ABSTRACT
This book began with the challenge of understanding Latin America’s resource nationalisms. Part of this challenge involved identifying and categorizing the range of policies used under the moniker of resource nationalism; and part of it involved explaining these choices. Both of these questions are logically prior but, ultimately, essential to understanding how resource nationalism affects the development potential of the region. Our methodology has been to examine a number of possible causes of resource nationalism, organized in Part 1 of the book; followed by the examination of six country-cases in Part 2. The country-cases were organized into three groups that represent different positions on the capture and use of resource rents from ‘limited’, to ‘moderate’, to ‘radical’ – reflecting the diversity of policy responses found in the region. By organizing the countries in this way, we improve our ability to make meaningful comparisons: we can see which causal variables are shared between countries with broadly similar outcomes in resource nationalist policies; as well as which variables differ between the countries with dissimilar outcomes.
