Resource Tenure

Legal tenure arrangements for natural resources such as minerals, fisheries, forest products, petroleum, among others, are fundamental to economic relationships in any human society and the cultural landscapes they create. At any geographical scale, claims to resources and systems to manage and use them must address the economic, environmental, cultural, and political dimensions of resources and the places in which they occur.

Geographically uneven distribution of natural resources is a key spatial characteristic of the environment. Social, political, and cultural responses to this spatial differentiation are fundamental to the proposition that geography continues to matter in the contemporary world, where it is often suggested that globalization foreshadows the “end of history” and the “end of geography.”

Resource geographies demonstrate that access to, control of, and identification with natural resources remain fundamental—even defining—elements in human social formations. Indeed, some political scientists suggest that social claims to and conflict over resources are central in all human politics. We can easily define politics and resources as interdependent, with various human activities at different scales involved in obtaining, using, and distributing the resources required to produce and reproduce biological, social, and economic life constituting the basis of all human politics.

In all contemporary states and environments, the economic, cultural, and legal constitution of property rights in resources and the institutionalization of these rights in systems of legal tenure are an important facet of governance and political economy. Most societies recognize a collective claim to territory and a right, even an obligation, of the members of the collective to protect their shared interests through the exercise of exclusive rights (including a right to exclude others from their territory and the enjoyment of its resources). The boundedness of different societies varies, with modern states typically seeking strict border controls and rigid control of (some) aliens. In smaller-scale societies, the porosity of the edges of society and territory often reflects diverse environmental, social, and geographical circumstances. For example, in arid areas of Central Australia, there are competing conceptualizations of groups and resources, depending on whether environmental and economic circumstances are considered a “feast” (in which case, social strategies of inclusion and the extension of obligation are emphasized to increase the range across which people are able to secure sustenance) or a “famine” (in which case the generosity of inclusion is limited as far as possible to the closest family and kin). In modern nation-states, where the metaphor of a “level playing field” seems to propose that global trade can occur in defiance of geographical differentiation and ecological (and cultural) diversity, the edges of society and territory are often porous only to capital and privilege, with human bodies disciplined through strategies of control and exclusion.

States have created tenure systems built on claims of universality. In settler societies, preexisting indigenous systems of resource governance and the political geographies they support were largely ignored and erased—assumed to be “inferior” to European imperial systems underpinned by Christian ideologies of divine providence and the economic imperatives of accumulation. Colonial and postcolonial states established a claim of ownership over resources, sometimes allowing surface and subsurface property rights to adhere to land tenure rights, as in the United States, and elsewhere reserving resource rights to the state and allocating them separately through systems of distinctive tenures for specified resources, as in most former British colonies.

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