How should communities share the economic benefits and environmental burdens created by the use of land and natural resources?
This trio examines the governance, ownership, and distribution of resources within communities and ecosystems. Business explains extraction, investment, production, and economic benefit. Nature establishes the ecological resource and environmental consequence. Social introduces justice, consent, collective ownership, participation, and distribution. Business × Nature can explain extraction and resource use, but Social is necessary to determine who decides, who benefits, who is displaced, and who bears the damage.
All three elements are indispensable to the analysis of community resource governance.
Constructive expressions include community development, conservation economies, sustainable agriculture, public transportation, cooperative resource management, and local environmental governance.
Imbalances include environmental injustice, displacement, resource conflict, extractive development, exclusion of local communities, and profits leaving the populations that bear ecological costs.