Regulating Resource Use

Introduction

Our objectives in this chapter are to resuscitate the concept of resource regulation and to explore how such a concept might contribute to a revived political geography of resources. We begin from the premise that resources are inherently political. By this, we mean that resources are an epistemologically specific outcome of competing claims over access to, control over, and definitions of nature. ‘Resources bespeak the operation of geographical networks of knowledge and control, through which a radically heterogeneous world of nature is ordered, fractured and delivered up to the economy. Resource extraction, therefore, occurs as a process of social negotiation of access to, and control over, an already politicized landscape of uneven development (Roberts and Emel, 1992) and, as such, the production of nature as resources inevitably entails an exercise of power.

As we explore in greater detail in the second section, our starting point is somewhat different from that of much geographical literature on resources, which circumscribes resource regulation as resource management, enacted primarily by an administrative state. Although the political dimensions of resource production and consumption have long been discussed within the geographical literature, many studies imply that natural resources ‘become political’ only at particular moments: specifically, at times of crisis, or conflict over resource allocation and control. From the perspective of these conventional approaches, the extensive systems of resource provisioning that underpin contemporary economic life are assumed to be quiescently apolitical for much of the time, so that resources only enter the realm of the political at moments of crisis. We argue in this chapter that this treatment of the political dimension of resources is overly restrictive, and that effacing the politics of resource definition effectively naturalizes and thereby (selectively) depoliticizes resources.

If we begin from the claim that resources are always already political, the apparent quiescence of resources demands our attention; the periodic failure of resources to erupt as the object of overt political struggle is something that demands explanation. In the third section, we begin to rework the concept of regulation to describe the processes by which the inherent tensions over resource definition, resource access and resource use are managed and contained. While regulation often has a constrained meaning — as sets of rules, enforced by the state — we deploy the term more broadly to encompass the ways in which institutions (in the sociological sense of rules, norms, customs) are enacted. Moreover, we argue that such an approach to regulation is increasingly justified by three interrelated transformations in resource sectors around the world in the past two decades: a transformation in scientific and lay knowledges of nature (from ‘resources’ to ‘environment’ as the targets of science, resource management and politics); a political economic transition (from states to markets); and an institutional transition (from administrative to market-based regulatory instruments).

In the fourth section, we argue that our conceptualization of regulation shares much in common with concepts of environmental governance and eco-governmentality (although we explain how these terms are not of a piece) in their focus on the relationship between multi-scalar ‘communities of rule and resources (Watts, 2004). We identify what these terms have to offer an account of regulation and, drawing both from these perspectives and from work on the production of nature, we develop a reading of regulation as [Page 220]the processes by which resources are performed (against alternative claims) and through which the metabolism of dynamic resource landscapes (which can resist their enrolling as resources) is negotiated. The fifth section illustrates this approach in a brief case study. In the concluding section of the chapter we reflect on this more expansive approach to regulation. We sketch the outlines of this approach as the basis for a revived resource geography, discuss its implications for what ‘doing resource geography entails and, returning to our opening theme, contrast this reading of resource regulation with contemporary work on ‘resource politics.

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