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

Natural resource wealth does not uniformly produce either development or fragility; its effects depend on the political and institutional conditions under which it is governed. Across African resource-rich states, similar endowments have generated sharply divergent outcomes, ranging from bureaucratic discipline and productive investment to rent concentration and institutional decay. This study examines the political foundations of these outcomes by analysing how resource governance structures incentives, authority, and access to wealth over time. Focusing on Botswana, South Sudan, Chad, Angola, Nigeria, and Zambia, the study addresses a central question: under what conditions does resource wealth support developmental accumulation rather than reinforce extractive political orders? Bringing together insights from developmental state theory, resource curse debates, and the political economy of natural resource management, it explores how resource governance interacts with broader political settlements from the late twentieth century through the post-2005 period. Methodologically, the study employs a comparative political economy approach across six cases, combining process tracing of key resource-governance decisions with analysis of resource governance indices, commodity price series, and elite interviews. This design allows for systematic comparison of how institutional arrangements and political incentives shape divergent trajectories. The findings show that outcomes are not best understood as the result of discrete policy failures or short-term shocks. Instead, they are reproduced through interconnected institutional and political mechanisms that structure elite incentives, bureaucratic capacity, and control over resource flows (Amsden 1989; Evans 1995; Mkandawire 200