a) Description
This module examines international, regional and national legal and institutional arrangements concerning the conservation and use of natural resources. It introduces legal principles relevant to the conservation and use of natural resources in international and national law. This module focuses on the international law aspects of natural resource use and conservation, the North-South dimension and on individual developing country case studies. Natural resource regulation is analysed within the broad conceptual framework of the notion of sustainable development. As a result, this module examines simultaneously economic development aspects of natural resource regulation, social development aspects and environmental aspects. This module specifically seeks to make the links between the exploitation of natural resources for macro-economic development and subsistence and other uses of natural resources for food security and health needs as well as the links between use for economic development and conservation, for instance, in the context of broader policy challenges such as climate change. This module starts with a background to natural resource regulation, including basic principles of international law relevant to natural resources, such as sovereignty and related concepts for natural resource appropriation, differential treatment/equity, sustainable development and human rights. It also examines the role of some of the main actors in natural resource use and conservation such as the World Bank and transnational companies. The module then moves on to examine a number of more specific issues within the context of selected natural resources. Natural resources considered may include water, genetic resources, forests, marine living and mineral resources of the seabed, minerals and energy.
Whereas Law and Natural Resources 1 offers the framework and conceptual foundations of this area of law. Students who complete this course can go on to enrol in Law and Natural Resources 2, which focuses on cluster-based sectoral analysis.
b) Indicative syllabus (subject to change)
Semester 2
Biological Resources
Week 1. Biological Resources: Food Security/Sovereignty & Forests
Week 2. Commercial Use of Plant Genetic Resources: Farmers/Peasants’ Rights and Access and Benefit Sharing
Week 3. Controlling Access to Biological Resources: Traditional Knowledge Protection, Biopiracy and Geographical Indications
Natural resources use, privatisation and corporations
Week 4. Privatisation of Natural Resources: Air and Water
Week 5. Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Accountability Related to Natural Resources
Week 6. Natural Resource Investment and Investor-State Disputes
Week 7. Corporate Liability and Use of Natural Resources
Mining, Oil/Gas & Energy
Week 8. Mining and the Resource Curse
Week 9. Oil and Gas
Week 10. Energy
c) Assessment (subject to change)
Assessment: Essay: 3'500 words (100% of the total mark)
d) General Reference Books Related to the Course
Shawkat Alam, Jahid Hossain Bhuiyan & Jona Razzaque eds, International Natural Resources Law, Investment and Sustainability (London: Routledge, 2017).
John F. Devlin ed, Social Movements Contesting Natural Resource Development (Routledge, 2020).
Francesca Romanin Jacur, Angelica Bonfanti & Francesco Seatzu eds, Natural Resources Grabbing: An International Law Perspective (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2016).
Celine Tan & Julio Faundez eds, Natural Resources and Sustainable Development – International Economic Law Perspectives (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017).
Lori Leonard, Siba N. Grovogui eds, Governance in the Extractive Industries – Power, Cultural Politics and Regulation (Routledge, 2019).