GRM 2010 Report - Centre of Islamic Studies - University of ...

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Workshop 1: Natural Resources, Accountability and Democracy in the Gulf Dr. Richard Youngs Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior (FRIDE) Prof. Gerd Nonneman University of Exeter This workshop set out to re-examine the linkages between natural resources – and in particular hydrocarbon fuel resources – and political liberalization/democratization, as illustrated by the case of the Gulf States. Very little notice has been taken of Middle Eastern, and especially Gulf, case studies in the broader literature on the subject. The region has long presented a peculiar case, with exceptional resources combining with apparently exceptional resilience of traditional systems. Moreover, these economies are arguably undergoing a slow evolution beyond pure rentierism, while possible emerging new socio-political trends may be in part linked to this. The workshop aimed to make both an empirical and conceptual contribution to these questions. The participants started from recognition that the literature on the link between resources and democracy is both diverse and contested. It ranges from suggested links between wealth and democracy to the opposite suggestion in early rentierism literature on the Middle East. Oil wealth in particular, and natural resource wealth more generally, have been argued, for instance by Terry Karl, to lead almost inexorably to authoritarian/autocratic government, or at least to be negatively correlated with ‘democracy’, ‘democratization’, or more broadly political participation and accountability. Michael Ross’s famous 2001 article also claimed to show a correlation between oil and authoritarianism. And others have pointed to problems of economic growth (‘Dutch disease’) and more generally a ‘resource curse’ resulting in governance failure and even state failure. The workshop participants debated the nature of such links, the mechanisms explaining them, and the variables that may support them, intervene, or cut across them. Some recent work on these countries’ political evolution has raised the question whether they need always remain stuck in the ‘liberalized autocracy’ stage at best, or might have mediumor longer-term possibilities of moving beyond this. Even in the current phase of more or less Gulf Research Meeting – July 2010 41
42 The 2010 Gulf Research Meeting liberalizing autocracy, does the evidence from the countries of the Gulf Coopertion Council (GCC) force us to re-visit Karl’s view? At the most fundamental level, the extent to which hydrocarbon-based rentierism itself remains an adequate description of the GCC economies, and even more so of their political economies, was questioned. Agreement emerged with some recent work on the GCC economies that has suggested fledging shifts are occurring that are changing the nature of at least parts of these economies. This does not mean there is not still a considerable rentier component of these political economies, but it does mean that analysis needs to look beyond the traditional rentier state framework. Not a single country in the MENA region scores above the global median of the World Bank’s index for global accountability. Yet paradoxically the countries of GCC, once condemned as irredeemably ‘rentier’, are emerging as the most efficient economies in the region – or at least as containing some of the most efficient sub-sectors or ‘islands of efficiency.’ During a period of inflated energy prices, non-hydrocarbon exports from the GCC have more than doubled. Half of the GCC’s GDP comes from non-oil products and a portion of this growth stems from the expansion of the private sector rather than public sector demand. In the GCC economies, the share of private investment in total capital formation is now higher than that of governments. State failure, or even failure of governance, then, is not on the agenda – at least not in any way suggested by the resource curse literature. This was shown clearly in Rolf Schwartz’s paper, which also suggested the explanation lay in the type of state formation that has been able to use generous resources (measured as ‘allocation per capita’) to bring forward societal groups mirrored on the
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THE GULF RESEARCH CENTER “Knowled
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