Defining Dependence: The Natural Resource Community Typology*

Natural resource dependence, although commonly invoked in natural resource sociology, has often been ambiguously defined. Communities are frequently described as dependent on natural resource development, but limited attention has been paid to what that means. In the literature, resource dependence is often treated as over-specialization in, or over-reliance upon, the natural resource sectors. However, the logic of over-specialization conceptually grounds dependence in poor economic outcomes. Thus, a one-dimensional typology of dependence based on a threshold of the share of development in the natural resource sector-as commonly used-does not fully capture the concept and risks tautology. In this paper, I address this ambiguity by formally defining natural resource dependence as over-specialization in the natural resource sectors. I then present an ideal typology, known as the Natural Resource Community Typology, and a corresponding classification scheme for rural communities in the United States. The typology integrates both extractive and non-extractive natural resource activity and has two dimensions-the level of development and the level of economic prosperity-and six mutually exclusive categories-extractive specialized, extractive dependent, non-extractive specialized, non-extractive dependent, hybrid specialized, and hybrid dependent. I classify counties from 2000 to 2015 and find that while extractive dependence decreased over the study period, non-extractive dependence increased.