Access revisited: An introduction to the special issue

Introduction:As political-economic forces at every scale and locus are transforming nature and society, struggles are mounting over access to natural resources. Wide-ranging and deepening inequality (e.g. Hickel 2017) suggests that questions of access are germane to critical social science today, possibly even more than in previous decades. Resource access struggles are part and parcel of unequal exchanges and outcomes, failure to recognize claims, lack of participation in decision making, and market processes. Access theory, not least Ribot and PelusoÕs (2003) A Theory of Access, presents concepts of power, control, benefits and burdens for analyzing access, which continue to gain pertinence today. Access theory and analysis have continually proven to be a versatile way to understand some of the most elusive obstacles to effective natural resources governance such as elite control over resources, exploitative market relations, and policies that eschew rights.This special issue was triggered by the 15 year anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Access and encompasses a literature review of A Theory of Access followed by eight articles with conceptual and empirical advances in access theory. It concludes with a postscript by Jesse Ribot and Nancy Peluso, reflecting on this special issue and A Theory of Access 15 years after its publication. In this introduction, we introduce access theory and the contributions of each article to new ways of theorizing and applying the concept of access.