Are directors who govern natural resources biased towards their home districts? The literature predicts that they will be but we argue that mixed-territorial seat allocation can attenuate directors’ incentives for home bias. When a regional director represents one community among several directors competing for a fixed budget, advocating for one’s own community is con- strained and directors are dissuaded from rent-seeking. We test our theory using the Columbia Basin Trust, a natural resource fund that distributes compensation for hydropower development across southeastern British Columbia. Using synthetic control and a difference-in-differences design that exploits a 2003 change to the composition of the Trust’s board, we find positive developmental returns and no evidence of home district bias and this holds whether that director holds an official regional appointment or a provincial appointment without an assigned territory. Our findings suggest that board-level institutional design is consequential for successful development and redistribution.