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Natural resource extraction is perceived as a destructive aspect of human culture. This characterization is widespread, despite the activity having shaped relationships between communities and their environment to create entire sets of cultural values and expressions through settlement patterns, traditional skills and practices, innovation and technology, intangible cultural expressions, local economies and more. The cultural dimensions of natural resource extraction landscapes were discussed at the ICOMOS ADCOM Annual Symposium in La Plata, Argentina, in December 2018. The workshop included experts in cultural landscapes, sustainability, industrial archaeology and industrial heritage. This paper reports on these issues and deliberations focusing on World Heritage cultural landscapes of extraction.

The report considers a broad survey of the World Heritage List and sites on national Tentative Lists to identify those related to natural extraction sites and distinguishing between categories of relict vs. living, and between the types of natural resources being extracted.

The conclusion is that the World Heritage Committee has yet to address the living value of natural resource extraction. Furthermore, the workshop attendants concluded that there is a pressing need to do so in light of the type, nature and sustainability of these sites. As the source of materials for many outstanding sites on the World Heritage List and the decreasing availability of some resources, the question requires consideration to ensure the sustainable use and livelihood of communities.

The limitations are set by the general terms of the survey and the limited engagement of knowledgeable individuals.

The practical implications are related to guidance to review and analyse potential living cultural landscapes related to natural resource extraction.

There is no general discussion on this topic yet amongst professionals. The initiative of the workshop identified that gap and its related necessity to provide guidance.

Even though many studies have attempted to understand the drivers of carbon dioxide emission and energy consumption to help tackle environmental issues, not much has been done to estimate the effect of natural resources extraction on these two variables. This paper aims to analyze the long-run and short-run carbon dioxide emission and energy consumption effect of natural resources extraction in Ghana.

The theoretical foundation for this study is the Stochastic Impacts Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology (STIRPAT) model. Secondary Data sourced from World Development Indicators (2018) for the period of 1971-2013 were used. Estimation was done by using the autoregressive distributed lag.

It was found among other things that urbanization, and extraction of natural resources contribute to Ghana’s carbon dioxide emission, while official development assistance helps in reducing carbon dioxide emission in the long run. Again, while income and extraction of natural resources increase energy consumption, urbanization and official development assistance reduce environmental degradation in the long run. Regarding the short run, income and urbanization both increase energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission; trade openness and official development assistance decrease both carbon dioxide emission and energy consumption.

The implications from the results include the need to strictly enforce laws regulating extractive activities in the country to ensure a safe environment; and also to raise tariff and non-tariff barriers on products that do not promote a friendly environment and vice versa.

The effect of natural resources extraction on carbon emission and energy consumption is examined.

The rise in public debt and the increased extraction of natural resources in Ghana at a time that environmental degradation is escalating, especially with carbon dioxide emission, is worrying. This seems to cast doubt on the country's ability to meet the goals of the Paris agreement for climate change and ensuring sustainable development. Consequently, in this study, the effect of natural resources extraction and government debt on carbon dioxide emission is investigated.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis was adopted for this study. The Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square Model was used for assessing the data. An annual data from 1971 to 2018 was used for the analysis.

The long-run results based on the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square analysis reveal that natural resources extraction increases carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, the joint effect of post-oil production in commercial quantities and natural resources rent increases carbon dioxide emission. Further, the findings document that the initial stage of government debt improves environmental quality up to a point, beyond which an increase in debt hurts the environment. On the environmental degrading effect of economic growth, the findings validate the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis. It is also observed that urbanization degrades environmental quality.

The study offers appropriate recommendations policymakers need to embrace towards the attainment of lower carbon emissions from the loans and natural resources rent to achieve environmental sustainability.

The effect of debt on carbon dioxide emission is assessed for the Ghanaian economy. It also contributes to studies on the natural resources-carbon emission nexus.

The Peruvian Canon system was designed to collect a percentage of taxed profits from the country's natural resource industries and redistribute these funds into communities that are important to the natural resource extraction process. However, these communities often lack significant basic resources, such as adequate public health facilities and basic medical supplies. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This analysis focusses on the political and economic factors within Peru's Canon distribution system and proposes public policy strategies that could more effectively ensure natural resource profits reach extraction zone communities.

Policymakers should consider the implementation of policies that require a transparent Canon collection and distribution system. Policies should be developed that mandate an adequate percentage of Canon funds for investment in Peru's public health system.

A significant portion of the available literature on local conditions within natural resource extraction communities and systematic empirical data available are lacking.

This analysis can lead to the development and implementation of public policy that more effectively targets improvements throughout Peru's natural resource communities.

One of the defining characteristics of industrial capitalism is the rapid expansion of social production. This expansion requires increased use of matter and energy. Society cannot create either matter or energy, so industrial expansion in one place means that matter and energy must be extracted and transported from other places. Because social production expands through both new technologies and new products, industrial growth requires not only greater amounts, but also an increasing variety of material and energetic forms. Because these different forms of matter and energy are found in limited quantities in different parts of the world, expansion, technological innovations, and product differentiation in productive economies entail the frequent relocation of extractive economies, either because they have depleted the natural resources on which they depend or because new technologies have shifted the market. Regions which depend on exporting extracted natural resources are therefore likely to suffer from severe fluctuations in income. Capital sunk in extractive infrastructure may devalue radically. These problems limit their capacity for sustained development. Nonetheless, resource extraction figures prominently in the economic plans of many lessdeveloped nations. A growing literature addresses the economic or the political pitfalls that beset extractive economies. This essay explores their ecological roots.

This paper aims to examine the effects of extractive activities on the well-being of local communities and assesses stakeholder expectations of resource benefits and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of oil companies in Ghana.

The paper uses a qualitative approach based on an exploratory research design to investigate the opinions and experiences of stakeholders in the growing oil and gas industry in Ghana.

The empirical findings demonstrate that entry negotiated agreements and local content requirements in the offshore oil industry have minimal benefits because of the lack of linkages with the economies of local communities. Additionally, the nature of CSR practices within the extractive industry is directly traceable to the resource governance arrangements and plural logics in Ghana’s institutional context.

This study only provides insights into natural resource governance and CSR issues in offshore oil and gas projects. Thus, the findings are not generalisable to the entire industry, including onshore drilling, which have other sustainability issues.

This research highlights the gap in natural resource management in Ghana and the effects of community expectations on CSR practices in the oil and gas industry. Therefore, this study posits the significance for including compliance requirements for improving the well-being of host communities in entry negotiated agreements and local contents.

By highlighting the nuanced issues in natural resource management within the oil and gas industry in Ghana, this paper makes significant contributions to the CSR and sustainability literature.

This chapter discusses the role of energy production in the global capitalist economy and its relationship to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with particular focus on SDG 8 – ‘Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all’ – and SDG 12 – ‘Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns’. It achieves this by first introducing the Club of Rome report the Limits to Growth which utilised a system dynamics computer model to simulate the interactions of five global economic subsystems (population, food production, industrial production, pollution and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources) (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens III, 1972), the results of which posed serious challenges for global sustainability, to better understand and contextualise unconventional (also referred to as ‘extreme’) and ‘renewable’ energy production as examples of the paradoxical nature of sustainable development in the global capitalist economy. Demonstrating that unconventional energy production methods are much less efficient, more carbon intensive, more environmentally destructive and just as unsustainable, and that renewable energy relies on the extraction of nonrenewable natural resources such as lithium that result in similar environmental and social issues, this chapter will interrogate this and ask the question – is the capitalist system in its current form capable of making ‘sustainable development something more than the oxymoron it appears?’.

The “resource curse phenomenon” has received a lot of attention from researchers; however, there has not been any sound explanation to back this phenomenon since the main reason why natural resource should restrain economic growth instead of boosting economic growth remains unanswered. This paper contributes to literature on “resource curse hypothesis” by examining the role of government effectiveness in influencing the impact of gas resource rent on economic growth.

The study adopted the Cobb-Douglass production and incorporated gas resource rent, institutional quality (government effectiveness), inflation and exchange rate as additional variables that influences total output (gross domestic product). The author estimated the empirical form of the Cobb-Douglass production using autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) and Toda and Yamamoto (1995) as the main estimation strategies while other time series approaches were used as a robustness check.

The estimates from the ARDL short-run and the long-run dynamics suggest that the direct impact of gas resource rent on economic growth was positive but not statistically significant. At the same time, the interacting of gas resource rent and government effectiveness showed a positive and statistically significant effect of nearly 0.4123 and 0.8724 on economic growth in the long run and short run, respectively. The results from the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) also indicated that economic growth has a strong influence on gas resource rent while government effectiveness drives economic growth and not vice versa.

The findings from this study imply that government effectiveness plays a crucial role in averting the “resource curse phenomenon”. Hence, improving government effectiveness and efficiency through minimizing corruption among state institutions would be imperative in curbing the “resource curse phenomenon” in developing countries.

The influential role of government effectiveness on the relationship between gas resource rent on economic growth is examined.

This paper explores the role of colonial heritage on long-term economic development from a resource-curse perspective. The authors investigate the impact of colonial exports on long-term economic development through two channels: (1) a direct impact of the economic dependency on natural resources and (2) an indirect impact via its effect on colonial institutions, which persisted over time and influenced current economic development.

To address this issue, the authors use an original data set on French bilateral trade from 1880 to 1912. The authors use partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in the empirical analysis, so that the authors are able to construct latent variables (LVs) for variables that are not directly observable, such as the quality of institutions.

The authors find that exports of primary goods to France had a negative impact on colonial institutions and that for French colonies, this impact was driven by minerals exports. Despite its impact on colonial institutions, exports of French colonies had no significant indirect impact on their current institutions. The authors find no significant direct impact of colonial trade on current development for French colonies. Finally, colonial exports of manufactured products had no significant impact on colonial institutions among French colonies and a positive impact among non-French ones.

Research implications regarding the findings of this paper are, namely, that the relative poor performance within French colonies today cannot be attributed to the extraction of raw materials a century ago. However, human capital and institutional development, instead of exports, are more relatively important for long-term growth. Some limitations in trying to determine the simultaneous relationship among colonial trade, institutions and economic performance are the relation between colonial trade and the extent of extraction from the colonizer, which is hard to quantify, as well as its precise mechanism.

Since the initial institutions set in those former colonies presented a strong persistence in the long run, their governments should focus now on building sound and inclusive political and economic institutions, as well as on investing in human capital in order to foster long-term growth. Once a comprehensive set of institutional and human resources are put in place, the quality and quantity of exports might create a positive spillover on the short-run growth.

One social implication that can be retrieved from this study is the ever-lasting effect of both human capital investment and introduction of inclusive political and economic institutions on the long-run impact of growth.

The paper uses an original primary data set from archival sources to explore the role of colonial heritage on long-term economic development from a resource-curse perspective. It applies a relatively new model partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) that allows the construction of LVs for variables that are not directly observable, as well as channeling the impact on growth through both direct and indirect channels. Finally, it allows for the simultaneous multigroup analysis across different colonial groups.

In this introductory chapter, we briefly outline the history of the political economy of raw materials, focusing particularly on the relationship between raw materials and economic development. We then introduce the chapters of this volume, and we conclude by discussing future directions for research in this area.