Rentier States in Guyana and Suriname and the Consequent Lack of a Social Contract

Abstract

Successive coastland-dominated governments in independent Guyana have retained both rentier control of resource extractive activities located on State-claimed public lands and the colonial tradition of absentee holders of State-issued concession licences to logging and mining. The colonial pattern persists of concentrated control of mining licences by a small number of persons who then rent access to evergreen concessions. Transnational logging companies concentrate on the intensive extraction of a few key timber species for export as unprocessed logs, leading to localized commercial extinction of iconic timbers. The State’s failure to capture an equitable share of the economic rent from resource extractive industries is evident in transfer pricing and the scale of illicit financial flows. The legal communal titles held to some of their ancestral lands by about three-quarters of Indigenous Villages are circumscribed by public access to all rivers and roads. Indigenous rights in State Forests are also ignored in practice by the quasi-corporate forestry and mining commissions (government agencies). The centralized government control, combined with superficial and ineffective parliamentary scrutiny, help to explain the lack of a unifying national narrative or social contract. Rentier practices can be reformed by decentralized governance structures, transparent allocation and civil society involvement in monitoring of concession licences and equitable benefit sharing.

Keywords: Guyana; Suriname; rentier practices; Indigenous land rights; transfer pricing; governance; species extinction