68 Social Contracts for Development
that could have profound socioeconomic implications for mineral-rich countries in Africa. A case study of mining companies in a high-income country and a lower-middle income country concludes that as new technologies are rolled out, host countries will be at risk of reduced socioeconomic benefits from mining because of lost local employment and personal income tax revenue, and employment-related local procurement will also suffer (Cosbey et al. 2016). Similarly, the ongoing global transition to clean energy technologies propelled by the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change may depress the long-term global demand for oil and gas from Africa’s producers. Mineral exporters are likely to see sharp demand growth for “climate minerals,” such as cobalt, copper, iron, lithium, and nickel for use in solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and other renewable energy hardware (Arrobas et al. 2017). In both cases, disruptions to long-term global demand for oil, gas, and minerals will affect the revenues available to policy makers, the benefits of these resources accruing to citizens and communities, and therefore the balance in citizen-state relations.
The Role of Social Contract Fragmentation in Conflict and Fragility Of the 30 fragile and conflict-affected situations on the World Bank’s Fragility, Conflict, and Violence harmonized list, 18 are in African states, where violence and weak institutional capacity remain major impediments to shared prosperity on the continent. The use of social contract theory in the literature on peacebuilding and conflict is undergoing a resurgence (for example, Kaplan 2014; Leonard 2013; McCandless 2018a). This revival has been partly driven by events such as the Arab Spring (Devarajan and Ianchovichina 2018; Toska 2017), and partly by a reaction to the focus in the discourse on elite bargains (World Bank 2011) and political settlements (Di John and Putzel 2009). The alignment and openness compass presented in the framework relates to conflict and fragility. The assumption is that social unrest can be a response to a low level of alignment between citizens’ perceptions of the outcomes of the social contract and their expectations. When this misalignment is combined with a lack of responsiveness from the state, unrest and violence could arise as a last resort form of bargain or as a breakdown in the social contract. The role of unrest as a bargaining mechanism is further described in the next spotlight. This study finds that the degree to which the state is responsive and a “people-centered approach to [conflict] prevention” (United Nations and World Bank 2019, 277) can be realized is contingent on the nature of the citizen-state bargain. The South Africa case study (Watts 2019) shows the importance of the strength of civil capacity, as epitomized by the mobilization within the African
