The resource property question in climate stewardship and sustainability transitions

Abstract

Natural resources are increasingly lauded as antidotes to the current social and ecological crises. In this context, a global land and natural resource rush for business, development and climate and environmental stewardship purposes has been at work since the mid-2000s. This paper discusses whether, how, and the extent to which the resource rush behind mainstream climate stewardship and sustainability transitions shapes the contemporary resource property question regarding who has the ability and power to harness what natural resources where, how, and for what purpose(s). It explores the drivers, protagonists and implications for research and political advocacy of critical shifts in the object, subject, form, enforcing authority, policy structure, and justification of resource property during neoliberal globalization since the 1970s. An alliance of trailblazing resource rush supporters and accommodators is behind these changes which, when taken altogether, hint at a broader restructuring trend of the resource property question in climate stewardship and sustainability transitions today. Despite its potential to democratize resource access, control and ownership, the restructuring trend so far primarily serves the purposes of big business and conservation non-profits to enhance their social license to operate by means of reducing local resource tenure risks at the grassroots level and reputational risks more generally. While there is a need for further research, the examined changes seem to be transforming the playing field of political advocacy around resource governance in climate stewardship and transitions to sustainability. But the examined restructuring trend is highly contested and contingent on an unstable middle-ground sort of political compromise, the future trajectory of which remains to be seen.