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.

Helle Munk Ravnborg, head of the research unit

About the research unit

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