Sharing Natural Resources in Times of Climate Change: Justice, Culture and Natural Resource Governance

Natural resource governance is a topic of growing interest. Access to fertile land and clean water, mineral extraction rights and the struggle for energy security in an age of global climate change, population growth and general environmental degeneration will trigger and intensify conflict over natural resources across and within national borders. These pressure points ultimately call for a critical re-assessment of existing and evolving principles of international natural resource governance, as well as ideas concerning the normative foundation and the distribution of rights to natural resources. Within the fields of political theory, international relations, and development studies researchers investigate the issue of resource rights, both in terms of their normative content and in terms of their distribution. There is a growing literature on topics such as rights to water and other key resources, and the relationship between resource rights and other rights, such as territorial and property rights. Moreover, the question of who should legitimately hold which resource rights, and whether cultural groups or states should have the right to autonomously decide how to use (or not use) certain resources is hotly debated. The workshop will bring together experts working on these issues, in order to explore key questions such as, who can legitimately claim control over which natural resources? Are there any egalitarian global resource rights? Do natural resources escape the logic of full private ownership? What is the relationship between resource rights and territorial rights? Which role (if any) should concerns for cultural and political self-determination play within an account of global resource justice? If we are concerned with global justice, which models of resource management should we favour at the global level? In investigating these questions the workshop will bring together several overlapping debates, and thereby advance the discussion on resource rights and their just distribution.