WORKING

TOGETHER
FOR A FAIR
SHARE
FOR ALL

Resource scarcity,
fair shares and development
Brent Stirton / Getty Images / WWF

A WWF/Oxfam discussion paper Alex Evans

Resource scarcity, fair shares and development
A WWF/Oxfam discussion paper - Alex Evans

Purpose
This discussion paper is intended to contribute to the evolving debate on the links between
resource scarcity and international development, in particular by focusing on the issues of
equity and fair shares for poor people and poor countries that arise in the context of resource
limits and environmental boundaries. It provides a short overview of some of the main issues,
together with ten tentative policy recommendations and areas for future work. The views in this
paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent any opinion or policy of either
WWF or Oxfam. Comments on the paper can be sent to Dominic White, [email protected] and
Sarah Best, [email protected].

Acknowledgements
The author would like to express his thanks to the following people for conversations which
helped shape this paper and/or comments on earlier drafts: Rob Bailey, Owen Barder, Phil
Bloomer, Matthew Chadwick, Sarah Cooke, Brendan Cox, Ruth Fuller, Jonathan Glennie,
Duncan Green, Paul Hilder, Matthew Lockwood, Kirsty McNeill, Claire Melamed, Henry
Northover, Jules Peck, Richard Perkins, Kate Raworth, Hannah Ryder, David Steven, Andy
Sumner, Casper Ter Kuile, Camilla Toulmin, Jos Wheatley, Luke Wreford and Dan Yeo; and in
particular Dominic White and Megan Chamberlain at WWF, and Sarah Best at Oxfam. All errors
of course remain the responsibility of the author alone.

About the author

Alex Evans is based at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, where
he runs CICs work on resource scarcity and climate change. He is also co-editor, with David
Steven, of GlobalDashboard.org. He was formerly Special Adviser to the Secretary of State at the
UK Department for International Development.

Citation
Evans. A., (2011). Resource scarcity, fair shares and development. WWF-UK / Oxfam
Discussion paper.

1
Introduction and overview
Issues of resource scarcity are rising rapidly up the political agenda in both developed and
developing countries, and at multilateral institutions from the UN to the G20. At the same time,
recognition is also growing of the centrality of these issues to development, given the higher
vulnerability of poor people and their greater reliance on natural assets. For the most part,
political attention on resource scarcity issues has focused on the two areas of supply side
measures: increasing the availability of food, water, energy etc. through greater investment,
technological innovation etc, and reducing vulnerability to the shocks and stresses that resource
scarcity can drive, for example through emergency food stocks and crisis management systems.

However, given that demand for key resources may well outstrip supply, a third key theme
which has so far received less political attention is the need to confront the distributional
issues that arise in a world of environmental limits. As total global consumption levels start to
hit sustainable (or in some cases absolute) limits for resources like land, water, food, oil and
carbon space, the need to advocate for fair shares of these resources for poor people and poor
countries will become increasingly central to international development.

Mapping out this new development agenda will involve unpacking some highly political
questions. What definition of fairness is most appropriate just ensuring that poor peoples
basic needs are met, or a more egalitarian approach that tries to reduce inequality in access to
resources? Does it make sense to think about equity of access to a particular resource (carbon
permits, say), or is it more helpful to think about overall wealth or income distribution, and the
entitlement that this carries with it to resources of all kinds? Which aspects of the agenda should
campaigners focus on most?

This discussion paper aims to contribute to this evolving debate by providing a short overview of
some of the main issues involved, together with some tentative policy recommendations and
areas for further work. Part 1 begins by setting out some examples of access and equity issues
that arise in the context of scarce resources, both within countries and internationally. Part 2
then sets out a discussion of some of the underlying issues involved, including different ideas of
fairness and some of the potential dilemmas involved. Part 3 explores some of the concrete
policy implications of this agenda and sets out ten tentative policy recommendations and
suggestions for further work:

Policy recommendations

1. Invest in improving the data. Any agenda of fair shares in a world of limits will
depend on accurate data. But current surveillance systems on resource scarcity suffer from
major gaps, and are poorly integrated across both issues and levels of governance.

2. Recognise that scarcity isnt just relevant to specialists in environment,

climate and rural livelihoods. On the contrary, resource scarcity will become
increasingly central to governance, economics, social development and conflict advisers,
and should be incorporated into training and professional development across these areas.

2
3. Understand how scarcity shapes politics in poor countries. Rather than seeing
scarcity as a stand-alone issue, donors and NGOs need to understand how it fits in to the
larger political economy context and relates to urban / rural tensions, political parties,
spending decisions, civil society dynamics, the politics of ethnic groups and so on.

4. Focus on access to justice. Even where legal frameworks are in place to ensure a certain
level of resource access, poor people may find their rights abrogated for example through
forced displacement from land as scarcity increases. Focusing on access to justice will
therefore be critical for governance specialists.

5. Be clear that this isnt just an in-country agenda. It is at international level where
there is most to be done, given that the key drivers of resource scarcity are global so
donors should scale up work on areas like policy coherence for development, international
institutional reform and sustainable consumption in OECD countries.

6. Start developing policy options now, before the policy space for them opens
up. As impacts of scarcity and climate change increase in frequency and severity, political
space will open up often after shocks, for a limited time. This places a premium on having
ideas on the shelf, that can be deployed rapidly when opportunities open up.

7. Focus on basic needs to start with. Much support for development already depends on
the idea that all people have a right to the basic needs of life. The fact that resource scarcity
imperils these basic needs can create a bridgehead narrative that opens up space for talking
about more difficult aspects of fair shares.

8. ...but start building up the broader fair shares narrative too. Donors and NGOs
should do everything they can to deepen awareness that individual consumption choices
have global impacts, and that taking equity seriously is a prerequisite for sustainable
management of shared resources not just a left wing agenda.

9. Focus on poor people, not just poor countries. A focus on resource scarcity
necessarily implies looking at inequality within countries partly because poor people are
most vulnerable to resource scarcity and environmental shocks, but also because scarcity
will create new opportunities for elite rent-seeking, corruption and exploitation.

10. Dont jump straight to the limits to growth question. Debate is starting to open up
on whether limits apply just to certain resources, or to growth itself. Even if the latter is
true (which it could be), it will take time for this to become clear. While campaigners should
not try to duck the question of whether there are limits to growth, neither should they risk
polarising debate by taking too definitive or didactic a tone at the outset. Instead, they
should play a long game: suggest that there is a genuine debate to be had about limits to
growth, and that the jury is still out, but above all underline that it is already clear that
there are limits to the supply/availability of crucial resources - and that policy needs to face
up to this, and in particular the fair shares issues that are unavoidably involved.

3
Part 1: Into a world of scarcity
In recent years, issues of resource scarcity and environmental limits have risen up the global
agenda. Demand for resources of all kinds is rising sharply due to both a growing population
and rising affluence in emerging economies. But at the time, supply growth has sometimes
struggled to keep pace, and there are concerns that these tensions could intensify. For example:

Demand for food is projected to rise by 50% by 2030.i However, the world consumed more
food than it produced in 7 of the 8 years between 2000 and 2008, rates of productivity
growth driven by the Green Revolution are running out of steam, and the world is having
to make up for a long period of under-investment in agriculture.ii

The amount of arable land per capita halved from 1960 to 2007, from 0.39 to 0.21
hectaresiii, but demand for it is increasing from multiple sources including food, feed, fibre
(paper, timber etc.), biofuels, carbon sequestration, conservation and cities.

Demand for water is likely to rise by 25% by 2025, but is already beyond sustainable use
levels in many areas of the world, leading to depletion of both ground and surface water
resources.iv Climate change will further exacerbate the problem. By 2025 up to two thirds of
the worlds people are likely to live in water-stressed conditions.v

Demand for oil is projected to rise by 40% by 2030, but supply is already hampered by
significant under-investment in new production sources and the increasing difficulty of
reaching remaining reserves, leading the International Energy Agency to warn of the risk of
a major supply crunch.vi

Despite countries continuing unwillingness to define a safe global carbon budget in the
UNFCCC, the amount of carbon space for any stabilisation level continues to shrink rapidly
as emissions continue to grow, meaning that carbon budgets will have to fall even more
steeply in the future.vii

And scarcity concerns have also been mooted in many other contexts, including rare earths
and metals that are essential for many clean technologies, uranium (essential for nuclear
power generation), access to ecosystem services, biodiversity and so on.

As supply and demand balances have tightened, volatility has increased. As a result, so has the
political salience of resource security, climate change and (perhaps above all) commodity prices.
Food and commodities feature prominently on the 2011 G20 agenda, as they did at the 2008
G8. The 2011 World Economic Forum has launched a major new programme of work on
resource scarcity.viii While the 2009 Copenhagen summit achieved limited progress on climate
change, it marked a new level of engagement on the issue by heads of government.ix
Private sector engagement in resource scarcity and climate change has moved well beyond the
weak voluntarism of corporate social responsibility.

4
 So far, the policy agenda on resource scarcity has focused primarily on two key areas
increasing the supply/availability of resources, and improving management of shocks and
volatility (see table below).

Figure 1: Examples of how policymakers are currently responding to scarcity

Increasing supply/availability Managing shocks and volatility

Food OECD policymakers initial reaction to the 2008 The 2011 G20 agenda includes proposals to set up
food spike centred on the need to invest more in a global system of emergency reserves, increase
agriculture and produce more food. transparency over national stocks and improve
systems for crisis co-ordination.

Many developing countries reacted by panic-

buying on global markets or banning exports. Many countries have dramatically scaled up their
stock levels since the 2008 spike, or sought to
reduce reliance on imports.

Oil Oil importers have reacted to price spikes by OECD countries are seeking to nudge emerging
demanding that OPEC pump more oil. economies towards membership of the IEA (an
emergency management mechanism).

Oil importers are also trying to diversify supply

through long-term supply deals with producer G20 agenda of greater transparency on stock
states (e.g. the new scramble for Africa), biofuels, levels may apply to oil as well as food.
tar sands, shale gas and more deepwater drilling.

Land / Food importers have sought to increase the (See left)

water amount of land (and water) available to them
through so-called land grabs. Many coastal
countries are seeking to improve water security
with desalination plants, despite their often high
energy intensity.

Climate The low ambition approach adopted by the US and Recent years have seen substantially increased
the BASIC countries at Copenhagen is heavily political attention to climate adaptation, including
focused on expanding the supply of clean financial commitments on fast-start finance
technologies through voluntary approaches. (though not all of this will be for adaptation, or
indeed additional to ODA).

Overall The emerging green economy or green growth There is growing interest in resilient development
agenda central to South Koreas G20 Presidency for instance through investing in areas like
and to Rio 2012 is heavily focused on clean social protection, peacebuilding, disaster risk
technologies and other supply side measures. reduction, climate adaptation and livelihoods
none of which were strongly emphasised in the
MDGs, but all of which are highly relevant to
managing the shocks and stresses that resource
scarcity can drive.

5
FOOD

Brent Stirton / Getty Images

Demand for food is projected to rise by 50%
by 2030. However, the world consumed more
food than it produced in 7 of the 8 years
between 2000 and 2008, rates of productivity
growth driven by the Green Revolution
are running out of steam, and the world is
having to make up for a long period of
under-investment in agriculture.
This overall agenda of seeking to counter scarcity by increasing supply and then dealing with
short term shocks and stresses through building more effective buffers at both international and
country level makes sense. But it also leaves open a key question: what if it proves impossible
to increase the supply or availability of key resources enough to meet spiralling demand?

Such an imbalance is a very real possibility. Policymakers are currently assuming that massive
breakthroughs in technology and resource efficiency will be made, and then rolled out on a
global scale, within timescales of historically unprecedented rapidity. This is not to say that the
kind of intense scarcity likely to be seen in the next few years or decades will be a permanent
condition on the contrary, markets, institutions and communities will adapt to changing
circumstances as they always do. But this process of adaptation will come with time lags
attached, given perverse subsidies for inefficient resource use, path dependency, vested
interests, political impediments to action and so on. In the meantime, levels of risk will be
substantially heightened.

To an economist, the answer to what happens during such an imbalance of supply and demand
would simply be that prices would increase and choke off demand. This dynamic can arguably
be seen when high oil prices act as a brake on economic growth, leading to demand falling and
oil prices easing once more. Some economists have argued that this is part of what happened in
2008 when oil prices collapsed fell after touching $147 a barrel.x But even if this is true, there is
still a difference between short term price declines within a longer term outlook of inflation
combined with higher volatility on one hand, and genuine demand destruction on the other.
At present, it is hard to see many signs of genuine economic transformation away from oil.
Other resources, such as food, water, land and carbon space, are much harder to substitute for
meaning that while demand destruction is still needed, the question arises of whose demand
must fall.

In other words, a third aspect to the policy agenda - which policymakers have been slower to
embrace - comes into play. This is about the distributional or equity issues that inevitably arise
when demand exceeds supply, not just during a short term shock, but over a longer term
structural transition: the question of fair shares in a world of limits. This third cluster of issues
is particularly important in the international development context, as the following examples
show.

On food, how much is produced is only part of the story: as important is who enjoys access
to the food that is produced. (As Amartya Sen famously put it, starvation is the
characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there
not being enough to eat.)xi Poor people are especially exposed to food price volatility and
variability, frequently spending three quarters of household income on food.xii While access
to food is partly about what happens in countries, it also has crucial global dimensions. Two
of the main sources of additional demand for food are global: a larger and more affluent
global middle class shifting to western diets, and diversion of food crops to biofuels (40%
of this years US corn crop will be used for ethanol).xiii Global factors such as climate
change, high input prices and competition for land will also affect supply growth. Scaling
up social protection may not be a sufficient policy response if these overarching supply and
demand tensions mean that poor people or countries are priced out of the market.

6
 On energy, too, issues of access are critical. Poor countries have been heavily impacted by
high oil prices: a 2007 report from the IEA found that in 13 non-oil producing states in
Africa (including Ethiopia, South Africa and Ghana) increases in the cost of oil from 2004
to 2007 came to more than they had received in aid and debt relief over the same period.xiv
While mechanisms such as the IMF Standby Credit Facility exist to support countries facing
balance of payments difficulties, the explicit assumption is that such difficulties will be
short term. But if high oil prices represent a new normal - because of under-investment,
peak oil or simply because demand grows faster than supply -then poor countries risk being
priced out of the market unless longer-term mechanisms are in place to ensure their access.

While land is not an internationally traded commodity, intense distributional issues still
apply. Even when poor people do enjoy access to land, they often lack formal title to it,
leaving them exposed to displacement. This brings vulnerability to the global trend of long
term land access deals, which are already estimated to account for 79.9 million hectares of
land, primarily in Africa, and disproportionately on community lands. Many of these deals
have disadvantaged poor people by displacing them from land without their participation
or consent, without creating employment and without due consideration given to food
security impacts.xv A similar problem is visible in fisheries, where for example EU fishing
fleets have bought up the fishing rights of some African coastal states, with financial
benefits accruing to political elites rather than fishing communities (an offshore landgrab).

On water, as already noted landgrabs are often also water grabs in that water rights come
with title to the land, enabling the leaseholder to export the water used to grow crops
produced on it (virtual water). Intense equity issues also arise in any discussion about
pricing water, or allocating water rights. Equally, if water is not priced or allocated, then
this can also lead to inequitable outcomes, particularly if overall use rates are unsustainable
- as the poor are often the first to lose out in this situation (e.g. through exposure to price-
gouging by water sellers, or being unable to afford water drilling technology).

On climate change, UNFCCC Parties have long been unwilling to discuss how any future
global carbon budget would be shared out. This makes it effectively impossible to start
talking about a global policy framework for stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations, and
also impacts developing countries in that carbon space is still being used up whether or not
a carbon budget has been defined, so entitlements that would belong to developing
countries in an equitable and comprehensive framework are instead being used for free by
high emitters.

There is also a broader issue of access to natural resources and environmental goods at the
aggregate level. This can be illustrated by ecological footprinting (see WWFs Living Planet
Index), which quantifies demand on ecosystems by measuring the total productive land and sea
needed to produce and regenerate the resources that an individual or population consumes. The
latest LPI finds that current global consumption overshoots planetary capacity by 1.5 times (i.e.
it would take 1.5 planets to sustain todays economy).xvi Similarly, the Stockholm Environment
Institute has identified nine key planetary boundaries - climate change, stratospheric ozone,
land use change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidification, nitrogen and
phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical pollution. It
argues that three (climate, biodiversity and biogeochemical flows) have been crossed while
others are nearing their tipping points.xvii

7
But these issues of boundaries and sustainable limits are also inherently linked to issues of who
gets to consume what within those limits. At present, high income countries footprint is three
times that of middle income countries, and five times that of low income countries (see figure 2).
If total consumption is to fit within sustainable levels and low income countries are to grow
their economies and improve their material standard of living - both precursors for sustainable
development - then major issues of fairness arise, above all the need for developed countries
drastically to reduce their footprints so as to provide a fair share of limited environmental
space for developing countries.

Figure 2: Human development compared to ecological footprint and sustainable use levels xviii

8
LAND

CAROL SALTER / Oxfam

The amount of arable land per capita halved
from 1960 to 2007, from 0.39 to 0.21 hectares,
but demand for it is increasing from multiple
sources including food, feed, fibre (paper,
timber etc.), biofuels, carbon sequestration,
conservation and cities.
Part 2: Fair shares in a world of scarcity
The convergence of equity and scarcity
Access to natural resources is, of course, grossly unequal even before increasing resource
scarcity is taken into account. The world produces enough food today to feed all of its
inhabitants, but around a billion people dont get enough to eat.xix The fact that 1.4 billion people
lack access to electricity is not because of an inherent limit to how much power could be
generated, but because of a failure of governments and markets.xx The fact that the worlds
poorest tend to be landless and rural is far from new. If anything, the fact that such inequalities
should exist is all the more scandalous, given that they exist amid conditions of plenty.

It is also worth noting that inequality is rising steadily up the development agenda
independently of any considerations relating to natural resources. The Millennium Development
Goals, pre-eminent in framing development objectives for more than a decade, focus heavily on
absolute poverty above all the number of people living on less than a dollar a day. But as the
MDGs 2015 deadline approaches, some influential commentators are arguing for more
emphasis on equality rather than just absolute poverty in some cases suggesting that this
could be the new big idea on development.xxi

But resource scarcity will be a game-changer for debates on fairness and equity in development.
The potential for scarcity to bring a harder-edged debate about distributional issues into play is
well captured by Martin Wolf in a Financial Times article, written as concern over food, fuel and
climate change was surging in 2007, in which he argued that,

The biggest point about debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back
the question of limits ... this is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically
significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if
there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense
distributional conflicts must then re-emerge - indeed, they are already emerging - within and
among countries."xxii

Whether or not Wolf is right that limits to growth per se are involved, it is clear that reaching
limits of any kind changes the discussion for debates about fairness. While left and right have
long had opposite ideas about distributive justice, after all, they have shared the assumption that
the total quantum of wealth to be distributed will expand over time.

If the resources and materials cake is expanding, debates about fairness are relatively benign
in nature allowing, for example, John Rawls to argue in his famous A Theory of Justice (1971),
that inequalities in the distribution of goods can be justified if (and only if) they mean the worst-
off in society are better-off in absolute terms. But if the amount of goods available is held static,
then issues of equity take on an absolute rather than relative tint. In this case, inequalities in the
distribution of goods must by definition disadvantage the worst-off: more for one party means
less for another.

9
So debates about issues of justice in conditions of scarcity are especially challenging. They are
also, of course, not new. In the 19th century, classical economics assumed that since the supply of
land (which was understood as a proxy for natural resources more broadly) was fixed, it would
become ever scarcer, pushing up rents and slowing down growth. The American political
economist Henry George argued from this perspective for a land value tax, arguing that it would
be both just and efficient to socialise land rents given that natural resources were not only finite,
but a form of unearned wealth.xxiii

In reality, of course, the economy did not show signs of diminishing returns during the 20th
century; on the contrary, technological innovation and the increasing use of fossil fuel-based
inputs saw growth continue and indeed accelerate. Now, though, with resource scarcity, peak oil
and climate change on the agenda, the context has shifted again. Considerations of equity in the
context of limits are back on the table. Economists are debating whether neoclassical economics
made a mistake in aggregating natural resources and capital as a single factor of production.xxiv
While recent years have seen policy debates about equality and resource scarcity proceed on
largely separate paths, their trajectories increasingly seem to be on convergent (or indeed
collision) courses.

Methodological challenges
Before addressing the question of how to deal with questions of fairness in conditions of
scarcity, it is necessary to note five key methodological issues that arise in this context.

First, there are real limitations to the data on resource availability, together with often
enormous ranges of uncertainty. Scientists have an imperfect understanding of how the
atmosphere works, for example, which directly affects estimates of what carbon budget will keep
the world within a given level of average warming; data on recoverable oil reserves are highly
contested. At the same time, the effect of policy measures such as changing prices is also far
from predictable.

Second, it is important to be clear that equity considerations apply in different ways to

different kinds of resources. Some resources - like water - are renewable, and hence involve
decisions about what use level is sustainable before issues of allocation can come into play.
Others - like oil - are non-renewable, and involve considerations about the entitlement of future
generations that do not arise in the same way with renewable resources. Others again involve
questions about the health of whole systems (such as ecosystems, or the climate), where there is
the risk of outright and potentially irreversible collapse.

Similarly, some kinds of environmental resources, such as oil, are rivalrous (i.e. consumption by
one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by another consumer) and excludable (i.e. it
is possible to prevent people who have not paid from having access to it), while others are not
(e.g. global public goods such as a stable climate). Some are easily and cheaply substitutable,
while others are not. And equity considerations also apply to the distribution of risk: while a fair
society would be one in which risk is broadly distributed and shared throughout the system, in
reality poor people are disproportionately exposed to risks such as climate variability or food
price volatility.

10
water

Edward Parker / WWF-Canon

Demand for water is likely to rise by 25% by
2025, but is already beyond sustainable use
levels in many areas of the world, leading
to depletion of both ground and surface
water resources. Climate change will further
exacerbate the problem. By 2025 up to two
thirds of the worlds people are likely to live
in water-stressed conditions.
A third methodological challenge arises from the fact that different resources are managed
at different scales. For example, although the fact that virtual water is effectively imported
and exported in crops, meat or other goods means that water security has a global dimension,
water management still takes place primarily at scales defined by hydrology: those of a river
basin or an aquifer, for example. By contrast, oil markets and climate change are much more
global in nature - even if the patchwork of global governance institutions that try to oversee
them are often messy and imperfect.

This complexity, and the system coherence challenges that come with it, are further
compounded by the fact that natural resources are often interchangeable . For example,
natural gas is used as a feedstock in fertiliser manufacture, and oil is used extensively both on
farms and in transporting food: in both cases, fossil fuels are in effect being turned into food.
But by the same token, the fact that food can be turned into fuel - for instance ethanol or
biodiesel - closes the loop the other way, in effect creating an arbitrage relationship between
food and fuel.xxv As a result, it is not possible to consider access to food without also taking
energy into account. Linkages like these frequently go unrecognised or are badly understood,
often a particular problem in governance systems configured into single issue silos.

Fifth and finally, there is the fact that scarcity is affected by other megatrends that also
need to be taken into account in policymaking. For example, the outlook on resource scarcity
interacts heavily with the outlook for demographic change, urbanisation and the effectiveness of
national level institutions and changes on any of these variables will in turn affect the
availability of resources and the equity considerations that apply.

So one aspect of giving practical shape to an agenda of fair shares in a world of limits is about
dealing with the numerous methodological issues that apply. But assuming that such
methodological issues can be overcome, what constitutes fair in the allocation of scarce
natural resources?

Whats fair?
The question of what constitutes fair is among the most contested issues in political
philosophy, involving questions not only of distributive justice, but also of identity (whether
people should be considered first and foremost as individuals or as part of communities, for
example), institutions and rights. This section therefore tries to reduce these vast debates to a
manageable scale by focusing on some of the conceptual issues that are of most direct relevance
for resource scarcity, identifying concrete examples wherever possible. A good place to start this
discussion is with the observation that a concern for equity can be interpreted either
minimally or maximally in the context of resource scarcity.

At one end of the spectrum, a minimal approach might be limited in ambition to ensuring that
all people have access to sufficient resources to be able to meet at least their basic needs
(although there is of course considerable debate about what constitutes a basic need).xxvi For
example:

Humanitarian assistance is one obvious instance of this kind of approach, particularly in

the context of food.

11
 Many forms of social protection also fit into this category, whether they are cash-based (e.g.
cash transfers such as the Bolsa Familia in Brazil or employment guarantee schemes such
as the NREGA in India) or resource-specific (e.g. food safety nets; in future, social
protection systems may also be applied to access to basic energy needs).

Subsidies, for example on food or fuel, can also be seen in the minimalist context although
they are often problematic (economy-wide subsidies are frequently a major fiscal burden,
and also send distorting market signals).

More broadly, rights-based approaches, such as a right to water or to food, can also be seen
as minimalist approaches to equity, given that the right offered is access to enough of the
resource to meet basic needs, not an equal share of the total amount available.

Land reform can be seen as minimalist when the objectives of reforms are simply to
provide poor landless families with enough land to provide for a basic livelihood (again, as
opposed to a larger agenda of redistribution in pursuit of equality per se).

At the other end of the spectrum, maximal approaches move beyond basic needs, and aim for an
equal overall allocation of access to the resource in question - either because such a distribution
is seen as desirable in its own right (e.g. a belief that people deserve equal shares of common
resources), or because equitability is seen as a prerequisite for effective institutional function
(e.g. to reduce free riding and maximise compliance). For example:

Rationing in Britain during World War II was based on the principle of equitable rights to
scarce foodstuffs and other goods, with special allowances for some citizens (larger food
entitlements for pregnant women or nursing mothers, for example) based on need.

The Alaska Permanent Fund receives at least 25% of the royalties from oil and gas
production in the state, and provides all citizens over voting age with an equal annual
dividend (usually between $1,000 and $1,500) every year, irrespective of age or the number
of years of residency in the state. A land value tax could be used to apply a similar approach
to land.

The Contraction and Convergence approach to global climate policy would work by
defining a global stabilisation target for greenhouse gas concentrations, and then sharing
out the resulting global carbon budget on the basis of convergence to equal per capita
entitlements to by some negotiated date. Entitlements would be tradable, allowing
countries to sell unused allowances providing low income countries, with their low per
capita emissions, with a major new source of finance for development.xxvii The Greenhouse
Development Rights approach is another attempt to solve the question of how to share out
a global emissions budget.xxviii

Of course, the twentieth century saw both socialism and communism attempting in different
ways to achieve equality of outcome not always with obvious success. Here, however, it is also
worth distinguishing between projects that are redistributive in scope (e.g. progressive taxation)
12
versus those based on equitable allocations of a newly privatised resource that can be regarded
as having been a commons up to that point (e.g. the atmosphere, state-owned oil resources).

This distinction between minimal and maximal approaches is in some ways comparable to the
debate in international development between advocates of tackling absolute or dollar a day
poverty and advocates of a more ambitious approach centred on reducing inequality.

Equity between countries or between people?

Another important question is whether the objective of equity applies primarily at the
country level, or - more ambitiously - at individual level. In recent years, aid donors
have tended to focus on countries GDP or GNI per capita as an indicator of their overall level of
development: the categorisation of high, middle and low income countries is based on GNI per
capita, for example.xxix However, countries with comparatively high GNI per capita can still have
high rates of inequality, and long poverty tails indeed, a recent study argued that the majority
of the worlds poor people live in middle, not low income countries.xxx As a result of this
distinction, there is an ongoing debate in development about whether aid should be focused
primarily on poor countries, or on poor people.xxxi

This debate has direct relevance to questions of equity in the context of resource scarcity. One of
the problems associated with landgrabs, for instance, is that while such deals can potentially
provide genuine benefits to the host country, such benefits often accrue to elites while poor
people lose out (for example, as a result of displacement from land that they had previously).
Similarly, an approach to carbon space based on equal per capita rights to the atmosphere might
regard governments as the owners of carbon permits, in some cases creating new rents for elites
to exploit; or it could go further, and provide each individual citizen with an equal carbon
entitlement (as proposed in the concept of personal tradable carbon allowances).xxxii

Equity today versus equity between generations

Next, there is an important temporal dimension to equity considerations on access
to scarce resources. In the case of climate change, for example, the longevity of many
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere means that present day emissions disadvantage future
generations both by using up carbon space that they might otherwise have had access to, and
by exposing them to climate impacts. Similarly, current use rates of non-renewable resources
such as fossil fuels also prioritise consumption today over consumption tomorrow. These equity
dilemmas can in effect be quantified through the discount rate employed to place a net present
value on a resource (a way of measuring the value today of cash flows or costs that are
received/incurred in the future). As a result, the levels used for such rates can be highly
controversial, as was the case for example with the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate
Change and its accounting for the social cost of climate change.

Another example of the temporal aspects of equity, again drawn from the climate change
context, is how to account for historical emissions that are already in the atmosphere. For
example, Britain began to industrialise earlier than most nations and the emissions from coal
it burned during the 19th century are still in the atmosphere. In this sense, while Britain has
about the same per capita CO2 emissions as South Africa, it has a larger overall responsibility for
climate change because of its past emissions. (However, one can also argue the point the other
way, i.e. that Britain should receive credit for innovations produced during its early period of
industrialisation that are available to all countries today.)

13
OIL

Jiri Rezac / WWF-UK

Demand for oil is projected to rise by 40%
by 2030, but supply is already hampered by
significant under-investment in new
production sources and the increasing
difficulty of reaching remaining reserves,
leading the International Energy Agency to
warn of the risk of a major supply crunch.
Equity on specific resources versus equity generally
Yet another question is that of whether it makes most sense to think about equity in
access to a particular resource, or to focus on equity more broadly. For example,
while inequality in access to land or forestry may be a very real issue for many poor people, the
underlying issue is arguably less about those natural resources themselves than the livelihoods
that they enable. If people who depend on those resources for their wellbeing had alternative
livelihoods that provided a secure income, as well as sufficient access to markets to enable them
to purchase food and other goods, then they might not need direct access to land or forests.

So one can argue that equity in access to natural resources like land, water and food is much less
important than overall inequality of income and wealth - and that development policy and
advocacy should concentrate on this bigger picture, for instance by pushing for policies that can
reduce inequality such as redistributive taxation. On the other hand, though, there are also good
reasons to consider natural resources as a special category. For example:

It might take a long time to reduce overall inequality but in the meantime, poor people
will remain especially reliant on basic natural resources, whether because they use natural
resources directly for their livelihoods (three quarters of poor people are rural), or because
their low incomes mean they spend a high proportion of their incomes on basic goods like
food and energy. Natural resources also often have enormous cultural significance for many
poor people and indigenous groups.

Wealth and income may not always ensure access to resources. Some small, low-income
countries struggled to secure enough food on open markets during the 2008 food spike,
despite having enough money to pay the market rate.

While markets will respond to resource scarcity (e.g. making alternative energy
technologies available to replace oil, or desalination as a response to water scarcity), these
kinds of innovations will take time to come on stream. Many will have to compete with
perverse subsidies that favour the status quo; others will depend on transformation of
entire infrastructures (such as power transmission grids). In the meantime, poor people
will continue to be disproportionately exposed to risk during the transition.

Even when new innovations are available, they will often have high initial capital costs that
put them out of the reach of poor people. This was often the case with agricultural
innovations during the earlier stages of the Green Revolution, which initially benefited
larger landowners, who had better access to credit.

At the same time, it is also important to be clear that the emergence of resource scarcity will
itself create winners and losers in the wider economy, regardless of what policy action is taken.
For example, an age of higher food prices may benefit rural food producers while urban
consumers lose out. Policy action may therefore also be taken to address new disparities that are
created by resource-linked drivers of change.

14
Resources managed as commons
Finally, it is worth noting that there are also forms of equity in natural resource access that do
not depend on monetising natural assets. In particular, resources can be managed as
commons instead of being privatised - an approach that some analysts argue to be
particularly appropriate given that the kinds of wealth contained in commons are not earned in
the same way as other forms of capital.xxxiii

While the idea of commons is often associated in popular imagination with the idea of the
tragedy of the commons - the dilemma in which multiple individuals reliant on a shared
resource ultimately deplete that resource through rational pursuit of their narrow self-interest-
in fact there is a vibrant and burgeoning literature on how to make commons work sustainably
and inclusively, notably the work of Elinor Ostrom. Significantly, research on management of
commons strongly emphasises norms of fairness and reciprocity as important requirements for
effective cooperation implying that fairness is both an outcome of a well-managed commons,
and part of what makes it work. Commons theorist Peter Barnes argues, for example, that one of
the five key organising principles for commons sector institutions is that of one person, one
share, observing that:

In the case of scarce natural assets, it will be necessary to distinguish between usage rights
and income rights. Its impossible for everyone to use a limited commons equally, but everyone
should receive equal shares of the income derived from selling limited usage rights.xxxiv

15
CARBON

National Geographic Stock / Jason Edwards / WWF

Despite countries continuing unwillingness
to define a safe global carbon budget in the
UNFCCC, the amount of carbon space for any
stabilisation level continues to shrink rapidly
as emissions continue to grow, meaning that
carbon budgets will have to fall even more
steeply in the future.
Part 3: Conclusion putting fairness into practice
So much for the conceptual and methodological issues that arise in discussions of fairness in
conditions of scarcity. What does the agenda mean in practice for international development
and what can aid donors, as well as campaigning organisations and think tanks, do to take it
forward? This section sets out ten tentative recommendations not a comprehensive or
definitive list, but rather one intended to tease out possible implications and provoke debate.

1. Invest in improving the data

The methodological issues flagged up in the last section are not merely of academic interest. On
the contrary, finding ways to manage them is a fundamental prerequisite for making any kind of
progress on a fair shares agenda on resource access and environmental space. At the most basic
level, this means improving the data, both at supranational level and in countries. Some of the
foundations are already in place comparatively good surveillance systems for food production
and food security already exist, for example but critical gaps exist as well (country-level data
on water availability and projected climate impacts are two key examples). Above all, donors
and think tanks need to work with developing countries to improve integration of data, both
horizontally across issues (e.g. connecting the dots between water, land, food and climate data
in countries) and vertically across governance levels (e.g. connecting on-the-ground surveillance
with early warning of how global trends could impact individual countries).

2. Recognise that scarcity isnt just relevant to specialists in environment, climate and rural
livelihoods
By extension, donors must also recognise that resource scarcity is not an agenda that is only
relevant to specialists in environment, climate and rural livelihoods. On the contrary, the
political economy of scarce resources can be expected to become increasingly central to issues of
governance, economics, social development and conflict where disputes over the
distributional dimensions of resource scarcity are already a significant threat multiplier within
fragile states (competition for land was a significant factor in Kenyas post-election violence in
2008, for example).xxxv It will therefore be essential that professional development in these and
other specialist areas of development practice includes training on the specific issues of
competition and equity in natural resources.

3. Understand how scarcity shapes politics in developing countries

Recent years have seen the Department for International Development and some other donors
move towards mainstreaming drivers of change assessments in country programme planning,
to ensure that spending decisions and influencing strategies are based on a sophisticated sense
of countries longer term political contexts. As resource scarcity increases and becomes a major
driver of change in its own right, this kind of analysis will become more important than ever.
Rather than seeing scarcity as a stand-alone set of issues, donors need to understand how it fits
in to the larger political economy context, and relates to urban/rural tensions, political parties,
spending decisions, civil society dynamics, the politics of ethnic groups, and other political
economic variables. NGOs and donors will also need to be clear how far they are prepared to try
to influence domestic debates over natural resource governance in the countries where they
operate.

16
4. Focus on access to justice
In the governance area specifically, issues of access to justice may become particularly
important as resources become more politicised, since even where legal frameworks are in place
to ensure a certain level of resource access, poor people may in practice find their rights
abrogated for example through forced displacement from land to which they enjoy customary
title as natural resources become more scarce. Existing literature on conflict over natural
resources stresses that conflict risk is highest in contexts where communities facing scarcity are
politically irrelevant and therefore less able to resolve disputes over resource access through
the state.xxxvi Focusing on access to justice will therefore be an especially critical area of work for
governance specialists.

5. Be clear that this isnt just an in-country agenda.

Aid donors will naturally tend to focus on what they can do in the countries in which they
operate it is there, after all, that the bulk of their staff are located, most of their money is spent
and where they tend to feel they have most influence. But they need to be clear that on resource
scarcity, it is the international level agenda where there is most to be done. As this paper has
highlighted, the key drivers of resource scarcity, on both the supply and the demand side of the
equation, are global. While developing countries can adapt to some extent, and donors can do
much to help them in this, ultimately global solutions are needed to global problems. This
means that it is imperative that donors prioritise their work on areas that can contribute on this
front like policy coherence for development, international institutional reform, green
economy, sustainable consumption in OECD countries and so on.

6. Start developing policy options now before the policy space for them opens up
At present, there is scant political space for taking forward a global agenda of fair shares in a
world of limits. On the contrary, governments are failing to act collectively on a whole range of
global issues (climate change, the Doha trade round, food export bans and global economic
imbalances to name just a few), and sustainable development issues are among those showing
fewest signs of progress. However, as the impacts of resource scarcity and climate change
continue to increase in frequency and severity, it is likely that political space will open up
often in the aftermath of shocks, for a limited time window. This places a premium on having
ideas (as well as communications and public affairs strategies) ready on the shelf, that can be
deployed very rapidly when windows of opportunity open up. Governments, NGOs and think
tanks all tend not to invest in this kind of preparedness, instead pursuing much more
incremental strategies. From now on, they need to do both.

7. Focus on basic needs to start with...

Much public and political support for international development already depends on the idea
that all people have a right to the basic needs of life, such as food, clean water and so on. The
fact that resource scarcity imperils these basic needs can create a crucial bridgehead narrative
that opens up space for talking about scarcity, and the more politically challenging aspects of
fair shares. Aid donors and NGOs are in effect already focused on many basic needs aspect of the
fair shares agenda, for instance through their focus on areas such as social protection,
humanitarian assistance, and the need for greater emphasis on small farmers in any new
agricultural renaissance (which inevitably involves issues of access to land, water and other
assets).xxxvii Again, though, work in countries must be matched by advocacy at the trans-
boundary level. The World Food Programme has provided one example of what this looks like in
its effort to win exemptions for humanitarian assistance from food export bans when these are
applied. Another example is provided by the recommendation made by the ten international
agencies commissioned to produce a report on food volatility for the G20, that national biofuel

17
support policies should be suspended when food prices surpass a defined level (a safety valve
approach).xxxviii

8. ...but start building up the broader fair shares narrative too

At present, the idea of equity in access to environmental space is largely absent from
mainstream public debate, even if it is becoming more recognised in environment and
development contexts. Consumers are only gradually getting used to the idea that their carbon
footprints implicitly have a fair shares dimension (emit too much and youre using someone
elses share), and more progressive consumers are just beginning to take the global impact of
diet choices more seriously. Building up a broader fair shares story in the public mind should be
a key objective for the development sector, involving both the agenda-setting capacity of
politicians and NGOs, and the technical expertise of think-tanks (for example in developing
indicators that can help inform consumption choices). Above all, it will be important to stress
that arguing that taking equity seriously is a prerequisite for sustainable management of shared
resources in a world of limits and high interdependence not just the norm or a left wing
agenda.

9. Focus on poor people, not just poor countries

As previous sections have noted, the development agenda has in recent years sometimes focused
primarily on country-level indicators (such as GNI per capita) more than the distribution of
income within countries. More recently, as described earlier, the issue of inequality has risen up
the development agenda, while research findings have emphasised that countries classified as
middle income are still home to hundreds of millions of poor people. A focus on resource
scarcity would strongly support the shift towards focusing on poor people rather than just on
poor countries. This is partly because, as discussed, poor people are most vulnerable to resource
scarcity and environmental shocks. But it is also because the changing political economy of
resource access also creates new opportunities for elite rent-seeking, corruption and
exploitation of poor communities: the emergence of the issue of landgrabs is a case in point of
how deals that can potentially seem to provide benefits for countries can in reality provide gains
for elites and severe losses for poor communities.

10. Dont jump straight to the limits to growth question

Debate is starting to open up on whether limits apply just to certain resources, such as oil or
carbon space, or to economic growth per se. The latter could yet prove to be the case: while
green economy agendas focus on decoupling economic growth from environmental impacts
(i.e. reducing the carbon or resource intensity for each unit of production), current decoupling
rates are being outpaced by economic growth, so that total environmental impact is still rising.

But even if there really are limits to growth, it will take time for this to become clear. While
campaigners should not try to duck the question of whether there are limits to growth, neither
should they risk polarising debate by taking too definitive or didactic a tone at the outset.
Instead, they should play a long game: suggest that there is a genuine debate to be had about
limits to growth, and that the jury is still out, but above all underline that it is already clear that
there are limits to the supply / availability of crucial resources and that policy needs to face up
to this, and in particular the fair shares issues that are unavoidably involved.

18
References

i World Bank (2008). World Development Report 2008. Washington DC: World Bank.
ii Trostle, R. (2008). Global Agricultural Supply and Demand: Factors Contributing to the Recent Increase in Food
Commodity Prices. Washington DC: US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service.
iii Source: World Bank World Development Indicators, at http://data.worldbank.org
iv Clarke, R. and King, J. (2004). The Atlas of Water. London: Earthscan Books.
v Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (2007). Water for Food, Water for Life: A

Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. London: Earthscan.

vi International Energy Agency (2009). World Energy Outlook 2009. Paris: IEA.
vii Evans, A. and Steven, D. (2009). Hitting Reboot: Where Next for Climate Change after Copenhagen? Washington

DC: Brookings Institution.

viii World Economic Forum (2011). Global Risks Report 2011. Geneva: WEF.
ix Evans and Steven, op. cit.
x See for example Rubin J. (2009). Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: What the price of oil

means for the way we live. London: Virgin Books.

xi Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
xii Ivanic and Martin (2008). The Implications of Higher Global Food Prices for Poverty in Low-Income Countries.

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper.

xiii Meyer, G. (2011). Fuel versus food the fight over corn. Financial Times, 22 March 2011.
xiv Crooks, E. and Wallis, W. (2007). Africa aid wiped out by rising cost of oil, Financial Times, 29 December 2007.
xv The Economist, When others are grabbling their land, Economist print edition, 5 May 2011; World Bank (2010),

Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? Report, 7 September 2010
xvi WWF (2010). Living Planet Report 2010. Gland: WWF.
xvii Rockstrom, J. et al (2009). A safe operating space for humanity, Nature 461, 472-475, 24 September 2009.
xviii Source: Wikimedia Commons / Travelplanner, based on data from UNDP and Global Footprint Network, 25 April

2009, under Creative Commons License

xix FAO (2010). 925 million in chronic hunger worldwide. FAO news release,

http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/45210/icode/
xx International Energy Agency, op. cit.
xxi See for example Hulme, D., Lessons from the Making of the Millennium Development Goals: Human

Development Meets Results-based Management in an Unfair World or Fukuda-Parr, S., Reducing Inequality The
Missing MDG: A Content Review of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and Bilateral Donor Policy Statements, both
in Sumner and Melamed (eds.), The MDGs and Beyond, IDS Bulletin, Vol 41, No 1, January 2010.
xxii Wolf, M. (2007). The dangers of living in a zero sum world economy, Financial Times, 18 December 2007.
xxiii Wolf, M. (2010). Why were resources expunged from neoclassical economics?, Financial Times, FT.com

website, 12 July 2010

xxiv Ibid.
xxv Dart, S. (2008). Commodities: the fundamental factors behind rising food and fuel prices. Presentation,

Goldman Sachs, June 2008.

xxvi See for example Amartya Sens capabilities approach in Sen, A. (1993), Capability and Wellbeing in M. Nussbaum

and A. Sen, eds. The Quality of Life, pp. 3053. New York: Oxford Clarendon Press or wellbeing approaches like the
one set out in New Economics Foundation (2009), National Accounts of Well-being: bringing real wealth onto the
balance sheet, London: NEF.
xxvii See Meyer, A (2000). Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change, Schumacher

Society.
xxviii See http://gdrights.org/
xxix See http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-classifications
xxx Sumner, A. (2011). The New Bottom Billion: What if Most of the Worlds Poor Live in Middle Income Countries?

Center for Global Development policy brief, Washington DC: CGD.

xxxi Evans, A. (2011). 2020 Development Futures, ActionAid report. Available at:

http://www.globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2020-Development-Futures-GD.pdf
xxxii See for example Fawcett, T. (2005). Personal Carbon Allowances. Environmental Change Institute, University of

Oxford.
xxxiii See e.g. Barnes, P. (2006)., Capitalism 3.0. New York: Berrett Koehler.
xxxiv Ibid.
xxxv Evans, A. (2010). Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and Violent Conflict. Background paper for 2011 World

Development Report. Washington DC: World Bank.

xxxvi See e.g. Raleigh, C. (2010). Political Marginalization, Climate Change, and Conflict in African Sahel States,

International Studies Review 2010 12, 69-86

xxxvii World Bank (2008). World Development Report 2008. Washington DC: World Bank.
xxxviii FAO et al. (2011). Price Volatility in Food and Agricultural Markets: Policy Responses. Rome: FAO / Paris:

OECD. Available at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/34/48152638.pdf

19
 Why we are here
If there is no URL To stop the degradation of the planets natural envi
to build a future in which humans live in harmony w

OR

Why we are here

To stop the degradation of the planets natural environment and
Oxfam is an international
With URL - Regular to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.
confederation of fifteen organizations working
together in 98 countries wwf.org.uk
to find lasting solutions to poverty
and injustice.

www.oxfam.org
www.oxfam.org/grow