Resource Governance in the Global South

With compound environmental stresses placing burdens around the world, it is crucial to consider resource governance in discussions on
sustainable futures. This is particularly important for the Global South where governments often lack capacities, and concerns about the
effects of stresses cut across sustainable development and security.

Thus, it is necessary to understand how resources (for instance, land, water, and minerals) are governed, how social, political, and economic
processes shape access and distribution, and how political outcomes within the liminal spaces between development and security (from
deepening vulnerabilities, inequities, and varying manifestations of violence, to sustainability and resilience) are produced as a result. To that
end, this unit focuses on developing an understanding of resource governance and resultant political outcomes in the Global South.

The research is guided by four principles:

1. Drawing on political ecology perspectives to understand burdens on resources, as contrasted from the extant approach of limiting
   explanations to biophysical and technical accounts of compound environmental stresses.
2. Developing micro- and meso-level explanations in light of lived realities of the Global South in partnership with local experts and
   communities, instead of primarily focusing on macro level associations between resource governance and political outcomes.
3. Developing causal explanations through study of socio-political processes as well as human behavior and actions, particularly bounded
   rational coping responses in the face of complex challenges.
4. Fostering discussion of methodological preferences (ontology and epistemology) to encourage interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
   research.

The unit aims to contribute to equitable and peaceful future societies by drawing on past and present patterns of resource governance in
light of respective contexts. As humanity struggles with interactive and complex challenges shaped by multiple and compound stresses (and
governance responses to them), interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are needed. Our hope is to provide a forum where such
knowledge can be co-created with the help of communities, scholars, and experts in the Global South and the Global North. Such
knowledge could contribute to policy and theory debates.

To analyze the dynamics of resource governance through a study of socio-political processes and human behavior and actions, we will
develop explanations of ground realities. Such an approach favors producing limited explanations or causal mechanisms that may provide
generalizable findings across contexts through local knowledge.

We will draw on multiple social science perspectives (political science, political ecology, criminology, urban theory, anthropology, behavioral
sciences). In addition, we will invite researchers and practitioners from other sciences related to resource governance for interdisciplinary
and transdisciplinary collaborations.

Some themes of the unit’s research in the Global South include the following:

1. Water Governance, Adaptation, and Climate Change in rural-urban contexts
2. Food Security and Climate Change in peri-urban and urban contexts
3. Political implications of colonial resource exploitation
4. Resource exploitation and social instability