa explores the impact that these actors have on regional trends such as resource nationalism and local procurement policies as well as grassroots-related issues such as poverty, livelihoods, gender equity, development, and human security.

This edited collection brings together a broad range of case studies to highlight the role of Canadian corporations in producing, deepening and exacerbating conditions of dispossession both at home and abroad. Rather than presented as instances of exceptional greed or malice, the cases are described as expected and inherent consequences of contemporary capitalism and/or settler colonialism. A core purpose of the book is to combine and synthesize analyses of dispossession within and outside of Canada. While the literature tends to treat the two as distinct and unrelated phenomena, these processes are often connected, as the normalization of settler colonialism at home can lead to indifference and acceptance of dispossession caused by Canadian companies abroad. This book brings local and global cases together in order to present a rigorous analysis of the role of Canadian corporate activity in processes of dispossession. The book includes a diversity of theoretical approaches related to the overarching theme of capitalism and dispossession; however, they share a critical analysis of capitalism and its implications on marginalized peoples at home and abroad. Included are political economy approaches that draw on the work of theorists such as David Harvey, important interventions from Indigenous and settler colonial studies, feminist approaches using the work of scholars such as Silvia Federici and the concept environmental racism, which draws on both critical race theory and environmental justice literature.