Poverty and natural resources: Principles for environmental management and sustainable development

Abstract

When applied to the analysis of natural resource management, the theory of access has led to a number of interesting findings, in particular, an insistence on the role of power relations in the conditions that regulate access to resources. By adopting the capability approach for this study, we move beyond the theory of access in a bid to explain the unequal access to/use of natural resources. We focus on three key types of power: strategic, institutional and structural. We then apply our approach to the case of Côte d'Ivoire and demonstrate how changes in power since the 1960s have caused increasing or decreasing opportunities of access to/use of natural resources for certain populations. The mechanisms we describe help elucidate the issue of resource degradation.