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This article presents a multidimensional account of the politics of resource extraction in two subnational regions of India in response to the question: what are the political conditions that facilitate extraction? Emerging from the same moment of state creation in 2000, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are adjacent mineral‐rich states with similar demographic profiles and comparable levels of economic development. The authors argue that despite these similarities and India's highly centralized legislative framework for natural resource governance, the two states have developed distinctive 'extractive regimes' in the years since statehood, which contrast in important ways across three dimensions: political organization and history, institutional effectiveness, and the nature and management of social resistance. The article offers the first in‐depth, comparative account of how subnational territorial reorganization in India acts as a critical juncture enabling the formation of extractive regimes, which have also converged in important ways in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Governance is becoming increasingly important in development and poverty reduction policies. However, the forms and methods by which it is to be incorporated into donor programs are only emerging at present. In this paper, we contrast two very different approaches—the White House led Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and DFID’s Drivers of Change (DOC) Approach—to analyzing governance, and compare their theoretical underpinnings. A key factor explaining why these different approaches have been adopted is that for the United States, global poverty reduction is a footnote to its foreign policy and national security agenda, whereas in the United Kingdom, global poverty reduction engages both the national political leadership and the civil society. In conclusion, the paper suggests that enduring contradictions confronted by all donors complicate the treatment of governance in empirically nuanced terms (as DOC attempts to do) while privileging a more universalistic approach like the MCA. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]