Governing Resource Wealth: Developmental State Formation between Botswana's Diamond Success and South Sudan's Oil Failure

This article examines the political conditions under which natural resource wealth enables bureaucratic discipline and developmental accumulation rather than rent concentration and state fragility in Botswana, South Sudan, Chad, Angola, Nigeria, and Zambia. It asks how developmental resource governance structures political order during the late twentieth century through the contemporary post-2005 era, combining developmental state theory, resource curse debates, and the political economy of natural resource management with a research design centred on comparative political economy across six African resource states, process tracing of key resource-governance decisions, and analytical use of resource-governance index data, commodity series, and elite interviews. The central argument is that the issue under study is not best explained as a discrete policy failure or a short-lived crisis. Rather, it is reproduced through linked institutional and political mechanisms that reshape incentives, authority, and access to resources over time (Amsden, 1989; Evans, 1995) (Mkandawire, 2001; Auty, 1993). Across the paper, the analysis tracks how these mechanisms operate in practice, what variation they generate, and why reform agendas that ignore the underlying political settlement rarely succeed. The article therefore contributes both a conceptual synthesis and a grounded comparative interpretation of the focal case. Its wider implication is that durable reform requires institutional redesign, political bargaining, and accountability strategies capable of reaching the real sites where power is exercised (Sachs Ross, 2012) (Bebbington et al., 2008; Lujala, 2010).