Legal empowerment for local resource control

TABLE 3. SOURCES OF POWER ASYMMETRIES
Political capital
Economic capital
Human capital
Social capital
Cultural capital
Project nature/
“importance”
Coercion
- Influence over decision-makers and opinion formers;
- Capacity to mobilise “powerful” actors (e.g. home and host state governments)
and/or to draw power from other negotiating tables;
- Internal cohesion/divisions.
- Access to financial and other valuable resources (e.g. technology).
- Skills;
- Knowledge;
- Self-confidence.
- Status;
- Information asymmetries;
- Contacts/relations.
- Assumptions, values and attitudes internalised by the different stakeholders – e.g.
ideas on the “modernity” and “backwardness” of different forms of resource use.
- Extent to which the project depends on a specific location e.g. due to availability of
valuable resources (e.g. minerals – “location dependency”);
- Vulnerability to local activities capable of affecting the cost-benefit equilibrium of
the project (e.g. sabotage);
- Relative importance of the project to the investor;
- Ease with which the investor can demobilise assets and move elsewhere (“asset
mobility”).
- Access to a coercive apparatus – e.g. capacity to mobilise the police or military forces
of the host state to further one’s interests.
Differences in social status, in access to information (e.g. about the existence
and location of valuable subsoil resources) and in contacts and social
relations (e.g. with politicians and the government administration); and
Differences in the degree of internal cohesion, for instance where local
resource users are divided in their position vis-à-vis proposed investment
projects.
These factors may be reinforced by cultural aspects such as widespread
beliefs and internalised assumptions concerning the “modernity” and
“backwardness” of different forms of natural resource use (for instance,
with pastoral use being perceived as “backward” in many contexts, while
foreign investment is seen as a key element of “modernisation”).
On the other hand, factors concerning the nature of the investment project
may reduce these asymmetries. Location dependency (i.e. the need for the
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