ABSTRACT
Solwezi was a small town during most of the colonial period and became the capital of the Northwestern Province in Zambia in the 1950s. First established as an administrative centre overseeing mining activities in the area, the administration has slowly developed a presence in the region despite a mostly dormant copper mine. In the early 2000s, the mine was reopened and quickly grew into the largest copper mine (by output) in Africa and the largest gold mine in Zambia, attracting tens of thousands of migrant workers looking for opportunities in a country which has suffered since the 1970s, first from low global prices for copper, then from the IMF-imposed structural adjustment reforms. Most research on the recent wave of resource extraction focuses on this new and spectacular actor, the mine, as well as the resistance against it. By contrast, this chapter looks at the local state (the municipal council) as a stable and long-term actor in a rapidly changing environment triggered by a global resource boom. To understand the effects of capital investment on local governance practices and stateness more generally, I examine the work of the municipal council before and after the most recent reopening of the mine in Solwezi. I will show – with a case-study in each of the economic, spatial and political realms – that the council has not taken up the challenge of governing differently in reaction to the unfolding changes such as in-migration, informal settlement and, most of all, the impact of the mine on urban life. The council, I will argue, is losing authority over its constituencies relative to the mine’s influence, but also in absolute terms in comparison to the times before the arrival of the mine. I do not read these processes as expressions of the resource curse – that is, the corruption of the state by extractive industries – as many scholars might. Rather, I see a non-synchrony of town development and the expansion of the mine, coupled with the investor’s capacity to produce relative order to ensure smooth extraction. In other words, the local authorities’ significance and range are indeed eroded due to the extractive industry but not for the reasons typically advanced by the resource curse literature.
