Resource Politics for a Fair Future: A Memorandum of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

From the extraction of tar sands in North America to large-scale land purchases in Africa and from China’s investment in the Mekong region to mining and soya production in Latin America – the global resources bonanza is a fact. But all this use of natural resources doesn’t respect the ecological limits of our world and it doesn’t result in a fair distribution of the profits.

This Memorandum is the outcome of a two-year process. With the dialogue project “Resource Equity in a Finite World” the Heinrich Böll Foundation brought together young people from 29 countries who have examined resource issues in their respective regions in ten “future workshops” in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. One such workshop took place in Prague, attended by young participants from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia and other European countries. Under http://www.boell.de/en/2013/11/07/sustainability-one-way-forward you can read an essay written by the delegates of the Prague workshop based on discussions held at this event.

Delegates of each future workshop brought their experiences, ideas and visions to Berlin, where they spent two days with the international Heinrich Böll Foundation team, discussing and developing these ideas further. The process was supported by an advisory board consisting of eleven internationally renowned environmentalists and human rights experts.

With the Memorandum the Heinrich Böll Foundation offers a perspective which combines democracy, ecology and human rights and lays out fundamental ways forward that can form the basis for fair and sustainable Resource Politics.