Natural resources and rural poverty: A closer look

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The review by Humphrey et al. (1993) is arguably the most important effort to date to advance our understanding of poverty in resource‐dependent communities—one that is likely to be remembered as pivotal, not just because it brings together four highly diverse theoretical perspectives, but because its clarity will facilitate the recognition of important gaps and of the need for empirical testing. All four of the perspectives appear to have important weaknesses, although the weaknesses appear not to be due so much to the efforts of Humphrey et al. as to the fact that social scientists have often overlooked biophysical variables in the past. For the future, there is a need for more systematic empirical analysis, including a more explicit focus on the characteristics of natural resource activities. In particular, attention needs to be devoted to (1) long‐term declines in both extractive and “linked”; employment; (2) the high levels of volatility that characterize world commodity markets; and (3) the tendency for social science expectations about natural resources, like many other forms of “social construction,”; to be based on untested assumptions that may have grown out of past experiences, but that are not based on careful analysis of long‐term trends, and that may prove inadequate as a guide to the future.

This publication has 25 references indexed in Scilit: