Rethinking Resource Management

Rethinking Resource Management offers students and practitioners in resource management a sophisticated and convincing framework for rethinking the dominant approaches to resource management in a complex world. Drawing on a deep understanding of relationships between resource projects and indigenous peoples, the book argues that current resource management practices consider important human values irrelevant and invisible, among their checklists and dry technical methods. The book uses case studies to argue that professional resource managers do not take responsibility for the social and environmental consequences of their decisions, on the often powerless and vulnerable indigenous communities they affect. It offers an approach to social impact assessment methods which are more participatory and empowering than many alternative technical approaches. It discusses the invisibility of indigenous people' values and knowledge in the dominant paradigms of resource management and draws on contemporary social philosophy to offer a relational framework for thinking about interaction and change in resource management systems. This philosophical discussion is followed by a critical evaluation of case study methods and looks at case studies from Australia, North America and Norway. Finally Rethinking Resource Management investigates methodological issues of social impact assessment, policy development, applied research and the relevance of geographical perspectives and ethics to professional practice. In advocating more just, equitable and sustainable professional practice, the book explores new ways of seeing and thinking, as a foundation for new practices. Rethinking Resource Management is empirically informed, theoretically sophisticated and ethically engaged in a way which will force resource managers at any point in their career to reassess what they think resource management is, should be and could be about.