Mining and Development in Sierra Leone: Negotiating Change and Navigating Uncertainty

Mining and Development in Sierra Leone examines how different actors in Sierra Leone use the effects of large-scale mining to navigate and transform the challenging conditions of life.

The book offers an in-depth analysis of the processes of development and change that mark resource extraction environments globally. Across the world, resource extraction is assigned an important role in development agendas. Yet a key question is how development opportunities are given shape and accessed and how extraction’s negative impacts are dealt with in actual politics and practices. Set in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone during a global mining boom, this book shows how mining-cum-development’s multifaceted effects materialize. By taking the micro-politics of large-scale mining as its principal focus, the book analyzes a range of the most perplexing phenomena of life in Sierra Leone and scrutinizes the intricate and contentious processes of change unfolding in mining environments. Mining and Development in Sierra Leone goes beyond promise-or-problem dichotomies, offers key insights into the struggle for progress that characterizes the mining-development nexus, and provides innovative understandings of the resourceful ways in which different actors negotiate change and navigate uncertainty.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars working on resource extraction, large-scale investments, globalization, and development, as well as to development practitioners, mining professionals, and policymakers.

Robert Jan Pijpers is a senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg, Germany. He is co-editor of The Anthropology of Resource Extraction (Routledge, 2022).