Resource scarcities affect the state via their effects on elites. On one hand, scarcities can threaten the incomes of elites that depend on resource extraction. Scarcities can also aggravate competition among political elites that derive their power from rival political institutions. The management of such conflicts requires immense amounts of state attention, time, and money. On the other hand, environmental scarcities generate opportunities for powerful coalitions of elite members to capture windfall wealth.
Scarcities can boost the economic power of small elite groups.
As they become more powerful, these groups are increasingly able to ignore state dictates, shirk taxes on their greater wealth, and penetrate the state to make it do their bidding. In particular, they often lobby to change the property rights and other laws governing the use of scarce resources such as water, land, and forests. In many societies, these rent-seeking elite groups influence the state through bribery, kickbacks, and other forms of corruption. Such predatory behavior by elites often evokes defensive reactions by weaker groups that directly depend on the resources in question. The struggle for resource control between powerful and weak groups, and among weak groups themselves, worsens social segmentation, which in turn debilitates civil society and erodes the trust-building processes that civil society promotes.