WORKSHOP: Governing Access to Essential Resources

This project is a workshop gathering together scholars with expertise in resource governance. It will focus on deployment of alternative property rights regimes, addressing how different practices allocate resources. As a result of a sharp rise in demand for agricultural commodities,essential resources are increasingly considered scarce and subjected to commercial pressures: worldwide, they are seen as valuable economic assets. This is leading to the commodification of these resources and, in turn, the land on which they are found, all for managing scarce resources that are essential to livelihood. Such essential resources include water, food, and forests (the latter because of their role as carbon sinks). Access to these goods will depend for the foreseeable future directly or indirectly on control over the land that harbors them. How to manage land to ensure broad access to scarce, essential resources is therefore a critical issue, yet one for which we lack good answers. In order to develop effective governance regimes for scarce, essential resources, it is vital to develop dynamic models that (1) focus on access and sustainability, not exclusion and growth; and (2) account for a wide and varying range of stakeholder interests. The goal of this project is to develop a framework of such regimes.

Contributions to the workshop will be framed as a dialogue between theoreticians and practitioners and allow for full-length papers as well as comments. The output of the workshop will be published in an edited book.