Introduction

The second decade of the 21st century may be that of Africa's renaissance. As Africa's economic agencies, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) along with the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the African Union (AU) have come to advocate the adoption of policies leading towards developmental states, so the continent has articulated an African Mining Vision (AMV; see www.africaminingvision.org) (AMV, 2009, 2011a, 2011b) by contrast to other possible strategies for its natural resource governance (Florini and Dubash, 2011) from assorted global developmental, environmental, financial and industrial agencies.

This chapter begins to identify the background to this quite remarkable shift, analysing the prospects for its advocacy and adoption by emerging non-state as well as state actors by the end of this decade, both on and off the continent. In so doing, we relate to the emerging ‘agency’ versus ‘dependency’ debate (Brown, 2012; Brown and Harman, 2013; Harman and Brown, 2013; Lorenz and Rempe, 2013) as a correlate of the continent's recent unprecedented growth. This sets it apart from recent economic difficulties and setbacks in much of the established North of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), especially the Eurozone. In turn, this relates to and resonates with the latest UN Development Programme (UNDP) human development report for 2013 that articulates the rise of the global South, including the economic growth of the African countries South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda and Mauritius (UNDP, 2013).

This chapter juxtaposes two dominant interrelated strands in the political economy of today's continent: the impact of BRICS, especially China (Xing, 2013), and the return of a commodities boom, this time with a focus on energy and minerals, but in future, on food, land and water. Indeed, while these commodities have experienced a downturn over the last decade, the presented expected boom will occur over the coming decades. In turn, it notes the difficulties of the Euro's PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), and the declining salience of the European Union (EU) symbolised by the stalling of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) project. A wide variety of novel alternative forms of finance are appearing from new donors and foundations, sovereign wealth funds, faith-based organisations (FBOs) and global taxes for global public goods/partnerships.