Transcript

In terms of thinking about the role of politics and the relationships between China and Africa, one of the things we've tried to do is say, well, it's all very well to say that Africans have some sort of agency or control in that relationship- what does that actually mean practically? How do we look at that and how is it, kind of, brought to life, really? And what we've tried- largely, these deals, that are done between China and African countries, are done between the leaderships- or what we call the political elites of those countries. So we've tried to focus on the role of political elites in Africa and how they've engaged with the Chinese. And to do that, to look at the local elites in Africa, we've used a kind of theory called political settlements theory that was first made popular by the academic Mushtaq Khan. And very briefly, he argued that, actually, what you have is- in Africa and other developing countries- a lot of informal politics. So this is politics that is not enacted through very formal channels that we might be used to in the West. When we think about the political elites that broker the deals between China and Africa, we've tried to look at the power those elites have and how they operate in terms of the factions and coalitions that they create and how that then shapes what they do. So, for example, if you take Ghana, where we've done a lot of work, you have two very big political parties who have, traditionally over the last 20 years or so- if not longer, vied for power of control of parliament. So this has created a very fluid political environment. And what you see in terms of then how that governs natural resources is that people often make quite short-term decisions because they're worried about how they're going to fight the next election. So they might sign off some deals with a particular oil company very quickly because they can then claim the merits of that deal and also try and channel some of the resources into the treasury for their own uses, whether that's legitimate or illegitimate. So it's really important, then, to understand the underlying politics of this natural resources rather than just say, OK, if we can get some institutions, right, making things a bit more transparent, things'll suddenly get better. We're saying, actually, underlying all that is a longstanding, deep-rooted politics. And to understand the kind of froth on the top, if you like, you have to understand that politics, which is what we've been doing in this research.