Resource Holders Research Articles

Environmental Violence, Water Rights, and (Un) Due Process in Northwestern Mexico

Water-related struggles worldwide may not involve armed conflict or direct bodily harm, but they are still violent in nature. Over the past century the Yaqui Tribe has continually contested water development plans and challenged distribution schemes, seeking to regain control over its livelihoods and the production of space in its ancestral homeland. In the Mexican state of Sonora we are currently witnessing a new chapter of the violent saga around water access in the Yaqui River valley. In fighting the proposed construction of the Independencia Aqueduct, intended to transfer water from the Yaqui River to the capital city of Hermosillo, the tribe’s struggles for recognition as a rightful resource holder have intensified. Paradoxically, dispossession is justified through an international human rights discourse and the relentless interrogation of indigenous authenticity aimed at delegitimizing Yaqui traditional resource claims.Las luchas relacionadas con el agua en todo el mundo no necesariamente conllevan conflicto armado o daño físico directo, pero todavía son violentas por naturaleza. Durante el ultimo siglo la tribu yaqui han impugnado continuamente los planes de desarrollo del agua y cuestionado los programas de distribución, con el propósito de recobrar el control sobre sus medios de subsistencia y la producción del espacio en su tierra ancestral. En el estado mexicano de Sonora estamos siendo testigos de un nuevo capítulo en la saga violenta en torno al acceso al agua en el Valle del Río Yaqui. Con la batalla contra el proyecto de construcción del Acueducto Independencia— diseñado para transportar agua del Río Yaqui a la ciudad capital de Hermosillo—las luchas de la tribu por el reconocimiento como dueños legítimos del recurso se han intensificado. Paradójicamente, el despojo se justifica por medio de un discurso de derechos humanos internacionales y el cuestionamiento implacable de la autenticidad indígena con el propósito de deslegitimar los reclamos yaquis sobre los recursos.

Natural Resource Wealth Optimization: A Review of Fiscal Regimes and Equitable Agreements for Petroleum and Mineral Extraction Projects

This review highlights the challenges of fiscal system optimization considering both the host government and extraction company perspectives. Countries around the world face an arduous task in determining the optimal fiscal system to maximize the capture of economic rents of natural resource extraction activities. The extraction industry is equally challenged to meet global commodity demand because the capital investments required for developing new hydrocarbon fields and ore mines are on the rise, while tax takes on extraction activities tend to rise too in many frontier jurisdictions. Normal profit must remain for the extraction companies, and returns must be large enough to replace for resource depletion. Companies use the benefits of resources produced in one country to finance capital investments for future field development in another country. One viewpoint is that profits are expatriated to the detriment of the host country and to the benefit of another country or the world supply chain as a whole. Another viewpoint is that all resource holders benefit because a foreign entity always starts in a new resource holding nation by investing in the development of an oil field or solid mineral mine using the profits from previous projects in other countries. A key question is What is a fair taxation regime for natural resource extraction in a particular geological setting and a given geographical location, taking into account subsurface uncertainty about the quality and volume of the resource, infrastructure needs and proximity to the world’s major markets and trade centers? Tax distortion could go both ways: either incentivize, attract and stimulate or des-incentivize, repel and deter resource development. Additional factors to consider are external uncertainties such as political and fiscal stability, sovereign risk and even local weather conditions (mostly in offshore and Arctic petroleum operations). Governments must tax the upstream rents of petroleum and mineral resources, but not to the level that suppresses extraction activities. All stakeholders want at least an equitable share of the profits. Defining what is equitable is a matter of intensive negotiations, renegotiation of prior agreements and sometimes litigation and international arbitration. Several case studies, covering both petroleum and solid mineral extraction projects, are included to highlight the key points involved in fiscal policies designed to optimize the utility of geological resource endowments. For example, the offshore tax regime employed in the US pivots the trade-offs between fiscal incentives and long-term resource supply to ensure energy security. This review concludes with a call for further research.

Entrepreneurial Communication Behavior & Resource Acquisition:Creation of Identity & Community

Due to the liability of newness that new firms suffer from, resource acquisition is an integral part of the new venture development process. While existing studies, recognizing the challenges that exist for new firms, such as the information asymmetry between them and their resource holders, suggest utilizing social ties and conducting impression management. However, they stop short at specifying the content that should be communicated through those channels in order to secure sufficient capital. The present study, through an in-depth content analysis of social media communication of eight new ventures attempting to raise capital through crowdfunding, identifies and classifies both the content that comprises entrepreneurial communication behavior and the iterative process by which it manifests, based on feedback from their desired stakeholders.

Entrepreneurs’ network evolution – the relevance of cognitive social capital

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate entrepreneurs’ network evolution in the start-up phase.Design/methodology/approach– Based on the case studies of six fashion start-up firms, this study uses a three-dimensional perspective on social capital (structural, relational, cognitive) to investigate entrepreneurs’ network evolution (i.e. initiation of new relationships) in the start-up phase so as to acquire resources and support for firms’ goals. The study focuses particularly on the understudied cognitive dimension of social capital. The fashion industry provides a relevant research setting because it is characterised by changes in demand, which generate opportunities for entrepreneurship.Findings– The findings show that the display of cognitive attributes is important for the creation of structural social capital (the establishment of new relationships). The findings also indicate that relationships initiated based on the cognitive dimension have a high probability of developing into embedded relationships, thereby becoming high in the relational dimension and providing access to private information containing referrals to other actors. Thus, these relationships also promote the continued development of the structural dimension.Originality/value– The findings imply that the entrepreneurs’ sets of cognitive attributes constitute an important asset in the creation of social capital. They also point to the importance of signalling these values to potential resource holders. Relationships initiated through the display of cognitive attributes can provide resources without requiring immediate economic remuneration.

Entrepreneurial narratives for resource acquisition in the Italian creative industries. A qualitative study

Objectives . This paper explores how narratives help creative Italian entrepreneurs attract resources. Methodology . Through the integration of literature on entrepreneurial narratives and resource acquisition with a case study (Project Officina Creativa), we have developed five arguments about the use of storytelling, impression management and social networking by an Italian creative entrepreneur. Findings . Officina Creativa conveys narrative strategies through oral stories told by entrepreneurs (through direct relationships) and a few basic written texts (web site and presentations). Social networking strategies and storytelling are the most used narratives. Storytelling potentialities are not fully exploited, especially concerning future scenarios and developments. Impression management is also fairly neglected by Officina Creativa and it is based on the partial communication of technical competences. As a result, informative signals addressed to resource holders are quite limited. Research limits . The paper adopts a qualitative research approach and it is the first step of a large-sample research project which will combine qualitative and quantitative data. Practical implications . The study develops propositions about which narratives strategies can be successful for an entrepreneur in the creative fashion business. In the meantime, the paper underlines which narrative strategies are under-exploited and can be effectively applied to Italian entrepreneurial experiences. Originality of the study . The study is the first attempt to understand how entrepreneurial narrative strategies are successfully implemented in the creative Italian industries.

To Certify or To Broker: How Science Parks Help Entrepreneurs Access Policy Resources

Intermediaries can help entrepreneurs access resources by verifying existing capabilities through certification or facilitating services that build new capabilities through brokering. Since no study directly compares certification to brokering, which entrepreneurs benefit more from either mechanism remains unclear. We study science parks to distinguish between these two mechanisms through a quasi-field experimental design, along with an instrumental variables approach, in Beijing’s Haidian district. Our key insight is that entrepreneurial affiliations influence if and how intermediaries (science parks) help entrepreneurs gain resources. Specifically, we find that entrepreneurs with global affiliations (returnees) need science parks to certify their quality to resource holders. By contrast, entrepreneurs with local affiliations (local elite education) primarily need science parks to broker services that improve their capabilities to enhance their quality to resource holders. Finally, entrepreneurs with existing ties to resource holders have less need for science parks. That is, entrepreneurs without government ties are more likely to be in science parks as those with such ties can gain resources without joining science parks. Our results shed light upon the literatures on networks, emerging economies, and entrepreneurship and have implications for policy promoting entrepreneurship in emerging economies.

Variety is the spice of life: Audience preference for unconventional category combinations

We formulate and test a theory about how audience motivation and engagement affect the fortunes of unconventional candidates. We propose that in markets where resource holders are motivated to diversify their transactions, unconventional candidates will be advantaged. Furthermore, we suggest that more engaged members of the audience are better at diversifying and therefore more likely to prefer these unconventional candidates. We find support for our contentions with data from an online peer-to-peer lending market, Prosper.com. Borrowers who affiliate with category labels less often seen paired receive more funding. Lenders who are more engaged are more likely to loan money to those same borrowers.

The Social Life of Forest Carbon: Property and Politics in the Production of a New Commodity

Interventions to conserve carbon stored in forests are central to the emerging global climate change regime. Widely referred to as REDD+, these interventions engage local resource holders in contracts to restrict their use of land and forests in exchange for conditional benefits, effectively creating a market for forest carbon—a new and intangible commodity. Delving into the social and material implications of this, three case studies (Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Cambodia) examine property relations in the early stages of forest carbon production in different tenure contexts. The case studies reveal that: (a) the risk of local exclusion from forest and lands under REDD+ is real, but is mediated by dynamic negotiations over knowledge and property; (b) the relationship between forest carbon and underlying property relations around land and forests is recursive and mutually constitutive; and (c) due to ongoing and entrenched property contests in REDD+ locations, there remains an unstable foundation for forest carbon markets.

A Organização do Processo Orçamentário nas Assembleias Legislativas Brasileiras

Brazilian governors are usually deemed institutionally strong and holders of significant political resources that help form and maintain legislative coalitions in the state assemblies. It is not yet clear, however, the extent to which governors need to bargain and negotiate in the assemblies. Legislative organization is clearly one of the factors that help explain how costly these transactions are. This essay analyzes how the budget process in Brazilian State Assemblies is organized. The main findings are that most assemblies are as centralized as at the federal level and that state deputies are, at least legally, in a better position to amend the budget than their counterparts at the federal level. This has clear implications for the political economy of Brazilian states and coalition management at the subnational levelKEYWORDS: Budget process, Brazilian State Assemblies, governors, Legislative organization, coalition management.

Male Iberian rock lizards may reduce the costs of fighting by scent matching of the resource holders

Animals should adopt strategies to minimize the costs of intraspecific aggressive interactions. For example, individuals should be able to identify resource holders in advance and avoid fighting with them because residents are generally more likely than intruders escalate aggression. It has been suggested that scent marks function mainly to allow competitor assessment by conveying the costs of entering a scent-marked area. Individuals may identify territory owners by comparing the scent of substrate marks with the scent of any conspecific they encounter nearby, assessing whether these two scents match or not, a mechanism known as scent matching. Here, we examined the response of male Iberolacerta cyreni lizards to areas scent-marked by other males and the potential role of scent matching in agonistic interactions. We designed a laboratory experiment where we allowed a male to explore the scent-marked substrate of another male, and then we immediately staged agonistic encounters in a nearby clean neutral area with either the male that had produced the scent marks (matching treatment) or with a different non-matching individual male. The higher chemosensory exploratory rates of substrate scent marks in comparison to clean substrates suggested that males detected and spent more time exploring scent marks to obtain information on the donor male. Moreover, this information was later used to decide the fighting strategy. Intruding males delayed time until the first agonistic interaction, reduced the intensity of fights and the number of aggressive interactions, and won less interactions with males which scent matched that of scent marks (because they would be considered as the territory owners) than with other non-matching individuals. Our results show that male I. cyreni lizards use scent matching as a mechanism to assess the ownership status of other males, which could contribute to modulate intrasexual aggression, reducing costs of agonistic interactions.

The Legal Structure of the Firm

The notions of firm and corporation are very often confused in the literature on the theory of the firm. In this paper, the two notions are sharply distinguished: the corporation is a legal entity entitled to operate in the legal system and in particular to own assets, to enter into contracts and to incur liabilities. It is used to legally structure firms for numerous reasons, including the need to locate property rights key for the operation of the firm in the ownership of separate, fictitious, legal persons. This avoids ex post-contracting bargaining by parties which otherwise would hold residual control rights over key assets used in the firms operations. The assets partitioning effect of corporate legal personality has also several economizing properties reviewed in the article. The firm is the economic activity developed as a consequence of the cluster of contracts connecting the corporation owning these assets to various holders of resources required in the firms operations. Numerous consequences deriving from this sharp distinction between corporation and firm are explained in this article, including the need to extend the circle of the beneficiaries of the firm managements fiduciary duties.

Unconventional gas: local supply, global implications

The sharp growth in unconventional gas production in North America has turned the gas market on its head. Unconventional gas (coal bed methane, tight gas and shale gas) is present in large volumes throughout the world—it offers the potential to continue to reshape global gas dynamics. Many expect the North America experience of sharp unconventional gas growth to be repeated elsewhere and are forecasting the perpetuation of a global gas surplus. Is this likely? We consider the impact of its development, identify some of the issues that will constrain its growth and address some of the implications for upstream suppliers, resource holders, buyers and policy makers. No post-Conference paper or slides are available for this presentation.

Octopamine and occupancy: an aminergic mechanism for intruder–resident aggression in crickets

Aggression is a behavioural strategy for securing resources (food, mates and territory) and its expression is strongly influenced by their presence and value. While it is known that resource holders are generally highly aggressive towards intruding consexuals and usually defeat them, the underlying neuronal mechanisms are not known. In a novel intruder-resident paradigm for field crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus), we show that otherwise submissive losers of a preceding aggressive encounter readily fight and often defeat aggressive winners after occupying an artificial shelter. This aggression enhancing effect first became evident after 2 min residency, and was maximal after 15 min, but absent 15 min after shelter removal. The residency effect was abolished following non-selective depletion of biogenic amines from the central nervous system using reserpine, or semi-selective depletion of octopamine and dopamine using α-methyl-tyrosine, but not following serotonin depletion using α-methyl-tryptophan. The residency effect was also abolished by the treatment with phentolamine, an α-adrenergic receptor antagonist, or epinastine, a highly selective octopamine receptor blocker, but not by propranolol, a ß-adrenergic receptor antagonist, or by yohimbine, an insect tyramine receptor blocker. We conclude that crickets evaluate residency as a rewarding experience that promotes aggressive motivation via a mechanism involving octopamine, the invertebrate analogue of noradrenaline.

Comments: Betting on Gas

Editor's column ExxonMobil’s purchase of XTO Energy last month—one of the largest merger and acquisition deals this decade—is another sign that future prospects for gas appear brighter than ever. The supermajor’s buyout of a leading developer of unconventional gas resources in North America gives it a major foothold in what has become the hot E&P play of the moment. In a panel session at last month’s International Petroleum Technology Conference (IPTC) in Doha, Thomas Walters, president of ExxonMobil Gas and Power Marketing, laid out his company’s view of the future of gas, a week before the XTO deal was announced. Gas demand will see strong growth over the next 20 years and resource holders must find new ways of developing supplies to meet this demand, he said. Presenting information from ExxonMobil’s 2009 Energy Outlook, Walters said that fossil fuels would continue to be the main energy source for decades and that gas demand would grow faster than demand for other hydrocarbons. Global demand for natural gas will challenge the industry to deliver, from developing unconventionals such as shale to massive liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) projects, such as those that have been built in Qatar, panelists said during the IPTC session. Gas, in particular, will play an important role in the future energy mix because of its abundance, smaller environmental impact, and its desirability as a fuel for power generation. Since its founding in the mid-1980s, XTO has grown by acquiring mature assets and expanding reserves through technology know-how. It owns large interests in major US shale, tight gas, and coalbed methane plays, and has reserves estimated at 45 Tcf of gas equivalent. ExxonMobil said it plans to create an upstream organization to manage global unconventional resources. Other companies are betting on a bright future for unconventionals as well. BP, Statoil, and Eni all have bought significant shale gas assets in the US in the past year. And Devon Energy announced in November that it was selling all of its Gulf of Mexico and non-North American E&P assets to focus on US and Canadian onshore. Devon holds key stakes in several of the largest US shale plays. Although projects in North America have drawn the most attention, other regions have begun estimating the huge potential of unconventional resources. Poland has attracted the interest of Marathon and ConocoPhillips for potential shale development. Saudi Arabia is also eyeing tight gas and shale projects, Abdulla Al-Naim, vice president of Exploration with Saudi Aramco, said during IPTC. He predicted that the exploration staff of the future would be focused on unconventionals. The rise of gas as a future fuel source continues to boost the prospects of a global gas producers’ association similar to OPEC. The 11 member countries of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum met in Doha during the week of IPTC to discuss strategy. Although gas has had limited scope as a global commodity, the growth of LNG has contributed to gas becoming a more fungible and less regional commodity.

Biodiversity Conservation Access and Benefit-Sharing Contracts and Patents

Access and benefit-sharing was a key objective of the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Implementing this objective in Australia has seen the adoption of a contract model where the terms and condition and price of access are negotiated between the bioprospector and the resource holder. Patents are a part of the price. This article assesses the place of patents in theory and in practice through the examples of the Craig Venter Institute contract and the Griffith and AstraZeneca Partnership agreement(s) in Australia. The article concludes that (1) there is little evidence that benefits flow to conservers and curators of in situ biodiversity (such as protected areas), and (2) there is an evolving policy dissonance between patents as a means of promoting biodiversity conservation and patenting as an imperative without reference to any conservation purposes.

Reducing query overhead through route learning in unstructured peer-to-peer network

In unstructured peer-to-peer networks, such as Gnutella, peers propagate query messages towards the resource holders by flooding them through the network. This is, however, a costly operation since it consumes node and link resources excessively and often unnecessarily. There is no reason, for example, for a peer to receive a query message if the peer has no matching resource or is not on the path to a peer holding a matching resource. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem, which we call Route Learning, aiming to reduce query traffic in unstructured peer-to-peer networks. In Route Learning, peers try to identify the most likely neighbors through which replies can be obtained to submitted queries. In this way, a query is forwarded only to a subset of the neighbors of a peer, or it is dropped if no neighbor, likely to reply, is found. The scheme also has mechanisms to cope with variations in user submitted queries, like changes in the keywords. The scheme can also evaluate the route for a query for which it is not trained. We show through simulation results that when compared to a pure flooding based querying approach, our scheme reduces bandwidth overhead significantly without sacrificing user satisfaction.

Developing a trust evaluation method between co-workers in virtual project team for enabling resource sharing and collaboration

An increasing number of companies, especially those with knowledge-intensive R&D programs, have turned to virtual project teams (VPTs) in recent years to generate the greatest competitive advantage from limited labor and resources. Members of a VPT are not limited to an enterprise and usually have various core capabilities. Successful implementation of a VPT depends on collaboration among team members during a project; such collaboration relies on efficient management of distributed resources, safe and timely resource sharing, and reliable trust evaluation mechanisms that facilitate the greatest degree of information sharing and minimize information transfer delays. This study first identifies VPT characteristics and the particular requirements of effective resource management and sharing. A VPT model is then presented. By applying this model, this study presents a trust evaluation method that assists VPT members in determining whether resource holders have made appropriate decisions to share resources with other VPT members. The proposed evaluation method comprises a trust evaluation between two VPT workers and a reliability evaluation of worker. Each resource can have a threshold that is a benchmark for resource sharing. The trust evaluation method for the proposed VPT model enables secure resource sharing across team and enterprise boundaries, facilitates collaboration, and enhances information transparency among team members.

Techbits: Digital Energy Conference Tackles Range of Issues

Oilfield applications of digital technology, including best practices, cutting-edge applications, and future technologies, were the themes of "Digital Energy 2006: Bytes and Barrels," a 2-day conference held in Houston in February. SPE and the SPE Gulf Coast Section worked together on the event, the sixth annual conference on applications of digital technology in the oil and gas industry. The event featured the perspectives of operators, service companies, and firms directly involved in information technology (IT) on such issues as data management, how demographics will influence IT, production-operations monitoring, collaboration, systems integration, and drilling and operations. In the conference keynote address, Steven B. Hinchman, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Production for Marathon Oil Corp., addressed "New Work Processes Required for Success." Supply and demand factors will influence how companies operate in the future, he said. "The global energy outlook really defines this changing work model," Hinchman said. Those factors include rising energy demand, especially in places such as China; growing transportation demand; the rise of natural gas as a global commodity; and a heavier and more sour barrel of oil that is becoming more difficult to produce. "The most critical question international oil and gas companies face today is access to resources," Hinchman said. By 2020, the industry will need to provide 125 million BOE in additional production capacity because of the rise in global demand and the decline rate of current producing fields, he said. Changing Relationship Another issue affecting how companies operate is the changing relationship between private international oil companies (IOCs) and national oil companies (NOCs), Hinchman said. NOCs control most of the world's reserves and are becoming increasingly active in the international arena. And today, NOCs have access to the industry's conventional technology, have more financial resources than they did in the past, and are becoming more active outside their borders. "IOCs will have to be able to differentiate themselves," he added. Oil and gas is becoming increasingly harder to produce because of rising E&P complexity and access to resources. Much of the industry's focus in the future will be on producing unconventional oil and gas, new gas technologies such as liquefied natural gas and gas to liquids, Arctic seas drilling, and ultradeepwater drilling. "All this means is that technology will play an even more important role in the next 20 years than it has in the past 20," he said. The industry's well-noted demographic challenges also will add pressure to how companies operate. Hinchman sees the need for a "new generation work model" that would involve:Integration of resource holders, suppliers, and vendors.Increased productivity.Disciplined processes and work flow.Leveraging of technology.Globalized work teams.Accelerated learning and knowledge transfer.

The Achilles' heel of an enduring relationship: Appropriation of rents between a manufacturer and its foreign distributor

A blind spot in the resource based view (RBV) of the firm is the rent appropriation process. The RBV argues that rents accrue directly to holders of competitive resources. In reality, the potential rents in an international partnership are up for grabs as they arise on both sides of the border. Dysfunctional acts may strain even the longest and most successful relationships. With this predisposition the literature focuses on opportunistic behavior in partner switching. Our study considers a more complex mechanism where satisfaction in expropriating rent drives partner switching likelihood. The notion of a time-tested stable relationship is a misnomer; vulnerability grows over time, as one or both partners gain bargaining power in an enduring relationship. Establishing significant credible commitment, not the eradication of opportunism, builds satisfactory cross-border relationships. The higher the stakes and the longer the relationship, the stronger is the satisfaction between the committed partners.

Comments on: Suris-Reguiero, Varela-Lafuente and Iglesias-Malvido, “Effectiveness of the structural fisheries policy in the European Union”

At the 11th Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Argentina, despite being steadfast in achieving an outcome on fisheries subsidies disciplines, member countries were unable to reach consensus on the matter. While members of the WTO have been advocating for sustainable management of fisheries resources and advocating the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.6, some developing countries were concerned about its impact on low income and poorly resourced fishers, who are surviving because of the subsidies under the discipline. This study provides possible implications of the fisheries subsidies as a trade policy tool for market access and its effectiveness in achieving the overall sustainable development goals. To examine the effectiveness of subsidies in fisheries negotiations, the study focuses on the global supply and demand side of the fisheries resources from the perspective of the fish resource holders and the fishing resource capacity. The analysis considers budgetary support in fisheries, the vessel capacity (tonnage), the fish development technologies and the total marine catch processing, to indicate the demand for extraction of the fish resources. The supply of the fish resources is determined by the regions with major fishing areas and the licenses issued for fishing. Using both the market demand and supply for fisheries resource extraction, the study examines the effectiveness of subsidies as a trade policy tool to attain the overall sustainable development goals. Based on the analysis, certain policy strategies follows, which are important for countries to consider before the elimination of fisheries subsidies at the WTO.