Natural Resource Governance: A Matter of Life and Death

“Is a River Alive?” 

This question, the title of a book by Robert Macfarlane, is not often asked in the natural resource governance community. But might posing questions like this open productive pathways? Pathways that lead not to the familiar trope of counter-posing development and nature, but that instead center responsibility, legitimacy and ethics. If one was to entertain the idea that rivers, forests and soils are life forms, then decisions that lead to their modification or destruction in the process of creating value would have to be understood as decisions to transform, redistribute and end opportunities to live, or to live well. Natural resource governance would then have to grapple explicitly with the ethical and existential questions that can otherwise be hidden by environmental impact assessments, budget sheets and growth models. It would accept that the governance of extractive industries is as much a politics of incommensurability as one of optimization.

In both its theory and its practice, natural resource governance has been mostly concerned with the steering of interests and incentives, of rents and taxes, of benefit sharing and compensation, of conflicts and their resolution, and of the behavior of companies, governments and organized civil society. It has elevated technical, institutional and managerial questions, and has understood itself as a field focused on the governance of wealth creation and distribution, rather than on the administration of life and death.

In many cultures, mountains, rivers and forests are understood as life forms and are governed and respected accordingly.

That said, there are spaces where these more existential questions are present. The ever-stronger debate on no-go zones raises these concerns, as do conversations in faith communities, popular culture, legal scholarship, creative industries and especially among Indigenous Peoples. Films such as Avatar and Dune, whatever else one thinks about them, are relentless in insisting that resource extraction is about decisions over what lives, and what dies, and the exercise of power to enforce those decisions. The papal encyclical, Laudato Si, did something similar, albeit more cautiously, insisting on the moral imperative of caring for creation in the face of extraction – a perspective also present in other faith traditions. The still nascent but emerging jurisprudence and legal scholarship on the rights of nature does not necessarily argue that abiotic nature is alive, but it gets close when it asserts a river’s status as a bearer of rights that merit legal protection against resource extraction (assertions that have sometimes prevailed in the courtroom). The growing scholarship on more-than-human life and “Earth Beings” entertains the same possibilities, and even if it may not pass its own judgement on whether abiotic nature is alive, it does recognize that in many cultures, mountains, rivers and forests are understood as life forms and are governed and respected accordingly.

For many in the natural resource industries, these contributions might be viewed as theoretical, unrealistic and anti-development. But those same voices are often quite comfortable with the idea that a corporation is a legal person with rights and obligations. And yet it would seem far harder to argue that a corporation is a being than to make the same claim for rivers, soils or forests.

My purpose here is not to be dramatic, nor to argue that resource extraction cannot create important opportunities—I come from a region that in large measure lived from coal mining and associated industries, and whose economy has really struggled since their demise. To ask bigger and ethical questions about resource extraction is not to argue against resource extraction in all its forms, nor to question that the good governance of resource extraction can make important contributions to human development—it clearly has done, and I grew up seeing many of those contributions. Rather, my purpose is to ask those of us in the natural resource governance field to live with the discomforts that we should live with. It is neither helpful nor honest to discuss resource governance or development governance without also centering the fact that these are fields that steer decisions about which and whose forms of living—human and biotic—will gain, and which and whose forms of living will suffer and, in some instances, be extinguished.

Recently, I was in a region experiencing vertiginous increases in mineral extraction, processing, capital investment and job creation. We spent time with Indigenous Peoples who not so long ago came out of isolation. Kind, funny, dignified and thoughtful, they are forced to navigate the sweeping transformations this growing resource extraction economy imposes on their lives with little to no support. The asymmetries of power this creates are appallingly large, and one came away with the sense that these communities are not being heard and have been largely left on their own to bear the costs. In a case like this, on what ethical grounds, and on the basis of what claims to legitimacy, are some able to decide that a form of life—in this case human—just doesn’t matter enough to stop it from slowly dying out. Is it sufficient to argue that the creation of tens of thousands of jobs justifies this? Is it adequate to argue that “we are the elected government”, or “we are a nationally strategic project” and therefore mandated to decide on these trade-offs? This is not clear, just as it is not obvious that citizens really intend their vote to give the governments they elect the power to decide what forms of life should prosper and which should die. Indeed, the idea that we might be delegating such power evokes a whole range of historical cataclysms.

As Earth is pushed up against or past almost all its planetary boundaries, the resource governance discussion is now more than anything else a discussion about what is allowed to live, and what not, why, when, by whom, and on what grounds. On what basis is the power to make such decisions given to those who govern natural resources? Discussing this should place ethicists, humanists, faith leaders, Indigenous Peoples and artists (for instance) alongside technocrats, company managers, bureaucrats, policymakers and scholars in a shared project of placing these really hard questions at the center of natural resource governance.

Decisions about extraction will become even more focused on wealth and war, and even less concerned with the flourishing of all life in all its wonder and glory.

Some of these difficult conversations about ethics, legitimacy and authority are already happening, but they should become much more central to the field. Building on Lisa Sachs’ recent commentary, to deepen such conversations would be a conscious effort to approach resource governance not only from within wider approaches to development, but also within wider approaches to democracy that understand democratic process as existing in service of life—all life. After so many centuries of unequally distributed harms, and in a context in which small groups of plutocrats and autocrats seek to steer ever more of our decisionmaking on issues of huge consequence, this centering of life and ethics seems a critical path in the face of the real risk that decisions about extraction will become even more focused on wealth and war, and even less concerned with the flourishing of all life in all its wonder and glory.