The Audacity Deficit in Natural Resource Governance

HOW YOU CAN USE THIS RESOURCE: Discover the perspectives of over 400 stakeholders on the challenge with current approaches to natural resource governance (NRG.). The paper offers an approach to improve NRG and tackle the climate crisis in future, through bold and creative solutions.

OVERVIEW: In 2021, the Brookings Institution and Results for Development, led by Daniel Kaufmann and Mario Picon, conducted a global survey on natural resource governance (NRG) following a dialogue and a blog series on future priorities. The survey gathered views from nearly 400 participants, including people from various fields like business, law, and human rights. This report explores these diverse perspectives and summarizes the findings on how to effectively tackle natural resource governance.

The key messages of the report are:

• There is a disconnect between what the stakeholders state as priority actions and reforms, and how likely they perceive these actions and reforms will actually happen. It shows a preference for incremental approaches to change in the natural resource field. There are important variations across regions.
• Current approaches to addressing challenges in natural resource governance, climate change, and the energy transition are generally incremental in scope and impact and categorize issues as high- or low-priority, while emphasizing that there is limited bandwidth available for their execution.
• There needs to be a move away from an era of relative conformity and a commitment to audacity in the way we tackle NRG challenges, addressing the toughest manifestations of the resource curse and the climate crisis. This will require innovation in engagement by civil society and a revamp of international initiatives as well as new partnerships. This must be complemented by tackling state capture and other perverse incentives that fuel autocratic violence and slow the move away from fossil fuels.
• On this last point, audacity requires deep complementarity and coordination of reforms across areas, sectors, and alliances, while acknowledging the challenges and incentives that affect different countries. Taking such an approach would harness innovation in who, why, how, and what is involved in making reforms happen. It would provide necessary strategic guidance to countries over the course of the energy transition.

Publisher: Brookings Institute

Read the report here.