The New Natural Resource Economy: Environment and Economy in Transitional Rural Communities

Abstract

Recent developments in resource management suggest an important opportunity to address the declining socioeconomic health of rural communities struggling to fill the gap left by the transformation of primary production in agriculture and natural resources. Commodity production creates direct links between producers and urban centers, bypassing rural communities and making them economically redundant. A range of activities have emerged in the last 20 years—watershed restoration, community forestry, sustainable agriculture, and ecosystem services, for example—that constitute a “new natural resource economy” (NNRE) that can help diversify rural economies while also enhancing environmental, social, and cultural assets. Constituent components of NNRE have been studied, but there has been no attempt to map the whole territory. In this article we report the findings from a scoping survey and three case studies, as a first cut at describing the NNRE economic sector and identifying barriers to its development.