Natural resource exploitation and children’s rights

In contrast to "classical" children's rights themes such as juvenile justice or alternative care, an established research tradition on "children's rights and natural resource exploitation" does not - yet - seem to exist. This may be explained by the relative novelty of (attention to) the issue, triggered by the resource rush as well as growing environmental awareness and concerns. At both the normative and scholarþ level, the relationship between childreni rights and natural resource exploitation has been commonly approached from a particular point of view instead of from a holistic perspective. However, as will become evident throughout this contribution, nâtural resource exploitation is a transversal phenonrenon, cutting across many traditional foci of children's rights analysis, among which child labour, health and education. The chapter will also show that resource exploitâtion is an area that highlights the ambivalence of a separate "domain" of children's rights, and in which the current legal conceptualization of children's and human rights runs up against its limits. It is moreover argued that children's rights need to be understood in a holistic, intercultural and contextspecific way, in order to adequately address extraction-related challenges