Fall 2016 Colloquium: Natural Resource Governance, Inequality and Human Rights

This seminar will address the human rights issues that arise in the context of natural resource extraction and governance, especially in relation to resources such as fossil fuels, minerals and timbers. It will examine how persistent inequalities between and within countries pose additional challenges for the realization of human rights in relation to natural resource extraction. Natural resource extraction is often seen as a means to raise needed revenue for development and realization of social and economic rights within countries, but it is also often located on the land of indigenous or otherwise socially marginalized groups, who may oppose it. Moreover, extractive projects often seem to benefit the corporations or governments that control them more than the local population that bear their costs. Does a human rights perspective help us adjudicate these tensions? How do existing inequalities influence how the benefits, risks and ecisionmaking authority in relation to natural resource governance are distributed? Would a human rights lens help redress some of these inequalities? What alternative governance regimes can we envision that might most effectively address the inequalities that arise in the context of natural resource extraction? What should we do about the downstream effects of fossil fuel extraction, such as the carbon it releases into the atmosphere?

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November 14: Violence against Women and Resource Extraction
In preparation for the guest lecture by Professor Penelope Simons, this class will examine various initiatives to impose human rights obligations on transnational corporations and hold them accountable for the impacts, including the gendered impacts, of their operations. These include various forms of self-governance and “corporate social responsibility”, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and as well as initiatives to try and hold transnational corporations accountable in the countries where they are registered.