Natural resources and poverty

– poor people’s access to natural resources in the context of inequality

The rural poor depend directly upon natural resources for a large part of the livelihood. This, combined with limited and often insecure access to natural resources, constitutes a conditioning element of their poverty.

Around the world, the rural poor are facing increasingly insecure access to land, water and forest. We examine rural poor people’s access to natural resources from two interrelated perspectives:

Agency: The means and strategies and relations through which rural poor people seek to establish and secure access to natural resources; and
Inequality: How and to which extent different patterns of social, economic, political and cultural inequality shape poor people’s agency to secure access to natural resources as well as the very outcome of their agency.

We bring together different research activities ranging from comparative programmes to individual research projects focusing upon particular issues, such as land tenure, forest and landscape management, and water governance. Each of these individual research activities contributes to the understanding of the ways, in which the rural poor seek to establish and secure access to natural resources, and of how different patterns of inequality shape rural poor people’s agency and its outcome.

Currently, our central research themes are:

(Detailed description of the research unit, pdf)

Helle Munk Ravnborg, Head of the Research Unit

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