Memorandum: Resource Politics for a Fair Future

Illustrations by Ines Meier
Teaser Image Caption
Illustrations by Ines Meier

From the extraction of tar sands in North America to large-scale land purchases in Africa and from China’s investment in the Mekong region to mining and soya production in Latin America – the global resources bonanza is a fact. But all this use of natural resources doesn’t respect the ecological limits of our world and it doesn’t result in a fair distribution of the profits.

This Memorandum is the outcome of a two-year process. With the dialogue project “Resource Equity in a Finite World” the Heinrich Böll Foundation brought together young people from 29 countries who have examined resource issues in their respective regions in ten “future workshops” in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Delegates of each future workshop brought their experiences, ideas and visions to Berlin, where they spent two days with the international Heinrich Böll Foundation team, discussing and developing these ideas further. The process was supported by an advisory board consisting of eleven internationally renowned environmentalists and human rights experts.

In this Memorandum the notion of new politics is introduced to look at current conflicts around resource use as a complex set of interactions between nature, humans, interests, power relations and cultures. With the Memorandum the Heinrich Böll Foundation offers a perspective which combines democracy, ecology and human rights and lays out fundamental ways forward that can form the basis for fair and sustainable Resource Politics.

Publication Series on Ecology, Volume 38:
Resource Politics for a Fair Future
A Memorandum of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

Edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation
Berlin, June 2014, 52 pages, with illustrations by Ines Meier
ISBN 978-3-86928-127-8