290165 PS Contested Resources, Rural Livelihoods and Globalisation (2020S)

The course discusses the role of natural resources in development in the global South. Resources like water, land, forest, biodiversity and livestock, central to rural livelihoods in Asia and Africa, are the focus. Natural resources based rural livelihoods, like those of farmers, forest dwellers and livestock owners, are simultaneously local and global. The contested use of natural resources plays out at the level of ‘everyday politics’, that is, “…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). The everyday natural resources use, management and goverance practices are increasingly embedded in processes of cultural, political, economic and ecological globalisation. Global dynamics manifest at the local level; local dynamics shape the global level. It is this connection and interaction that the course explores. 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 the role of large dams construction in nation building; 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 politics of the climate change discourse and policy; the uneqwual distribution of water in irrigation systems; open source seeds initiatives to counter control of agricultural production by large transnational companies; the strength and limitations of community based natural resources management approaches; the role of scientific knowklesdge in colonialism.