This chapter outlines why EU Cohesion Policy must end and explores reform challenges. Despite consuming a third of the EU budget, structural funds have failed to reduce disparities, creating a resource curse that fosters dependency, misallocation, and reform delays. Conditionality mechanisms are ineffective: national governments promise reforms that rarely materialize, while the European Commission prioritizes absorption over accountability. Monitoring remains weak, and political incentives favour short-term spending and pork-barrel projects. The chapter argues that subsidies deny lagging regions the chance to learn from poor choices, perpetuating stagnation. Ending Cohesion Policy is essential, but politically difficult due to entrenched interests and lobbying. Gradual phase-out may be more feasible than abrupt termination, though both face commitment challenges. Freed resources should fund competitive programmes in research, innovation, and defence or return to citizens via tax cuts. The EU must abandon idealistic redistribution and focus on enforcing the Single Market, improving governance, and fostering competitiveness. Without reform, Cohesion Policy will continue to undermine Europe’s economic resilience and democratic integrity, threatening the EU’s future.

This chapter argues that EU Cohesion Policy – through its structural and investment funds – has failed to achieve its core objective of regional convergence and has instead produced harmful economic and political consequences. Despite consuming roughly one-third of the EU budget and enjoying strong political support, these funds have not reduced disparities; in fact, some regions and entire countries, such as Portugal and Greece, have diverged from the EU average. I contend that cohesion funds operate as a form of resource curse: they distort incentives, foster dependency, and delay structural reforms, ultimately weakening competitiveness and governance. While the European Commission claims high returns on investment, credible evidence is scarce, and monitoring remains inadequate. Drawing on historical analogies and case studies, I show that these subsidies misallocate resources and undermine institutional quality, contributing to Europe’s stagnation relative to global competitors. Ending Cohesion Policy – while preserving beneficial aspects of EU integration – is essential for revitalizing the Union. This chapter sets out the intellectual foundation for that reform, challenging entrenched assumptions and calling for a serious debate on the future of EU regional policy.

This chapter explores the paradox of resource windfalls: rather than fostering prosperity, they often lead to economic stagnation and institutional decay. Historical and modern cases – Spain and Portugal during the silver and gold influx, Venezuela and Nigeria with oil – illustrate how sudden wealth triggers misallocation of resources and weakens governance by increasing incentives for state capture. Resource booms typically shift economies towards non-tradables, undermine competitiveness and foster authoritarianism or corruption. While countries like Norway and Botswana avoided these traps through strong institutions and prudent fiscal management, such success is rare. The chapter contrasts the exceptional Marshall Plan with later aid programmes, such as the Lomé Conventions, which failed due to scale, permanence, and poor monitoring. These lessons reveal that resource windfalls are conditional: without robust institutions and accountability, they become curses. This analysis provides the foundation for the book’s central argument – that EU structural and cohesion funds replicate these dynamics, explaining their ineffectiveness and the political resistance to reform.

This chapter argues that EU Cohesion Policy has created a resource curse within Europe, fostering dependency, misallocation, and institutional decay in several Member States. Despite decades of structural funds – amounting to hundreds of billions – countries like Greece, Portugal, and southern Italy have failed to converge and, in fact, diverged from EU averages. The chapter explains how continuous inflows of ‘easy money’ distort incentives, delay reforms, and weaken democratic accountability, while official EU reports rely on implausible models and confuse spending with outcomes. Economic mechanisms such as Dutch Disease inflate non-tradable sectors like construction, while political effects include rent-seeking, clientelism, and executive dominance over parliaments. Funds often substitute for national spending, finance short-term projects, and encourage pork-barrel investments, rather than fostering innovation or competitiveness. Although some Central and Eastern European countries have converged, warning signs suggest similar risks ahead. Cohesion Policy, intended as solidarity, has become a poison pill: perpetuating stagnation and undermining governance. Without credible reform or termination, the EU risks deepening regional divergence and weakening its long-term economic resilience.

This concluding chapter argues that EU Cohesion Policy, despite its stated goal of reducing regional disparities, has failed and should be terminated. Consuming over a third of the EU budget, structural funds have not delivered convergence; instead, they have fostered dependency, misallocation, and a resource curse that undermines competitiveness and governance. The EU continues to promote unrealistic claims about cohesion’s benefits while neglecting its core mission: enforcing the Single Market. Evidence shows that subsidies distort incentives, delay reforms, and weaken accountability, harming both poorer regions and the EU as a whole. The utopian vision of equalizing Member States through transfers is unattainable and counterproductive. Ending Cohesion Policy would free resources for priorities such as science, innovation, demographic resilience, and defence – areas critical for Europe’s future. Reform faces strong political resistance from net beneficiaries and entrenched interests, but pressure from net contributors will eventually make continuation unsustainable. A serious intellectual debate is urgently needed. Cohesion Policy has failed for decades; prolonging it risks further economic stagnation and geopolitical vulnerability. The time to end Europe’s resource curse is now.

This chapter presents a theoretical model of the conditions under which natural resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes pursue or eschew the liberalization of domestic economic regulations in the twenty-first century. I term this the rent-conditional reform theory. This model focuses on three salient groups: political elites who devise and implement policy, economic elites who enjoy non-competitive privileges, and the non-elite citizenry who may or may not participate in private entrepreneurship. This model illustrates the demands and constraints both economic elites and the citizenry impose upon political elites amid the pursuit of economic liberalization.

This section draws on previous chapters to compare Zimbabwe to other resource-wealthy states in Southern Africa, particularly Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia. In all these states, resource sector policy has been essential to these states’ historical and institutional development. However, this chapter looks at how, even given many advantages and a level of development that was once ahead of these states regarding state capacity and democratization, Zimbabwe has fallen distinctly behind these other states. An overview of the resource sector shows that timing matters as other resource sectors are far more institutionalized than Zimbabwe and, while often leaving much to be desired, have not led to the same level of institutional and political decline. While these other states have had many of the same challenges and have had extreme difficulties, Zimbabwe has nonetheless been at the far end of the bell curve when it comes to resource curse dynamics.

This chapter introduces the central puzzle of this study: why, in contrast to other states in Southern Africa, have Zimbabwean democratic institutions stagnated or even declined since independence in 1980? To begin to answer this question, an overview of the resource sector in Zimbabwe, particularly the large diamond found in 2006, and the development of institutions since Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, is given. Furthermore, an institutional analysis, a brief overview of past studies, and a research design are outlined. In terms of case selection, Zimbabwe is placed in the overall population of cases when it comes to resource curse dynamics, and the concept of the “opaque” state is defined. Furthermore, Zimbabwe is defined in terms of democratization and state capacity, concepts that will be used throughout the study.

This chapter draws on past theories of ownership structure in the oil sector and applies them to the alluvial diamond sector in Zimbabwe. The alluvial diamond sector in Zimbabwe presents a natural experiment for understanding ownership structure in that the state and ruling party have been the same since 2006. Still, at least six different ownership regimes have been attempted. This chapter traces each of these and examines how the unpredictability of ownership in the diamond sector has often led to large-scale diamond smuggling and a regulatory framework reflective of political dynamics. The unpredictability of ownership has, in and of itself, caused difficulty in the Zimbabwean diamond sector and has reflected the unpredictability of state institutions. Thus, this chapter argues that past approaches that have been developed to examine the oil sector of states have some relevance for states that have a large amount of alluvial diamond wealth. However, the unique ability for a large amount of diamond wealth to be smuggled into a small space has made the significant increase in diamond wealth since 2006 a challenge for the formal economy and state capacity.

This chapter focuses on past literature on resource-wealthy countries and examines how alluvial diamond wealth may present unique challenges for states. State theory is discussed, and the “opaque” state concept is compared and contrasted with these. Then, an overview of different arguments that have been made to explain the relative decline of Zimbabwean institutions is given. Most of these can fall into three central categories: the psychology of leaders in ZANU-PF, the failure of economic policy, and external sanctions. The large diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006 is presented as a “critical juncture” for Zimbabwean institutions. Thus, this chapter places Zimbabwe in the overall population of cases when it comes to resource wealth and compares and contrasts how past approaches to resource politics, which have heavily focused on the oil sector, provide a roadmap for examining alluvial diamond wealth. However, this research must also be built upon as different resources, particularly a rapid increase in alluvial diamond wealth in the case of Zimbabwe, bring various challenges to state capacity and democratization.

The movement of tin frontiers across the globe both shapes and tells the tale of key vectors of capitalist imperialism across the world-system: expropriation, industrialization, decolonization. This chapter takes as its organizing principle the idea of the ‘mystery’ of the commodity and the ‘curse’ of tin. The literary and cinematic narratives examined reveal the capacity of tin texts to shape understandings of the socio-economic, gendered and racial inequalities in both peripheral and core territories. Whether in realist or irrealist representation, the mystery of the commodity of tin is frequently mobilized as plot hook, organising metaphor or structural principle. Whether in the tales of the tío or the memoirs of Cornish miners, in the realist films of Bolivia’s Ukamau group or Hammer’s schlock-visions of extraction in the British South West, we find instructive accounts of land expropriation, leeching of natural resources, ecologies of exhaustion and the broken bodies of the global working class.

Are civil conflicts driven by resource crises? Research suggests that the root of conflict, in part, is explained when analyzing how economic deprivation drives groups into turmoil. Resource ownership, especially when unevenly distributed, often leads to violence. Research remains divided, however, on which resources drive violence, and the precise mechanisms that are involved. While many scholars argue that inequality drives violence, there exist many other factors that can help to explain civil wars. Evidence in this chapter suggests that while oil dependence may trigger conflicts, the duration of conflict is heavily influenced by factors beyond resources alone. Contrarily, agricultural commodities lack significant ties to civil war onset or duration, challenging our understanding of deprivation on a country-specific basis. Conflict is inextricably tied to maintaining political order, which for resource-rich countries hinges on interacting factors that governance structures facilitate. Further analysis on these topics – like the greed, state capacity, and grievance frameworks – offers strong insights into why violence emerges, giving multiple avenues and case studies as evidence for explaining civil wars overall.

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of this book, discusses their academic, policy, and normative implications, and proposes areas for future research. It briefly explains the political situation after separate independence, pointing out the contrast between the economic and diplomatic success of the three states and their persisting authoritarianism, which is a result of separate independence. It also makes suggestions for topics for future research, including the resource curse and colonial entities that never became independent.

This chapter documents the restrictive conditions under which leftwing, “Bolivarian” populism managed to destroy democracy in Latin America. Only Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (1999–2013), Evo Morales of Bolivia (2006–2019), and Rafael Correa of Ecuador (2007–2017) accomplished this feat because they benefited from the high instability plaguing their countries’ presidential systems and, at the same time, from the enormous hydrocarbon revenues provided by the global commodities boom. By distributing massive benefits to ample population sectors, they won overwhelming political support, which they leveraged for dismantling the remaining, already battered checks and balances. By contrast, presidents who did not benefit from such a huge windfall or who governed in countries not suffering from high institutional instability did not manage to still their power hunger and asphyxiate democracy. Instead, some of these leftwing populists suffered irregular evictions from office, whereas others managed to serve out their terms, but failed to perpetuate themselves in power and strangle democracy.