By Paul A. Haslam*

María del Carmen Ortiz / Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Resource nationalism is driving the most significant shift in Latin American development policies of the past decade.  It is rarely talked about yet is constituting a new developmental model that is being adopted by governments of diverse ideological inclinations.  It has involved reforming taxation regimes dating from the 1990s to extract more “rent” from natural-resource intensive industries; strengthening and extending state capacity; using rents to support social spending by the state, including anti-poverty programs; and – most importantly – linking resource abundance with industrial policy.  It is the basic framework of the post-neoliberal development model, and examples are many.  The splashier headlines in the past decade focus on various instances of nationalization, including the expropriation of YPF in Argentina (2012); Venezuela’s erratic nationalization program; and Bolivia’s dramatic military occupation of foreign-owned…