This paper explores the ways a concept of ‘resources’ can contribute to our understanding of wellbeing. The major argument is that resources do not have a fixed meaning but are constituted through social practice.
While we may construct ‘resource profiles’ to record different types of resources, their significance for wellbeing will depend on understandings about how these resources can and cannot be used in particular contexts.
We must avoid reifying categories like ‘capitals’ or ‘assets’. All forms of resources, such as land for example, have material, relational and symbolic dimensions.
How resources are used in practice also depends critically on who is involved, and the structural forms of power they can deploy. This approach exposes the common ‘conceit’ when development agencies assume that because they are familiar with ‘a resource’ they understand what would constitute its ‘rational’ use in different contexts.
The paper concludes with a plea for some balance between a universal framework and one sensitive to local understandings.