290165 PS Contested Resources, Rural Livelihoods and Globalisation (2017S)

The course discusses the role of natural resources in development. Resources that are central to rural livelihoods in Asia and Africa, like water, land, forest, biodiversity and livestock, are the focus. Natural resources based rural livelihoods, like those of farmers, forest dwellers and livestock owners, are simultaneously local and global. Kerkvliet’s notion of ‘everyday politics’ captures the perspective on the local that this course takes well. He defines ‘everyday politics’ as “…the debates, conflicts, decision, and co-operation among individuals, groups and organisations regarding the control, allocation and use of resources and the values and ideas underlying these activities.” (Kerkvliet 1990:11) Natural resources governance, management and use are understood as inherently political practices – natural resources are ‘contested’.

For the perspective on the ‘global’ in the course a famous line of poetry by W.H. Auden, ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, can serve as illustration. Every localized process of natural resources use and management (the grain of sand) is embedded in a set of broader, global process (the world). Global dynamics manifest at the local level; local dynamics shape the global level. It is this connection and interaction that the course explores. The course provides concepts and theoretical insights to think about the connections and interaction. It presents the different domains within and processes through which the material and institutional shapes, meanings and outcomes of natural resources governance, management and use are contested. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the course draws on political economy and political ecology approaches to natural resources, as well as the broad and diverse field of the analysis of natural resources management institutions.

Examples/case studies discussed in the course range from social processes around the building of large dams (displacement, forest submergence, social movement resistance at local and global level, policy responses); the bundles of rights and access relations to land and forest for different groups of people, and their gender dimension; the negotiations between sovereign states about transboundary resources like rivers and wildlife reserves; the strength and limitations of ‘payment for ecosystem services’ to achieve ecological sustainability and combat climate change; how migration affects agrobiodiversity conservation; the strength and limitations of community based natural resources management approaches; aspects of global environmental governance such as intellectual property rights in seeds and human rights approaches to water; and the relevance of climate change for rural livelihoods.