Natural Resource Management Policies in the Congo Basin

Policies on natural resources were assessed both nationally and regionally to identify areas where there are still policy gaps, gaps between policies and their implementation, and areas where countries of the Congo Basin have progressed over the last decades. New emerging economic patterns were also rapidly screened. Significant progress in legislations has been made in all the countries of the Congo Basin, but there were also some inadequacies between enacted policies and legislations and their enforcement. Limited capacity, poorly paid personnel, and inadequate resourcing for enforcement explained many of these inadequacies and were linked to the overall poor governance, lack of transparency, limited freedom of speech, limited inclusion, and inequalities in the redistribution of the wealth generated by natural resources in the Congo Basin. Political and financial conditionalities imposed by western-based international financial institutions pushed the countries of the Congo Basin to search for less politically arrogant and financially less conditional economic cooperation alternatives and opened up the new scramble for Africa, whereby China, India, and South Africa have invested a lot of resources, followed by other countries such as Brazil, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey. There are new types of economic cooperation, including bartering natural resources for infrastructure or for security. Consequences of these new dynamics are not yet well documented and should be a priority for investment in science.

Wabasa, S.M. et al. (2026). Natural Resource Management Policies in the Congo Basin. In: Inogwabini, BI., Sonke, B., Koutika, LS., White, L.J. (eds) Resilience and Sustainability in the Congo Basin. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-02023-9_38-1