Natural Resource Governance Reform and the Peace Process in Myanmar
This report summarizes the role of natural resources in armed conflict and the current peace process in Myanmar. It serves as a baseline study for efforts to promote equitable and accountable management of natural resources for peacebuilding. The main findings overall indicate a lack of meaningful progress on moving towards natural resource good governance reform in the country and specific to the peace process. Land and resource ownership and governance decentralization within federal structures anchor the central demands of ethnic civil society stakeholders and ethnic armed organizations, but these demands are so far at odds with the 2008 Constitution and Union laws and policies. The future Union Accord peace principles do not yet contain principles specific to natural resources, and clauses specific to land mostly serve to further centralize unitary state control.
