Showing posts from category conflict.
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Geoff Dabelko on Finding Common Ground Among Conservation, Development, and Security at the 2011 WWF Fuller Symposium
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Bridging the divide between the conservation and security communities “requires that we check some stereotypes at the door,” said ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko at the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Forward: Ideas That Work and How Science Can Effect Change symposium. Changes in global climate, as well as environmental threats more local in origin, require us to “find ways to minimize threats [and] maximize opportunities…from the dialogue between these different communities – and get out of our silos to do that,” said Dabelko.
However, this dialogue faces real challenges and concrete trade-offs. “There are big imbalances in terms of the resources that these different communities have,” and this often cuts the conversation short, he said. The conservation and security communities are also orientated towards some very different objectives and toolsets. But “given the levels of stress that our natural systems are under, given the level of dysfunction that are political systems are exhibiting, to me, it suggests that it’s a call for all hands on deck,” asserted Dabelko.
“The relationship between environment, natural resources, and violent conflict” is not the “only part of the story,” he said. Conservation goals can be achieved by preserving biodiversity on military sites and demilitarized zones, and through the Department of Defense’s new focus on reducing energy consumption. In the past, Russian-Norwegian-U.S. cooperation around de-commissioning Soviet-era nuclear submarines protected fragile Arctic habitats, prevented potentially dangerous technology from reaching world markets, and built confidence between recent adversaries. The dual potentials of “peace parks” in fragile and insecure borders across the Middle East have also garnered attention.
Environmental Peacebuilding
“Too often…natural resources are viewed as luxury items – what you worry about once you get rich, democratic, and peaceful,” yet, the environment is an “essential ingredient” for peace, Dabelko said. It is often “key to restoring livelihoods and jump-starting the economy” in conflict affected countries.
“Under a rubric or umbrella that we’re calling ‘environmental peacebuilding’ we have systematic efforts to…break those links with conflict,” he said. The future “concern is that because of environmental change, growth in population, growth in consumption,” and rampant inequities, climate change will act as a “threat multiplier.” “A risk analysis frame” is required to think through not only the risk of failing to act but also the risk of acting in ways that have the potential to create conflict if done poorly.
“We’re talking about changing access to resources and introducing money into uncertain political contexts – who gets it for what. That can be done well and that can be done poorly, and if you are talking to the folks in the conflict community, that’s often an inflection point for when conflict is a potential,” Dabelko said. In the context of potentially troublesome adaptations such as biofuel production, hydropower projects, and REDD+, this means taking seriously the well-worn, but apt, mantra of “do no harm” and working to maximize the “triple bottom line” of development, peace, and climate stability.
A question and answer period, moderated by USAID’s Cynthia Gill, followed the presentation with fellow speakers Anne Salomon of Fraser University, Michael Jenkins of Forest Trends, and Martin Palmer from the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (available below). -
The Sahel’s Complex Vulnerability to Food Crises
›February 24, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“Across the Sahel region of western Africa, a combination of drought, poverty, high grain prices, environmental degradation, and chronic underdevelopment is expected to plunge millions of people into a new food and nutrition crisis this year,” according to a UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) statement from February 10. The coming “lean season” is predicted to be the third food crisis in less than a decade and highlights a set of glaring vulnerabilities in a region facing severe long-term threats to health, livelihoods, and security. However, as international agencies call for funding to mount yet another emergency response, serious concerns are being raised about what is (or isn’t) being done to address the root causes of vulnerability.
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The U.S. Military, Climate Change, and Maritime Boundaries
›The Defense Science Board, which advices the U.S. military on scientific and technical matters, writes in a recent task force report that the most immediate and destabilizing effects of climate change will impact U.S. security indirectly, through American reliance on already-vulnerable states that are “vital” sources of fuel and minerals or key partners in combatting terrorism. The report singles out three specific themes as particularly important to responding to near-term climate-driven threats and adapting to climate change’s long-term impacts: providing “better and more credible information [about climate change] to decision makers,” improving water management, and building better local adaptation capacity, particularly in African nations. Ultimately, the report concludes that the most effective, most efficient way the United States can respond to climate change is not militarily but “through anticipatory and preventative actions using primarily indigenous resources.”In “Maritime Boundary Disputes in East Asia: Lessons for the Arctic,” published in International Studies Perspectives, James Manicom writes that as climate change makes access and exploration easier, there are lessons to be learned from East Asian states’ handling of maritime disputes for Arctic nations. Manicom finds that simply because a state may be party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), disputes over boundaries and “over the methods used to settle disputes” persist. Domestic identity politics also can and do affect the extent to which a state attempts to exert influence over disputed areas – a noteworthy conclusion given growing rhetoric in Arctic states over the national importance of disputed territories. Finally, Manicom points out that, while “high expectations of resource wealth” may fuel disputes and “political tension,” those expectations do not inevitably doom competing states to conflict over resources. -
Kaitlin Shilling: Climate Conflict and Export Crops in Sub-Saharan Africa
›“There’s been a tremendous amount of work done on looking for a climate signal for civil conflict, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and a lot of this work draws a very clear and simple path – if it rains more, or if it rains less, there will be more or less conflict,” says Stanford University’s Kaitlin Shilling in this short video interview. Unfortunately, that straightforward research does little in the way of helping policymakers: “the only way to change the agricultural outputs due to climate change is to change climate change, reduce climate change, or stop it,” she says, “and we’re not really good at that part.”
Shilling moderated a panel at last month’s National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment on climate-conflict research. Agricultural export crops – cotton, coffee, cocoa, tea, vanilla – represent one area where policymakers might be able to intervene to prevent climate-driven conflict, says Shilling. Though not as important from a food security perspective, “these crops are really important” for sub-Saharan economies, as well as for “government revenues, which [are] closely related to government capacity.”
But “the effects of climate change on those crops are less well understood,” Shilling says. How they relate to “government revenues and how those relate to civil conflict is an area that I spend a lot of time doing research on.”
By “understand[ing] the mechanisms that underlie the potential relationship between climate and conflict, we can start identifying interventions that make sense to reduce the vulnerability of people to conflict and help them to adapt to the coming climate change.” -
The Ramsar Convention: A New Window for Environmental Diplomacy?
›In seeking ways to connect conservation with peacemaking, the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security (IEDS) has released a study that examines an expanded role for the international wetlands treaty, the Ramsar Convention.
The Ramsar Convention: A New Window for Environmental Diplomacy? describes the wetlands convention, its place within the international environmental treaty world, and its potential to enhance environmental security during this dynamic time of increasingly insecure water supplies and climate change. With more than 40 years of work, the treaty has been quietly and effectively conserving wetlands and increasing recognition of the need to build international cooperation around them. The treaty has also helped define wetlands within greater biogeographic regions and led to formal identification of transboundary wetlands.
In the article, we set out to combine information from the convention’s 234 listed wetlands (13 of which have formal transboundary plans) with the Global Peace Index, which ranks countries using 23 indicators, such as number of conflicts, conflict deaths, military expenditures, and relations with neighboring countries. The result is a prioritized list of countries most in need of tools of conflict resolution.
Working within the framework of the convention builds capacity between high-conflict-risk nations and has potential to develop otherwise-difficult-to-establish trust because the process is transparent and all stakeholder voices are heard. This can be important even when the existing conflict has nothing to do with international wetlands.
The convention is active in many countries with ongoing conflicts, such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, and Sudan, and efforts there may help inform the ongoing debate as to the efficacy of conservation as a tool for peacemaking.
As environmental conditions continue to evolve rapidly, the need for institutions that can work in the transboundary environment will increase. The established international infrastructure of the convention has the potential to be a greater force in peacemaking. Further research may help focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the current system and reveal ways for more effective peacemaking efforts.
Suggestions for ways to enhance the convention’s role in environmental diplomacy include working more closely with researchers and practitioners directly involved in the environmental peacemaking field, increased focus on developing capacity for increased flexibility to react to dynamic conditions, and more active promotion of formal transboundary agreements.
Pamela Griffin is an independent scholar at IEDS where she focuses on the diplomatic potential of transboundary wetlands. -
Taking a Livelihoods Approach to Understanding Environmental Security
›February 17, 2012 // By Kate DiamondSince the concept of “environmental security” first gained traction in the early 1990s, research on the issue has been overwhelmingly focused on how environmental change impacts state security. That has been to the detriment of policymakers trying to preempt instability and conflict, according to the University of Toronto’s Tom Deligiannis in his article, “The Evolution of Environment-Conflict Research: Toward a Livelihood Framework,” published in February’s Global Environmental Politics.
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Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics (Book Launch)
›“The world’s population is changing in ways that are historically unprecedented,” said Jack Goldstone, George Mason University professor and co-editor of the new book, Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics. [Video Below]
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Papua New Guinea Youth Conflict Study Reveals Effects of Civil War on Young Men
›Demographic security is fast becoming a central concept in discussions about the relationship between youth and violence, and, although quantitative work has been the normal mode of research in the field, recent evidence from Papua New Guinea’s autonomous region of Bougainville shows the value of understanding local-level nuance.
Policies to support youth in post-conflict situations are important for building peace, particularly given the “youth bulge” thesis that suggests that large cohorts of marginalized young people are contributing to a demographic “arc of instability” across the developing world. However, the statistical evidence showing correlations between youth bulges and an increased risk of instability has been criticized for failing to account for the agency of youth themselves. For instance, Marc Sommers points out that there is “scant information on how and why most marginalized African youth resist engagement in violence even when it would seem to provide immediate benefits.” This lack of detailed, evidence-based knowledge can frustrate efforts to develop effective youth policies, particularly in post-conflict settings, where the risk of the persistence or even return of violence, is arguably increased by the presence of youth bulges.
Bougainville’s “Crisis Generation”
Hoping to address this lack of knowledge about how and why young people engage in peace or violence in post-conflict settings, I recently spent several weeks in Bougainville. My aim was to study how young men make lives for themselves in the social circumstances that exist nine years on from a civil war that lasted more than a decade and claimed more lives than any Pacific conflict since World War II. The qualitative evidence I collected on these pathways informed analysis in an article co-authored with Jon Barnett in the Journal of Political Geography, “Localising Peace: The Young Men of Bougainville’s ‘Crisis Generation’” (subscription required).
With a 2010 median age of just 20.4 years (projected to remain less than 25 until at least 2030) and more than 60 percent of its population less than 30 years old, Papua New Guinea is among the world’s youngest states, according to UN population data. Despite a wealth of natural resources, the state faces severe challenges to providing education, jobs, and security for a young population whose growth has for many years severely outpaced the capacity of its formal institutions. Papua New Guinea, and the region of Bougainville within it, is a state where demographic strains are reasonably expected to continue to pose risks to an already fragile state.
Bougainville’s 18-to-30-year olds, known among their peers and elders as the “crisis generation,” are those with living memory of the violence but who were too young to have fought on either side. They continue to face challenges with trauma, accessing education and work, achieving social standing, and escaping from histories of violence. These sometimes impede their capacity to participate meaningfully in local society and can lead them towards sporadic acts of violence.
Understanding the Pathways to Violence
For many young men in Bougainville, achieving critical social measures of success – such as amassing the wealth required for marriage – has become nearly impossible due to high unemployment and restricted access to education. Marriage matters, since land rights in Bougainvillean societies are generally derived matrilineally, and therefore young men who are unable to marry tend to lack secure access to land.
Education is a critical institution for young men in Bougainville. Unfortunately, the formal sector that might employ young men upon completing secondary education is very small, and therefore much of the time and money spent pursuing that education is wasted. The education system itself lacks the resources to meet the needs of all those who seek secondary education. To cope with the demand, youth are asked to sit for exams in grade 8 and again in grade 10, a practice which creates high failure rates and whittles down the student cohort from several thousand at primary level to only a few hundred at the completion of secondary schooling (few of whom then receive meaningful employment). For many, this failure to obtain a return on years of school fees places significant strain on the relationships between youth and their familial and social networks.
Some adapt to these challenges by “upgrading” their poor education through distance learning or by seeking out vocational training as a way to obtain skills relevant for rural life. But some are seen as wedged between a set of unworkable options: “Many of them are existing in a vacuum,” said one civil society leader. “They see things outside but they cannot grab them and they cannot ground themselves.”
As a result, many turn to homebrew alcohol and marijuana and a select few seek social standing by adopting displays and acts of violence that imitate the personas of former rebels. Of these choices, the first attracts the stigma of “lazy,” and the second, “dangerous.” In both cases, these stigmas risk overshadowing the legitimate challenges facing young men by distilling the complexity of the world into a simple morality crisis that itself creates divides both between and within generations.
Building Policy Prescriptions
Unfortunately, the sorts of life and trauma counseling services capable of engaging these young men remain under-supported. As one youth worker claimed of the youth who have no memory of life before the war, “They don’t know how it was before the Crisis. They think things have always been this way; that this is normal.”
In a more southern district, one young man explained of his more notorious peers, “It’s these guys roaming around, mixing with ladies and drinking, they cannot reason so they use the gun, the knife – offensive weapons. And when they are sober they regret. These people spoil the peace process here in Bougainville.”
Providing viable alternatives to these lifestyles is crucial and can only be achieved by asking young men themselves about their world, about the challenges they face, and about the strategies they take to maneuver through them. By understanding the social, cultural, and geographical specifics of a local context, this form of analysis provides a valuable starting point for determining and evaluating policy interventions that statistics alone cannot provide.
In Bougainville’s case, an expansion of vocational training and the provision of trauma counseling, regardless of whether a person was a combatant or not, are two desperately needed interventions that have the potential to increase the capacity of young men to achieve success through peaceful means.
Sources: Conciliation Resources, The Sydney Morning Herald, UN Population Division.
Photo Credit: “Mekamui/Panguna” and crossing from Buka to Bougainville, courtesy of flickr user madlemurs.
