Resources
In the contemporary era of climate change, resource depletion and population growth, ‘resources’ have taken on a powerful social and political significance. New resources are emerging, whilst anxieties over the ethics and practicalities of resource use are prompting publics around the world to engage with resources in increasingly self-conscious ways. International leaders gather to discuss ways of protecting dwindling resources; small-town Indonesians gather in coffee shops to ponder how their country can overcome ‘the resource curse’; young Africans enrol in Mandarin classes so they can co-operate with the Chinese companies that they hope will extract their nation’s oil and ore. In the Caucasus, energy supplies are manipulated as a means of political intervention, whilst householders across Europe curb their gas and electricity use in order to be ‘green’.
Important issues underlie these trends. To what extent are communities’ engagements with resources being shaped by new forms of description and intervention stemming from governments, activist groups, economists and natural scientists? What determines whether such interventions succeed or fail? And how might societies create and respond to new forms of cosmopolitanism and co-operation based on the concept of a ‘global commons’ in which all communities of the world are thought to hold a stake?
Social anthropology has a vital role to play in addressing these questions. The discipline already has a distinguished tradition of examining the profound social and cultural implications of resource management and extraction. Our research strand goes further. Remaining committed to detailed studies of specific locations, we are collaboratively building these into a comparative framework that speaks directly to issues on a global scale. Looking at global resources – be they oil, gas, genetics, water, or personnel – we will explore how local understandings intersect with national trajectories and issues of planetary concern, as well as teasing out how this larger level links to local understandings of bodies, environments and livelihoods under threat.
Our Research Priorities:
- To examine how the trafficking of new ‘resources’ vocabulary is coming to reconfigure various domains of social life – an example would be the language of ‘human resources’ replacing ‘personnel’ in many institutions. We will investigate what new understandings and patterns of behaviour the language of ‘resources’ brings with it – and conversely, how this new deployment of vocabulary is changing the nature of what ‘a resource’ is, and how it can be managed or deployed.
- To critically examine the relationship between resources and human nature. Social scientists often interpret humans’ engagement with resources using models developed in the ecological sciences. Humans are said to be strongly reactive to the quantity of a resource in their environment, becoming competitive when a resource is scarce, and stockpiling when it is abundant. We seek to examine when and why this behaviour emerges, what alternative systems of resource use might be cultivated, and how ‘human nature’ with respect to resources is changing as human skills, tissues, and genomics are increasingly reconfigured as ‘resources’ themselves.
- To document and theorise how people respond to a world facing resource depletion and climate change. How does uncertainty in the availability of resources change how people behave, and how they think about themselves and their place in the world? What new claims over the landscape and environment might emerge? Given the unpredictability, contingency and uncertainty surrounding resources and climate, can we detect fundamental changes in the character of their regulation?
- To discover how contemporary resource politics is transforming relationships with states and corporations. Is public awareness of the nation-state as a territorial entity that carries, or is dependent upon, important resources prompting new ways of imagining the nation? How is international investment in resource-rich countries changing citizens’ global imaginaries? And how are extractive capitalist corporations positioning themselves in the new moral politics surrounding resources?
- To develop anthropological approaches to the global commons, the cosmopolitan values that might underlie it and the scientific and political practices that could make it a reality. The current failure and potential future success of a global commons rests on how different constituencies can and will configure a notion of the social good of the world. It also depends on how this is juxtaposed with other ethical imperatives, ranging from national development and personal fulfilment to maintaining sovereignty or protecting ‘sacred’ landscapes. Through ethnographic research we will discover how such intersections are playing out, and what factors are influencing their trajectories.
- To discriminate between different resources. The social significance of resources varies, as does their material characteristics, malleability and capacity to be regulated. We are developing new analytical methods that link social and political issues to the attributes of the resources themselves. Doing so allows us to compare issues of global significance as they affect not only different geographic locations, but also different types of resource.
- To consider our own knowledge production, as well as that of allied disciplines, as a resource. As intellectual resources, concepts developed in one context can produce unexpected insights when applied in another context. We will thus investigate how, when and why certain forms of knowledge become a resource for policy, management, and governance. We will explore the transformations which this knowledge (including academic and theoretical knowledge) undergoes in engagements with these fields of practice, how knowledge takes the shape of technology or policy, and how it returns to the academy as ‘theory’.
