This thesis concerns the welfare of communities hosting major mining projects in remote regions of the world. It is based upon analysis of ten recommendations made to mining companies by the World Bank in 1998. This was achieved through evaluation of five factors, each of which influences local mineral-driven development. These factors are; the impact of violence upon local development, the implications of antecedent social practices for formal structures, political power in the creation of local institutions, understanding of the physical realities of mining, and equity within the local mineral-driven development apparatus. These factors were tested in the context of the Tampakan Copper Project, operated by Western Mining Corporation, on the island of Mindanao, in the Philippines. Because violence and political power on one hand, and tradition and understanding on the other, are rooted in respectively national and local institutions, a dichotomous national-local methodology was devised. Research of 'national' factors such as the cause of conflicts in the region, and the legal rights of host communities for examples, were conducted through archival research and interviewing of key figures. Research of 'local' factors was achieved through the collation of various local data. Moreover, because there were five 'Tribal Councils' within the vicinity of the proposed minesite, a comparative assessment of local factors was possible. A methodology for measurement of Council performance was designed, which provided a means for reinforcing findings, and thereby extending evaluation of the requirements of local mineral-driven development.

This thesis scrutinises the emergence, expansion, operations and effects of community-driven development (CDD) programmes, referring to the most popular and ambitious form of local, participatory development promoted by the World Bank. On the one hand, this thesis draws on the writings of Antonio Gramsci to explore new ways of contextualising and understanding CDD programmes along the lines of hegemony and transformism, as promoting social stability and demobilising counter-hegemonic challenges under conditions of democratisation and decentralisation, in support of economic liberalisation. On the other hand, it scrutinises the performative operations of CDD discourse in producing, legitimising and reproducing interventions, along the lines of "anti-politics," inspired by the Foucauldian approaches of James Ferguson and Tania Li. It also examines the performances elicited by CDD discourse, which "hails" politicians as "progressive" leaders, and "interpellates" the population as an "empowered" and "civil" society. Focusing on "Kalahi," the "flagship" CDD programme of the World Bank in the Philippines, in the "showcase" Province of Bohol, this research also reveals that CDD interventions, ostensibly designed to promote popular participation in local governance, have in practice worked to shore up the position of entrenched local machine politicians, and to undermine local peasant and fishermen's organisations mobilised to demand implementation of agrarian reform and legislation restricting large-scale fishing. Kalahi, the thesis further shows, was from the outset also intertwined with the expansion of agro-business and tourism ventures in the province, and with counterinsurgency operations. In parallel, Kalahi discourse has promoted new discursive styles of leadership, which have enabled local politicians to enhance their political clout and to reinforce their popular support base, whilst practices and institutions have remained essentially unchanged. Overall, this thesis thus shows that CDD programmes have worked to shore up hegemony in rural localities throughout the Philippines, and elsewhere across the developing world.

This thesis investigates the collection of levies by the state from Colombian coffee and Philippine coconut producers and the delegation of authority, to mobilise and regulate the uses of the levies, to producers associations in these sectors. The thesis suggests that these activities constitute an “institutional framework” for state-engineered rents, whereby public authority is appropriated by private agents. It asks why similarly-designed institutions for allocating rents yielded different outcomes: Colombian coffee levies are associated with growth-enhancing and producer welfare-promoting investments in coffee production and marketing, while Philippine coconut levies are depicted as non-developmental rent capture by associates of a president. The thesis explains the variation in outcomes by examining the basis in political economy of the power exercised by the leading sectoral organisations, FEDECAFE in Colombia and COCOFED in the Philippines, and how they articulated this power in the mobilisation of the levies. It finds that the conditions for collective action and the exercise of power were more robust for Colombian coffee than Philippine coconut producers. This meant that while FEDECAFE directly intermediated between coffee producers and the state in the mobilisation of rents associated with coffee levies, COCOFED shared the power of mobilising rents with other individual political brokers. This variation led to differences in rent mobilisation: a process that was production-enhancing in Colombia but not in the Philippines. This work thus shows how variations in the political organisation of rent-seeking may be linked to variations in the developmental outcomes associated with the collection and deployment of such levies. Doing so, it seeks to contribute to the understanding of the political conditions under which state-engineered rents may be production-enhancing – an important question in late developing countries, where corruption may be endemic, but state-allocated rents nevertheless necessary for promoting development.