Rentier States in Guyana and Suriname and the Consequent Lack of a Social Contract
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".