State of nature: on the co-constitution of resources, state and nation

This chapter examines the relationship between resources, states and nations, and shows how they co-produce one another through (1) environmental policy and governance, (2) resource rents, and (3) resource nationalism. Environmental policy and governance are one obvious contact point between nature and the state. Whereas environmental policy refers to state-centric modes of regulation, environmental governance signals the institutional and scalar diversification of environmental management. States are similarly constituted by ground rent derived from resource extraction, which produces states both fiscally (as state budgets depend on resource rents) and territorially (as resource frontiers expand in relation to extractive activities). Resource nationalism is understood as the ensemble of material practices and symbolic understandings through which resources are enrolled in constructions of nationalism and the nation. The chapter argues that, as forms of socio-natural ordering, resources, states and nations constitute a trialectic, in which the production of one constitutes the production of the others.