Who Should Own Natural Resources?

Margaret Moore

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509529193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

The natural resources of the earth – from oil and water to minerals and land – are crucial to our basic economic and social existence. But who is entitled to control, use and benefit from them? Should anyone 'own' the natural bounty of our planet? In this book, distinguished political theorist Margaret Moore tackles these questions and examines the different positions in the debate. States claim the right to control the natural resources within their territory. Liberals argue for a system of private ownership rights, including over natural resources, while egalitarians dispute such claims and argue for equal rights to natural resources. Moore shows why these standard approaches to resource justice are wanting, and offers an original approach that examines the different ways in which people interact with resources in order to determine what good is at stake in any particular case. In the context of serious environmental crisis and looming resource conflicts, this innovative and timely book will be essential reading for all students and scholars interested in the environment, property, distributive justice, and future generations.

1
Introduction

This book advances a theory of justice in natural resources. There are more than seven billion people on Earth, a figure expected to rise to about nine billion by 2050, and every single one of us needs resources – water, sunshine, space to live in, food, clothing and shelter. Access to natural resources matters to everyone; we all have a stake in the issues discussed in this book.

Resources are also implicated in some of the most serious potential challenges to our international order. As a result both of changes in technology and of global warming, areas that were undeveloped are now coming into focus – both by states, eager to extend their jurisdiction, and by multinational corporations, looking for new opportunities. Consider, for example, the various claims that have been made for control over the resources in the Arctic, the ocean, the seabed, uninhabited islands and Antarctica. How, for example, ought we to assess the rival claims made by states in the South China Sea, which are disputed by China, Malaysia, Philippines and Taiwan? Or the dispute between Japan and South Korea over a chain of uninhabited islands and the adjacent seabed? Or the Arctic, which is the site of overlapping claims by Russia, Canada, the United States and Denmark? What kinds of claims make sense? We urgently need a conversation about who owns and who controls these natural resources and the terms in which we should interact with them, before we have developed the technology to harvest the resources contained therein. As it is, the profusion of claims and counter-claims are fuelled by the belief that the ocean bed and the Arctic and other uninhabited areas are rich in resources, and that gaining territory over these areas will enable the country to gain control over the resources.

Conflicts over resources do not just occur at the international level. They are also a feature in the domestic politics of almost every state. Consider the dispute over building an oil pipeline in British Columbia, which has been backed by Alberta, where much of the oil is produced, but has met stiff opposition from aboriginal groups and their supporters, who have objected to the pipeline going through aboriginal land. Or consider the conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists in many parts of Africa, which is primarily about access to arable land and water resources. This conflict has been exacerbated by recent development projects aimed at irrigating some farmland and controlling flooding, which has had the effect of jeopardizing access to vital land and water for pastoralist herders, and thereby upsetting previously arrived-at understandings of how the two groups can co-exist in the same geographical area. Or consider the destruction of the rainforest in places like Borneo, which has been fuelled by landowners planting palm oil trees for international markets, but which are detrimental to the interests of future generations of people, who will almost certainly experience the harmful effects of human-induced climate change, which rainforests help to mitigate.

At present, we lack a general theory to examine our relationship to resources, and we therefore find it difficult to address specific cases of resource conflict. As a result, we have very fractured intuitions about rival claims. This may not be apparent from the example above, where the claims of the greedy plantation owner are pitted against the overall health of the planet, but what about when we add the idea that many of the world’s poor rely on cheap palm oil as an important source of food? Or – to make the point more directly – how do we feel about the resource claims made in a place such as Brazil, between the poor, who argue that their poverty should be addressed through accessing the rich natural resources of the Amazon, and those of Amazonian indigenous people, who are living on huge swathes of the Amazonian jungle, and who resist development there. In many cases, we are sympathetic to both kinds of claims, and are unsure how to resolve such conflicts.¹

What we need, I argue in this book, is a political theory of resource justice, which examines the varied nature of human beings’ relationship to the natural world and thereby helps us to answer the question of what is at stake in any particular claim to a resource. Once we know what is at stake, we can formulate a normative analysis of resource justice, including the rights and duties that we have in relation to a particular resource (control of it, extraction rights and so on).

The question posed in the title of the book – who should own the world’s natural resources? – is intended to be understood both more broadly than perhaps first appears, and more narrowly. It is narrower than it might be because the question is a normative one: it does not ask who now owns resources, but who should do so, or perhaps even more accurately, who should control, use and benefit from them. It is also intended to be understood more broadly, to encompass not only issues of ownership per se, by which I mean the rules of property ownership that are typically part of the laws of societies, but also issues of jurisdiction over resources by governments, as well as what justice requires that we leave for future generations. In order to answer these questions, I argue that we have to clarify what normatively is at stake in any claim to entitlement over resources – what kinds of entitlements individuals or communities might have to a resource, given their relationship to it; and the claims made by people to resources that they have never seen and which are far from where they live, both spatially and temporally.

To the extent that we have considered justice and natural resources, it is mainly as a component or part of a larger theory of distributive justice theory. I argue, however, that this is an unsatisfactory and truncated way to think about our relationship to the natural world. This book rejects the distributive paradigm, and offers instead a relational theory that examines how we, individually and in the groups that matter to us, are related to resources. Some might think that the argument of this book echoes a complaint that libertarians have made against liberal theories of justice. Robert Nozick famously argued that theories of distributive justice treat goods as if they are manna from heaven, and fail to recognize that goods need to be produced, which gives rise to entitlements on the part of producers. However, this familiar argument suggests that natural resources are precisely the kind of thing that ought to be subject to distributive justice, because they are just there, not produced by anyone. This debate has, I think, occluded our view about the kind of relationship that we do have with respect to the natural world, and the resources in it, including land.

The relational theory of resource justice advanced in this book is both pluralist and contextual: pluralist because it offers more than one principle, and contextual because it does not offer a top-down theory which assesses claims in the abstract, but focuses instead on the claims that are made, and the relationship between the claimant and the land or resource in question, and proffers principles that provide guidance on how we are to assess them in the specific ways that they have emerged in cases of conflict. I adopt an approach similar to the one pioneered by Michael Walzer, who argued that different things can take on different meanings in different contexts and that it is important to know what the good is to the people in question. Walzer pointed out, for example, how ‘bread’ can have many different meanings – for some, it may refer to food or survival; for others, it could be religiously symbolic, such as ‘holy eucharist’ bread; or for still others, it may refer to a long-standing family business, or unique cultural symbol (such as bagels or German pretzels). Similarly, if we are to understand the value of land and of resources, we have to probe the specific ways in which people interact with resources and land, the meaning that these things have for them, and then consider how, when conflicts arise, they can be resolved or at least mitigated.

Definitions

The relational approach to resource justice begins with the very way in which we conceive of what is a natural resource. I regard natural resources as things that are derived from the environment and not made by humans, while being related in some way to human purposes and conceptions. This is a very open definition of natural resources as part of the ‘natural wealth’ of the world: land, water, air and sunshine are natural resources, as well as plants, animals and mineral ores. A hiking area is a resource; so too is a sacred mountain. Although natural resources have a physical character – as oil or coal or firewood or plant life – they are transformed into resources by being important for human purposes and this relational character explains how we individuate resources. This means that what counts as a resource is historically, culturally and individually variable. Different people will individuate resources differently: in the case of a tree, if what matters to one person is the bark; to someone else, the leaves; and someone else, the wood, then that counts as three different resources. If another person needs the whole tree, then that person considers the tree as a resource.² What this means of course is that something can be a resource for one person or one group, but not a resource for someone else.

This relational conception allows us to have a more capacious understanding of our relationship to the natural world than the usual one, where resources are conceived of as related to us purely instrumentally, as ‘resources’ for us to use. So in this book I emphasize the non-instrumental ways in which we are related to the natural world, where the language of ‘resource’ is perhaps itself too suggestive of the idea that they are only important as inputs to human welfare. I want to resist this thought, as I think that there are many different reasons why people care about the natural world and its resources, including land. They may care about it because it is historically significant in the life of the community with which the person identifies; or because it is sacred; or because the person grew up there, and her parents’ ashes are spread there.

Aims, Argument and Structure of the Book

In order to understand the motivation for writing this book, it is important to see the flaws in the current accounts of resources and theories of resource justice. In chapter 2, I lay out three prominent theories of resource...