Call for Submissions: Understanding the ‘Local’ Aspect of Participation and Citizen Engagement in Natural Resources Governance

Nov 6, 2019 | Päivi Lujala
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The people living in resource extraction areas are increasingly at the heart of transnational natural resource governance (NRG) policy discourse. Accordingly, locally sustainable – i.e. economically, socially and environmentally responsible – natural resource extraction has become a central agenda in NRG. The local and territorial aspects of the global discourse on NRG have gained considerable attention resulting in a variety of efforts aiming to engage citizens to participate in resource management. This increased emphasis on participatory processes is thought to provide a basis for citizens to engage in more democratic practices, to scrutinize the performance of the authorities and extractive industries and, when needed, mobilize citizen to demand better NRG, and thus lead to increased accountability in local and national natural resource management. However, many efforts to achieve meaningful citizen participation in NRG are failing.

The increased emphasis on local embeddedness in NRG makes natural resource management ever more complex and multi-scalar. Global frameworks and policies for increasing local participation do not necessarily reduce power imbalances in decision-making or enhance socially just and democratic processes. Failures in policies and practices for citizen engagement highlight the shortcomings in conceptualizations about how participatory processes work and underscore the need to better understand the transnational context, and the ‘local’ in it, that shape resource extraction and resource revenue use. 

Therefore, experiences from the extraction areas – where global policies meet the local ‘reality’ – are ever more needed in order to understand the limits of current policy frames and hence also to make the ground for influencing the (re)formulation of the global policies and how they are implemented. There is also a need for a more nuanced insight into the complexities of how sites of extraction and the people living there are related to broader global policy regimes. 

The special issue aims to discuss policy frames and mechanisms of participation within the wider political context of global NRG and within a variety of geographical, economic, and social contexts. This special issue will significantly advance knowledge on current policies and emerging debates in participatory processes in the extractive industries.

We invite interdisciplinary analysis from any geographical region that empirically and/or theoretically study the complex nature of local participation and citizen engagement in natural resource (revenue) governance in developing countries. Authors are welcome to submit papers on any topic related to the broad theme of the call, the special issue is in particular interested in the following issues:

• Analysis of successes and failures of specific participatory policy frames or initiatives within NRG in general or in specific location(s)
• Degree and nature of ‘local’ involvement in transnational NRG 
• Insights into and from novel conceptual and methodological approaches to examine the position of the ‘local’ in NRG seeking to engage citizens
• Alternative forms of decision-making for local NRG

Submissions

Submission Deadline: The final deadline for submissions is June 1st, 2020

All manuscripts are to be submitted online through the Extractive Industries and Society platform.

Please direct any informal question to the guest editors of the special issue: Paivi.Lujala@oulu.fi