Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
these concepts and suggests the need to search for more conceptual clarity.
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The various
paradigms used within and between disciplines partly explain this ambiguity concern-
ing the conflict-resources nexus. Contributing to the confusion is the phrasing used by
non-academic parties, including governmental and non-governmental institutions.
For a thorough understanding of the conflict-natural resources nexus, we need to
append adjectives to these terms - e.g., renewable, biotic and removable for natural
resources, and latent, manifest, local, and cross-boundary, among others, for conflicts.
A next step is to establish the trends in either abundance or scarcity of a specific natural
resource that stand at the centre of a conflict. We consider a historical perspective
and political economy analysis to be the most rewarding, especially if we apply a
process-oriented perspective of natural resource analysis. Barrow (1999: 5) indicates
that environmental management is an “approach that goes beyond natural resource
management to encompass the political and social as well as the natural environment.
It is addressed with questions of value and distribution, with interpersonal, geographic
and intergenerational equity.'' Before we elaborate this line of thought in more detail,
let us first scrutinise the concept of natural resources as it has been used in recent
academic and non-academic publications. In the last section we will summarise our
approach schematically in a conflict-resources framework.
4.3 WHAT ARE NATURAL RESOURCES? A LITERATURE REVIEW
The term natural resource, like environment, is mostly used in a generic way. We are all
supposed to understand what is meant by it and the concept is seldom specified. A clear
example of this is the topic,
World Resources - The Wealth of the Poor: Managing
ecosystems to fight poverty
published by The World Resources Institute (2005). In this
topic of almost 300 pages, the meaning of community-based natural resource man-
agement, resource access and resource degradation is explained, but no definition of
natural resource is ever provided. Likewise, the recently established “Natural Resource
Charter'' (also see www.naturalresourcecharter.org), a Paul Collier-led Oxford Univer-
sity initiative backed by policy makers, leaves us in the dark when it comes to defining
a natural resource. The Charter has been devised with the intention of being used as
an international tool to foster the sustainable implementation of the transformation
of poor economies exploiting their natural resources. It defines 12 precepts to guide
the governments and societies of resource rich countries in the generation of economic
growth that promotes the welfare of the population in an environmentally sustainable
way (NRC 2010: 1). Although the term 'natural resource' is mentioned 34 times, the
Charter provides no precise definition. Reading in between the lines of the Charter, it
seems that it is limited to non-renewable extractive resources such as oil, gas, other
minerals and metals, thus leaving aside resources such as forests, pastures and water,
among others (NRC 2010).
The 1999 discussion paper entitled,
Exploring understandings of institutions and
uncertainty: new directions in natural resource management
, is yet another publication
that fails to define the term natural resources. The paper, produced by the IDS -Sussex
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Frerks (2007) sketched some of the building blocks in the resources-conflict knowledge
framework and the accompanying complexity, see also Chapter 2 of this volume for an update.
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