Resource Politics for a Fair Future

From the extraction of tar sands in North America to large-scale land purchases in Africa and from China’s investment in the Mekong region to mining and soya production in Latin America – the global resources bonanza is a fact. But all this use of natural resources doesn’t respect the ecological limits of our world and it doesn’t result in a fair distribution of the profits.

In this Memorandum the notion of new politics is introduced to look at current conflicts around resource use as a complex set of interactions between nature, humans, interests, power relations and cultures. With this text the Heinrich Böll Foundation offers a perspective which combines democracy, ecology and human rights and lays out fundamental ways forward that can form the basis for fair and sustainable Resource Politics.