Natural Resources, Energy Politics, and Environmental Consequences

Life on Earth is undergoing major changes due to the converging and rapidly accelerating climate, biodiversity, pollution, and other environmental crises and emergencies. Global environmental and ecological constraints, consequences, and politics are becoming mainstream and necessary components to include in analysis across scientific fields. Over-extraction of resources in destructive ways is leading key ecosystems into states of collapse, species and habitats are being lost at record rates, and tipping points are cascading to produce a chaotic transformation. In this setting, resource extraction, in its varied forms, needs to be urgently analyzed in terms of its impacts and politics to understand, explain, transform, regulate, and govern the way natural resource sectors and actors affect the web of life. To this end, this article opens up natural resource politics, and how their unfolding has been analyzed globally and sectorially. Most of the studies related to or discussing the topic of extraction focus on the negative impacts of these projects, their developmental impacts, or the characteristics of conflicts related to extraction. Fewer studies focus on explaining what are the politics that lead to negative impacts, development, or conflicts. The studies on the politics behind extractive investment outcomes discuss the causal paths from political actions to extraction in different contexts mostly tangentially. Yet, constructivist studies by social scientists on natural resources have shown how resources and spaces of extracting resources are also created in social and political processes, which are typically international and related to existing power relations. Resources do not just exist out there, but are imagined when a part of nature is framed as a natural resource, and some areas are turned into sacrifice zones for extraction. These are places being destroyed as they do not matter to their extractors. The span of these localities has expanded over nations and subcontinents, placing us all in the sacrifice zone now, as Naomi Klein elucidates in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. This bibliography covers first the textbooks, followed by an assessment of the key dynamics in which resource politics are embedded, such as conflicts and developmental interventions, and their key actors: civil society, corporations, states, and global actors. Last, the particularities for different targets and sectors of extraction are assessed, including trees and forests, minerals, hydrocarbons and energy, water, and food and feed. For databases and resources, journals, and methodology of studying resource politics, please see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Politics of Extraction: Theories and New Concepts for Critical Analysis” which focuses on the key theories and organizing concepts.