Showing posts from category cooperation.
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Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam on the Population Reference Bureau’s “Women’s Edition” Trip to Ethiopia
›The original version of this article, by Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.My name is Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam, and I’m a freelance journalist, writer, and editor from Pakistan. My passion is writing about human rights with a special focus on gender issues and reproductive health. Blogging is a personal joy to me, as I put my heart into my writing and blogging allows for a more personalized style. Digital journalism is a sign of evolution – one I happily accept. My pet peeve is marginalization on any grounds. I am a mother of a teenage daughter and live in Karachi.
As part of the Population Reference Bureau’s (PRB) group of journalists in Women’s Edition 2010-2012, I recently had the chance to travel to Ethiopia on a visit that was unforgettable. The visit inspired a series of seven brief travel-blogs, based on my seven days there. Women’s Edition is a wonderful opportunity to connect with other like-minded female journalists from developing countries around the world, and learn solutions to the problems from this interaction. The program has reaffirmed my belief that our commonalities are more than the differences.
Read Farahnaz Zahidi Moazzam’s posts from her trip to Ethiopia on her blog, Impassioned Ramblings, and view photos from the trip on PRB’s Facebook page.
Photo Credit: PRB. -
Watch: Michael Renner on Creating Peacebuilding Opportunities From Disasters
›Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute working on the intersection between environmental degradation, natural resource issues, and peace and conflict. Recently, Renner has focused on water use and its effects on the Himalayan region. In particular he’s working to find positive opportunities that can turn “what is a tremendous problem, into perhaps an opportunity for collaboration among different communities, among different regions, and perhaps…ultimately across the borders of the region,” he said during this interview with ECSP.
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Finding the Right Paddle: Navigating Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies
›June 14, 2011 // By Christina DaggettAfter decades on the periphery, climate change has made its way onto the national security stage. Yet, while the worlds of science, policy, and defense are awakening to the threats of rising sea levels, stronger storms, and record temperatures, debate continues over the means and extent of adaptation and mitigation programs. In a world of possibilities, how to decide which paddle to use to navigate uncertain waters?
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Inaugural Lee Hamilton Lecture at the Wilson Center
Admiral Mullen: “Security Means More Than Defense”
›Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen delivered the inaugural talk in the Lee Hamilton Lecture Series on Civil Discourse and Democracy at the Wilson Center yesterday where he spoke on the importance of “taking the long-view” on U.S. engagement with the world and the changing field of 21st century geopolitics.
Mullen, whose aides, Captain Wayne Porter and Colonel “Puck” Mykleby, wrote the recently launched Mr. Y paper on a new national strategic narrative, echoed many of the same sentiments.
“[The Mr. paper] has some interesting things to say about how we are seeing a shift away from 20th century concepts of power and control to that of promoting strength and influence,” Mullen said. “Frankly, in this small, flatter, and faster world, I think any nation that believes it can, in a very clinical way, control events does so at their own peril.”
“The narrative also happens to share my long-held belief that we must remain engaged internationally if we wish to pursue the world that our children [and] our grandchildren deserve,” he continued:As challenging as engaging others with different views may be, the alternative of abandoning these partners in these regions is far worse. We’ve gone down that road before, and it is one that leads to isolation and resentment, ultimately making our nation less secure as we deceive ourselves into believing that ignoring these challenges will somehow make them go away.
Mullen also agreed with the Mr. Y authors’ view on adopting a more holistic view of national security:
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Until we restore a sense of hope in these challenged regions, we will see again and again that security without prosperity is ultimately unsustainable.Wayne and Puck put it well when they said we must recognize that security means more than defense. And sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests, and interdependencies. We must accept that competitors are not necessarily adversaries and that a winner does not demand a loser.
The military’s energy initiatives are an important focus as well, Mullen said. “We’re the biggest consumer of energy in the U.S. government…and I don’t think we’ll ever get to a position where that’s not the case, but we certainly ought to recognize that and figure out a way to do it more effectively, efficiently, and at a much reduced cost.”
What we learned in Iraq is “there were too many people getting killed in long convoys,” Mullen said. The Marines were able to adapt to that threat by developing self-contained green cooling kits, and “that’s where we’re headed,” he said. “Our focus on and investments in the green world has taken off.”
“Now it is really mainstream: The service chiefs, combatant commanders, [they] talk about it,” Mullen continued. “There are investments being made, both from an S&T; standpoint – science and technology – as well as research and development.”
Read the transcript in its entirety here for the Chairman’s remarks on the continued importance of the UN, G-20, and NATO; the short-term intractability of challenges in Iran and North Korea; the rise of China; continued American military dominance; the defense budget; and the Arab Spring, which he called the “most significant change afoot in the world today.”
Photo Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, courtesy of David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
Rosemarie Calvert, Center for a Better Life
Winning Hearts and Minds: An Interview with Chief Naval Officer Admiral Gary Roughead
›May 23, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Rosemarie Calvert, appeared in the Center for a Better Life’s livebetter magazine.
Few people understand “smart” power as well as Chief Naval Officer (CNO) Admiral Gary Roughead. To this ingenious, adept leader of the world’s largest and most powerful navy, it’s not just about military strategy or political science; it’s about heart. It’s about the measure of a man with regard to honor, courage and commitment. And, it’s about appreciation and respect for the natural world. As one of the U.S. Defense Department’s most powerful decision-makers, Roughead has helped mold a new breed of sailor who understands that preventing war is just as important as winning war – that creating partners is more important than creating opponents. Add mission mandates such as humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and environmental stewardship, and it’s clear why Roughead and his brand of smart power are having a profound impact on international peace, national security, and natural security.
Engendering Environmental Advocacy
“You don’t live on the ocean and not love it. My appreciation for the environment came from a very early age – from just loving to be on the water. It’s something that’s had a very strong impact on me,” explains Roughead, who grew up in North Africa where his father worked in the oil business. He and his family lived along an uninhabited area of coastline where his father’s company built a power plant and refinery to process and transport Libya’s huge oil field finds to offshore tankers.
“We were the first people to move there; I was still in grammar school. The beauty in being the first was that the coastline was absolutely pristine. Even before school, I would get up and go skin diving. There were beautiful reefs, and fish were everywhere. The vegetation was just incredible. The company built an offshore loading area a few miles off the beach with 36-inch pipes pumping crude oil out to where these big supertankers would come in. Back then, there wasn’t a high regard for the environment, so when storms would kick-up and ships got underway in a hurry, they would just cast them off and all that oil would go into the ocean.
“Fast forward about five years, and the last time I went skin diving I didn’t see a living thing. The vegetation was dead. At that time I was visiting my folks on summer leave from the Naval Academy. There were periods when I would skin dive and then surface after being down about 35-40 feet, and my lungs would be ready to burst. I’d look up, having moved from my original location, and see this massive oil slick. And, I’d go, ‘Oh gosh…no!’ But, you didn’t have any choice. I would come home and actually have to clean the oil off with kerosene because it was caked on me.
“I saw and experienced environmental devastation, and it had an effect on me. Being at sea all the time – I love going to sea and seeing everything about it – drove me to the views I have. I really do think there’s compatibility between the Navy and the environment. We have things we must accomplish, but we can do them cleanly and responsibly. That’s what we’ve tried to demonstrate to those who have different views – that there has to be compatibility between the two.”
Continue reading on the Center for a Better Life.
Rosemarie Calvert is the publisher and editorial director of livebetter magazine and director of the Center for a Better Life.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “USS Nitze underway with ships from U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and foreign navies,” courtesy of flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery. -
Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace
›Download Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace from the Wilson Center.
How does globalization affect natural resource issues such as water on local, national, and international levels? Can our common dependence on these stressed resources be a force for bringing people together rather than dividing us? What lessons can we learn from sharing insights from communities at these very different levels of organization?
Pathways to Peace
In January 2010, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Fetzer Institute invited 22 scholars and practitioners to a two-day seminar to discuss these questions and the deep connection between caring for the environment and caring for community. Pathways to Peace: Defining Community in the Age of Globalization was the second seminar in a three-year initiative to combine scholarship, public policy, and local practice to articulate and support global conflict transformation and reconciliation in communities throughout the world. Examining the effect of environmental peacebuilding on communities, the discussion explored how governments, NGOs, the private sector, and other interested parties can generate positive outcomes while minimizing negative ones.
Participants from Canada, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Israel, Kenya, Nepal, Switzerland, the Philippines, and the United States brought to the table a wide range of experience and expertise from diverse fields, including peacebuilding, community building, health care, economic development, conflict resolution, and foundation management. By convening leaders in environmental peacebuilding and community building, the Wilson Center and the Fetzer Institute drew on a wide range of experience and perspectives related to environment, conflict, and peacebuilding practice and research. The group used water access and peacebuilding case studies as a means to enter into dialogue about the challenges of global community engagement.
Shared Waters
In preparation for the seminar, geographer and renowned water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University contributed a paper, “The Enlightenment Rift and Peacebuilding: Rationality, Spirituality, and Shared Waters,” in which he laid out the complicated, sometimes conflictual, and often surprisingly collaborative aspects of negotiations over water resources. For Wolf, given water’s life-sustaining quality but limited quantity, it seems intuitive that “water should be the most conflictive of resources.” However, he maintains that “while press reports of international waters often focus on conflict, what has been more encouraging is that, throughout the world, water also induces cooperation, even in particularly hostile basins, and even as disputes rage over other issues…there is a long, and in many ways deeper, history of water-related cooperation.”
On this foundation, Wolf illustrates four stages of water conflict: from adversarial, to reflective, to integrative, to action. Lessons from the “spiritual understanding of water conflict transformation” he says, “offer not only new understanding of current disputes, but also models, tools, and strategies for more effective water conflict management and transformation.”
Seminar participants used Wolf’s paper as a starting point from which to write short papers based on their own expertise and experience. From Kenya to Nepal to Harlem, participants shared their perspectives on the challenges and promises of environmental issues, community building and organizing, and peacebuilding.
This report, Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace, draws from the rich dialogue of the seminar and seminar papers to share the broad range of experience and the insight of the participants. To learn more about these remarkable programs and the people working on natural resources, peacebuilding, and community development, see the complete list of papers on page 120, which can be downloaded from the Wilson Center. -
Climate Adaptation, Development, and Peacebuilding in Fragile States: Finding the Triple-Bottom Line
›“The climate agenda goes well beyond climate,” said Dan Smith, secretary general of International Alert at a recent Wilson Center event. “In the last 60 years, at least 40 percent of all interstate conflicts have had a link to natural resources” and those that do are also twice as likely to relapse in the five years following a peace agreement, said Neil Levine, director of the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID. [Video Below]
Development, peace, and climate stability are “the triple-bottom line,” said Smith. “How would you ever think that it would be possible to make progress on one, while ignoring the other two?” Levine and Smith were joined by Alexander Carius, managing director of Adelphi Research, who pointed out that climate change is both a matter of human security and traditional security. For example, as sea-level rise threatens the people of small-island states, “it also affects, in a very traditional sense, the question of security and a state’s sovereignty,” he said.
The Triple-Bottom Line
Conflicts are never attributable to a single cause, but instead are caused by “a whole pile-up, a proliferation, a conglomeration of reasons” that often include poverty, weak governance, traumatic memory of war, and climate change, said Smith. “Climate adds to the strains and the stresses that countries are under,” and works as a “risk-multiplier, or conflict multiplier,” he said.
Focusing development and peace-building efforts on those regions experiencing multiple threats is both a “moral imperative” and a “self-interested imperative,” said Smith. “We benefit from a more prosperous and a more stable world.”
There are currently one and a half billion people in the world living in countries that face these interlinked problems, said Smith, “and interlinked problems, almost by definition, require interlinked solutions.” Responding to the needs of these people requires developing resiliency so that they can respond to the consequences of climate change, which he called “unknown unknowns.”
“What we need are institutions and policies and actions which guard us not only against the threats we can see coming… but against the ones we can’t see coming,” said Smith. The strength and resilience of governments, economies, and communities are key to determining whether climate events become disasters.
Interagency Cooperation
“Part of making the triple-bottom line a real thing is to understand that we will have to be working on our own institutions, even the best and most effective of them, to make sure that they see the interlinkages,” said Smith.
But even though individuals increasingly understand the need to address security, development, and climate change in an integrated fashion, “institutions have only limited capacities for coordination,” said Carius. Institutions are constrained by bureaucratic processes, political mandates, or limited human resources, he said. “Years ago, I always argued for a more integrated policy process; today I would argue for an integrated assessment of the issues, but to…translate it back into sectoral approaches.”
Levine expressed optimism that with “a whole new avalanche of interagency connections” being established in the last few years, U.S. interagency cooperation has become “the culture.” However, if coordination efforts are not carefully aligned to advance concrete programs and policies, they run the risk of “getting bogged down in massive bureaucratic exercises,” he said. “‘Whole of government’ needn’t be ‘all of government,’ and it needn’t be whole of government, all of government, all the time.”
Building Political Will
Europe has a “conducive political environment to making [climate and security] arguments,” said Smith, but the dialogue has yet to translate into action. In 2007, the debate on climate and security was first brought to the UN and EU with a series of reports by government agencies and the first-ever debate on the impacts of climate change on security at the UN Security Council, said Carius. However, none of the recommendations from the reports were followed and “much of the political momentum that existed…ended up in a very technical, low-level dialogue,” he said.
More recently, the United Kingdom included energy, resources, and climate change as a priority security risk in their National Security Strategy. And Germany, which joined the UN Security Council as a rotating member this year, is expected to reintroduce the topic of climate and security when they assume the Security Council Presidency in July. These steps may help to regain some of the political momentum and “create legitimacy for at least making the argument – the very strong argument – that climate change has an impact on security,” said Carius.
Sources: AFP, UK Cabinet Office, Telegraph, United Nations
Image Credit: “Trees cocooned in spiders webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan” courtesy of flickr user DFID -
The Continuing Challenges of Integrated Development
›March 20, 2011 // By Schuyler Null“How are we going to feed all these mouths?” asked Bekele Hambissa, director of the Environmental Protection and Development Organization in Addis, on day two of the PHE Ethiopia Consortium general assembly (read about day one here). Environmental resources are directly tied to Ethiopia’s population growth, said Hambissa, during a discussion of balancing efforts to address population growth, environment, and livelihoods. While poverty alleviation is an important goal of population, health, and environment integration (PHE), it must be environmentally sustainable, he said.
