JUSTICE AND NATURAL RESOURCES Justice and Natural Resources An Egalitarian Theory CHRIS ARMSTRONG Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Chris Armstrong 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960742 ISBN 978–0–19–870272–6 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work Acknowledgements I have been working on this book for roughly half a decade, and have racked up a number of debts along the way A Mid-Career Fellowship from the British Academy during the academic year 2012–13 provided much-needed time to make progress on the manuscript Visiting fellowships at the Centre for Democracy, Peace and Justice at the University of Uppsala, at the Centre for the Study of Social Justice at the University of Oxford, and in the School of Philosophy in the Australian National University provided space away from the distractions of my home university I have also benefited greatly from the broad community of people now working on egalitarian theory, global justice, territorial rights, and natural resources For comments on various chapters— and in some cases the whole manuscript—I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Ayelet Banai, Megan Blomfield, Gillian Brock, Alex Brown, Daniel Callies, Simon Caney, Ian Carter, Dimitris Efthymiou, Anca Gheaus, Bob Goodin, Clare Heyward, Holly Lawford-Smith, Duncan McLaren, Alejandra Mancilla, Andrew Mason, Darrel Moellendorf, Shmulik Nili, Kieran Oberman, David Owen, Ed Page, Fabian Schuppert, Henry Shue, Annie Stilz, Kit Wellman, Leif Wenar, Scott Wisor, and Lea Ypi I would also like to thank audiences at the University of Amsterdam, the Australian National University, the University of Bristol, the University of the West of England in Bristol, University College Dublin, the University of Durham, Humboldt University of Berlin, the London School of Economics, McGill University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Oslo, Nuffield College Oxford, the University of Salamanca, the University of Southampton, the University of Uppsala, the University of Utrecht, the University of Vienna, the University of Warwick, and the University of Zurich I would like to extend special thanks to those who participated in a symposium on my book-in-progress at the Goethe University Frankfurt during January 2016, including Darrel Moellendorf, Merten Reglitz, Daniel Callies, Eszter Kollar, Anca Gheaus, and Ayelet Banai All of these interlocutors have helped me to sharpen the arguments presented here, though I am aware that many of them continue to disagree with some, and sometimes much, of what I have to say Chapter draws on my paper ‘Natural Resources: The Demands of Equality’, Journal of Social Philosophy 44/4 (2013): 331–47 Chapter draws on ‘Justice and Attachment to Natural Resources’, Journal of Political Philosophy 14/2 (2014): 48–65 Chapter draws on ‘Against “Permanent Sovereignty” vi Acknowledgements over Natural Resources’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics 14/2 (2015): 129–51 In each case the text has been revised substantially Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to those who have given me so much support while I wrote it: for Sophia, Felix, Leonard, and Yasmin, with love Contents Introduction Resources and Rights Equality and Its Critics 29 The Demands of Equality 62 Rewarding Improvement 93 Accommodating Attachment 113 Against Permanent Sovereignty 132 Perfecting Sovereignty? 150 Resource Taxes 177 The Ocean’s Riches 201 10 The Burdens of Conservation 220 References Index 248 262 Introduction Conflicts over natural resources are impossible to ignore in our world We know that the tribespeople of the Amazon have been brutally dispossessed as great swathes of rainforest are destroyed We understand that a key factor in many of the civil wars which have devastated African communities is the struggle to gain control over supplies of oil, diamonds, and gold We may even remember that a relentless thirst for natural resources spurred Europe’s colonization of the world, shaping the very boundaries of nation-states in its aftermath Countries such as Argentina, the Ivory Coast, and the Gold Coast (now Ghana) were even named after the resources to be found (or pillaged) there Others (including Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, and Gambia) were named for the rivers which sustained local communities As resources are consumed ever more frenetically, struggles over them show no sign of disappearing The desire to exert control over as yet untapped natural resources has motivated new territorial claims over the Arctic region, and seen millions poured into deep-sea mining technology Political scientists have often predicted that ‘water wars’ will be a feature of our future, although thankfully those predictions have not yet been borne out.1 We know that many economies in the Middle East have been transformed by the discovery of oil, and by the conflicts which have sometimes followed But these conflicts are not confined to geographical ‘hot spots’ Rather disagreements about who owns resources, and how they should be used, are endemic In the Scottish independence campaign of 2014, debates about the viability of a Scottish state frequently turned on rival claims about who would end up owning North Sea oil, and even what price it might be expected to command in the coming years As I write, many Canadian citizens are campaigning to raise awareness of the environmental impact of oil pipelines, and tar sands exploitation, on virgin forests and on the indigenous people who live in them It is abundantly clear that natural resources matter to people All of us need some resources if we are to survive—including water, air, light from the sun, and some land to stand upon Others are so valuable that states which possess large reserves of them have a guaranteed source of income (though whether that income will be turned into sustained economic growth, or shared with ... develop an egalitarian theory of natural resource justice These chapters argue for the superiority of an egalitarian theory versus various non -egalitarian alternatives, and defend the egalitarian. .. life-plans matter more than others, and it does not give us reason to abandon egalitarianism as a theory about natural resources If the first half of the book sets out an egalitarian theory of natural. .. attachments can be accommodated within an egalitarian theory I argue that egalitarians can and should care about these attachments, and moreover that we can be much more permissive towards them than has