Boom back or blow back? Growth strategies in mono-industrial resource towns-'East' and 'West'

Boom back or blow back? Growth strategies in mono-ndustrial i resource towns – ‘east’ and ‘west’ Gertrude Saxinger, Andrey Petrov, Natalia Krasnoshtanova, Vera Kuklina and Doris A. Carson INTRODUCTION The aim of this chapter is to discuss how ideas of path dependence and lock- (Grabher, 1993; Martin and Sunley, 2006) manifest in mono- in industrial resource towns in Russia, the United States and Australia. Based on the views of inhabitants, resource companies and administration representatives, this chapter illustrates the lure of the ‘re- oom’, its constraints b and downsides, as well as the attitudes of people towards new development paths. The chapter also identifies the various obstacles to alternative path development faced by mono- ndustrial resource towns. The four case study i sites are characterised by heavy mono-ndustrial activities in renewable i and non- enewable resources. The cases from the United States (fracking r around Williston in North Dakota) and Australia (alumina production in Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory) are characterised by a long-erm t neoliberal political and economic regime, while the industrial paths of the two Russian case studies (the forestry town Baikalsk and the petroleum town Ust- ut in the Irkutsk region) go back to the Soviet Union´s K command economy. Although the Russian cases were subject to neoliberal industrial politics in the early post-ocialist era, a re- ationalisation of s n the resource industry is again visible today; namely, a system called by Saxinger (2016a) ‘re- ocialist neoliberalism’. s The idea of path dependence has been...