Conservation practitioners realize they must deal with conflict but often lack the training to do so, says Dr. Andrew Plumptre, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Albertine Rift Program. Moreover, they don’t realize their conservation efforts—by restricting access to resources or creating new burdens, costs, and risks for communities—are at times directly responsible for spawning new conflicts where none existed before.

In a recent presentation—Healing the Rift: Mitigating Conflict Over Natural Resources in the Albertine Rift, sponsored by WCS and the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group—Plumptre used his work with WCS in the Albertine Rift as a launch pad to discuss how conservation practitioners can work to mitigate conflict.

Achieving “Conflict-Sensitive Conservation”

“Conflict-sensitive conservation,” as outlined in an International Institute for Sustainable Development‘s practitioners’ manual developed in conjunction with WCS, is a multi-step process:

1. Identify—What are the area’s current or potential conflicts?
2. Prioritize—Which conflicts are the most serious?
3. Target—Which high-risk conflict does my organization possess the capacity to address?
4. Analyze—What are the causes and effects of conflict? Who are the stakeholders, what are the relationships between them, and which should we seek to engage?
5. Design & implement solutions—With what strategy should the conflict be approached? At which point in the conflict cycle should we seek to intervene?
6. Monitor—Continue to watch the area for new developments.

Conflict in the Albertine Rift

Plumptre’s fieldwork on the DRC’s Virunga National Park is one of the case studies in Renewable Natural Resources: Practical Lessons for Conflict-Sensitive Development, recently published by the World Bank. Conflict in the park began in 1996, when an influx of internally displaced persons from the war in the DRC poured into the area, placing severe strains on the park’s fish, wildlife, timber, and agricultural resources.

In 2006, Plumptre and his WCS colleagues entered Virunga and identified four challenges they could best address:

• Overfishing on Lake Edward
• Military poaching
• Park encroachment
• Conflict with displaced Ugandan pastoralists

WCS tackled the conflicts with an array of strategies:

• To combat overfishing, WCS helped villages establish sustainable targets and implement internal policing mechanisms
• To curtail encroachment and poaching by the military and those living in the greater Virunga National Park area, WCS trained Congolese Park Authority (ICCN) staff in enforcement and monitoring techniques, established channels of communication with military commanders, and engaged in general and targeted environmental educational campaigns.
• To relieve resource pressures from the presence of Ugandan pastoralists, WCS worked with the Congolese and Ugandan governments to ensure pastoralists could safely and freely return to Uganda to settle elsewhere.

All of WCS’ work was carried out in conjunction with local ICCN members. WCS also regularly convened meetings of elected stakeholder representatives, where disputes, accusations, and interests could be openly aired and mediated. The meetings also fostered collaboration between the stakeholders and created an enabling environment for conflict resolution.

Beyond Virunga National Park

Since completing their project in 2007, Plumptre and his team have established similar projects in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the Itombwe Massif, and Misotshi-Kabogo. Now, however, they are working to prevent conflicts before they take root. WCS has guided communities in the Misotshi-Kabogo area to work together to petition the Congolese government to turn their territory into the DRC’s 8th national park.

Climate change is predicted to spur local, often intra-state or regional, migrations in response to droughts and flooding. Could these migrations lead to similar resource conflicts in the future? The rate of migration, governance and carrying capacities of the absorbing communities, and economic status of the migrants will all come in to play. In cases where conflict might result, Plumptre’s work successfully demonstrates that “conflict-sensitive conservation” should have a place in the peacebuilders’ toolkit.

Is the “resource curse” inevitable? The Resource Conflict Monitor (RCM) produced by the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) attempts to monitor the management, administration, and governance of natural resources in countries prone to resource-conflict dynamics by establishing an empirical measure of resource governance.

Mediation and conflict resolution around natural resources require “long-term engagement, timely interventions, and lots of flexibility,” says Juan Dumas, senior advisor for the Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano in Quito, Ecuador. The Woodrow Wilson Center and the Fetzer Institute hosted Dumas for a roundtable event on Pathways to Peace: Stories of Environment, Health, and Conflict. In this interview with ESCP Director Geoff Dabelko, Dumas shares key lessons learned from his experience with his NGO that specializes in prevention and management of socio-economic conflicts around natural resources.

“Most of the actual violence around water today is not occurring with armies marching out on the field of battle…[it] is more diffuse, more at the community level, more small scale, but quite real and quite important for us to try to address,” says Ken Conca, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland during this conversation with ESCP Director Geoff Dabelko. Though the world remains fixated on future “water wars,” we “should not forget the actually existing violence in the world today,” he says.

Climate Change and Security in Africa: A Study for the Nordic-African Foreign Ministers Meeting, a collaboration between the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Institute for Security Studies, examines the spectrum of literature devoted to the security implications of climate change in Africa. In particular, the study focuses on the economic sectors and regions most susceptible to climate change’s threat multiplier effects. It concludes that “climate change presents very real development challenges which, under certain circumstances, may contribute to the emergence and longevity of conflict.”

“Climate change seems to be eclipsing all other environment and security issues, but those issues haven’t gone away,” says Oli Brown, program manager at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). “There are still problems with illegal timber, still problems with mining, there are still problems with diamonds, there are still problems over land, water, and so on. Climate change encompasses a lot of those issues and makes some of them more difficult and more pressing.”

IISD is working with the United Nations Environment Programme on ensuring that these issues are addressed in UN peacekeeping missions. “What we do with UNEP is to coordinate a group of experts that help to advise the UN family on ways that it should do conflict prevention, post conflict reconstruction, peacekeeping, peace negotiations and peacebuilding more effectively,” says Brown.

In areas fraught with conflict, is it possible to advance conflict resolution through environmental discourse? A recent conference hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Porter School of Environmental Studies explored this question through an examination of existing peace parks, as well as possible future preserves.

The wide-ranging discussion sought to apply theories of conflict resolution and environmental peacemaking to local conflict in the Middle East. Touching on conservation, conflict resolution, local history, geography, ecology, and diplomacy, the participants underscored the importance of restoration efforts, local environmental maintenance, and the pursuit of peace through environmental cooperation.

In a preview of his new book The Plundered Planet: Why We Must – and How We Can – Manage Nature for Global Prosperity, Paul Collier dispelled the common perception that Africa’s indentified resource reserves are the world’s largest. In actuality, it is estimated that up to four-fifths of the value of subsoil assets in the African continent are yet to be discovered. “That is the big story,” Collier remarked. “Here are assets which could finance transformation….but historically haven’t.” Instead, these resources have been plundered.

In a recent event hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Paul Collier, professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, and Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, discussed how resource-rich environments in developing countries have been traditionally misused. The two also proposed strategies to disrupt these processes and transform resource “curses” into deeply needed support for peace and stable development.

Conflict and instability in countries whose economies are heavily invested in natural resource have often hindered local development and security. Many of these countries—including Cambodia, Angola, Indonesia, and DRC—have suffered from one of two forms of plunder:

Types of Natural Resources Plunder:

1. Where the few steal from the many:
Natural assets are, by definition, without natural owners, and therefore lie as easily taken common goods. “This process of expropriation opens up a whole array of dysfunctional variants, many of which are violent,” Collier noted.

2. Where the present steals from the future:
Intertemporal mismanagement is a possibility, as unlike man-made assets, natural assets belong to all generations.

Operating from a worldview of weak sustainability, where profits from natural assets are reinvested for the benefit of future generations, Collier suggested that natural resource rights are more akin to “rights of stewardship” than traditional property rights. “We may well transform that value into something that is more productive, but if we pull up natural assets from the ground, we should leave to the future something that is equivalently valuable.”

Collier argued that the successful harnessing of natural resources for stable and sustainable development depends on the application of a tenuous decision chain:

Natural Resources Decision Chain:

1. Discovery Process:
Failure in this phase stems from poor property rights, and the time consistency problem—uncertainty that conditions and regulations that make expensive upfront investments profitable today will remain in place in the future.

2. Appropriate Taxation:
Currently, as a result of poor negotiations or limited information regarding the status of resources, governments are unable to craft tax regimes which effectively capture resource rent.

3. Avoiding the Delta:
Sustainable management any discovered subsoil assets must avoid a local “Nigerian Delta” catastrophe. Clearly designating the government as the sole responsible agent for resource rents may limit such failures.

4. Saving the money:
To avoid plunder of the future by the present, Collier suggested that, though politically difficult, a proportion of revenue streams must be delineated from general accounts.

5. Building the capacity to invest in the country:
Collier deemed the inability of resource-rich countries to attract diversified investment as the “killer link.” Governments must use returns from subsoil assets to fund “investment in investment”—directing public capital toward transportation and utility infrastructure, education, health, and other short-term projects. Once in place, such projects encourage future public and private investments, thereby multiplying long-term returns.

As with many complex systems, Collier warned that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If one link fails, “the chain won’t pull the country from poverty to prosperity.” On the other hand, if each link holds, the value is tremendous. ”[Y]ou really can pull the country from poverty to prosperity over the course of a generation. There are no fixes in economics that are faster than that.”

Ultimately, Collier and Birdsall emphasized that success depends upon the development of an informed and competent “critical mass” of people. Even the strongest decision chain will fail if it is not underwritten by a majority of the population. Birdsall reiterated the need for public participation in the process, possibly through direct income distribution or responsible interventions by non-vested third parties.

Photo: Courtesy of Oxford University Press.