State of the World 2005 Trends and Facts - Building Peace Through Environmental Cooperation

“While a large body of research examines the contribution of environmental degradation to violent conflict, little in the way of systematic scholarship evaluates an equally important possibility: that environmental cooperation may bring peace.”

After decades of simmering conflict and heated border disputes, Peru and Ecuador ceased hostilities under a 1998 peace agreement facilitated by Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the United States. The disputing governments agreed to establish conservation zones along the border that would be managed by their national agencies but headed by a binational steering committee. The new Cordillera del Condor conservation zone—or “peace park”—uses the interdependence of the two countries’ ecosystems to remove a thorny obstacle to peace.

Today, there is growing recognition that cooperation can bring greater benefits than fighting over or merely dividing shared resources. “Environmental peacemaking “involves using cooperative efforts to manage resources as a way to transform insecurities and create more peaceful relations between parties in dispute. As such initiatives become more frequent and gain momentum, they may provide a way to transform both how people approach conflict and how they view the environment.

Environment and Conflict: A History

“Posing a problem as one of ‘environmental security’ may inhibit cooperation in the very places where the ecological insecurities of people and communities are most stark.”

Do environmental problems cause or exacerbate violent conflict? There is some evidence that environmental problems can trigger or exacerbate local conflicts that emerge from existing social cleavages such as ethnicity, class, or religion. Yet claims that environmental degradation induces violent conflict remain controversial. Some fear that casting environmental problems as conflict triggers will “securitize” environmental policy, injecting militarized “us-versus-them” thinking into a realm that demands interdependent, cooperative responses.

Governments in the global South have long been wary that the North’s increased interest in international environmental protection might hamper their own quest for economic development. In the context of an already contentious North-South environmental dialogue, poor countries often view the concept of “environmental security” as a rich-country agenda to control natural resources and development strategies. Given these concerns, recasting environmental debates in security terms has not been an effective catalyst for global environmental cooperation.

Why the Environment?

“By their very nature, environmental problems demand anticipatory action, entail longer time horizons, and require an appreciation for sudden, surprising, and dramatic changes.”

As a peacemaking tool, the environment offers some useful, perhaps even unique, qualities tat lend themselves to building peace and transforming conflict: environmental challenges ignore political boundaries, require a long-term perspective, encourage local and nongovernmental participation, and extend community building beyond polarizing economic linkages. Given these characteristics, environmental cooperation could push decision makers to embrace a longer time horizon, such that future gains weigh more heavily in current calculations.

Environmental issues encourage people to work at the society-to-society level as well at the interstate level. Over time, regular interaction among scientists and non-governmental organizations may help to build a foundation of trust and implicit cooperation. For example, despite daily battles in the streets of the West Bank, Palestinians and Israelis continue to meet informally to manage aspects of their shared water resources. Cross-border environmental cooperation may also help to build a more broadly shared conception of place and community.

Using Environmental Cooperation to Build Peace

“Environmental peacemaking recognizes that a robust peace will require a foundation in sustainability.”

Most environmental peacemaking initiatives fall into one of three partially overlapping categories: efforts to prevent conflicts related directly to the environment, attempts to initiate and maintain dialogue between parties in conflict, and initiatives to create a sustainable basis for peace. Initiatives that target shared environmental problems may be used to establish a direct line of dialogue where other attempts at diplomacy have failed. Often, conflicting nations find the environment to be one subject where communication can be maintained.

Shared environmental challenges may be useful not only for initiating dialogue but also for actually transforming conflict-based relations by breaking down the barriers to cooperation—transforming mistrust, suspicion, and divergent interests into a shared knowledge base and shared goals. In the end, whether the environment causes the conflict or simply aggravates it is irrelevant, as there will be no long-lasting peace unless groups can cooperate and develop a solution.

Remaining Challenges

“Despite environmental peacemaking’s potential, a skeptical eye is warranted when such initiatives remain the narrow purview of governments and political-economic elites.”

Initiatives that improve trust and reciprocity among governments without promoting a broader, society-to-society foundation for peace run the risk of reinforcing the zero-sum, state-based logic of national security. They are also prone to short-term mitigation efforts that fail to address the full scope of the problem.

Narrow government-to-government initiatives risk creating the conditions for more-efficient resource plunder, promoting neither peace nor sustainability. There is also a danger that governments are simply deciding things over the heads of people most affected by the projects. Eco-tourism may benefit wealthy hotel owners and foreign investors far more than locals living in the shadows of cross-border peace parks. In southern Africa, projects were most successful when greater control over land and resource use was ceded to local communities.

Making Environmental Peacemaking a Reality

“Environmental Peacemaking strategies offer the chance to craft a positive, practical policy framework for cooperation that can engage a broad community of stakeholders by combining environment, development, and peace-related concerns.”

Cross-border environmental cooperation can yield tangible environmental, economic and political gains. If properly designed, environmental initiatives can also reduce tensions and the likelihood of violent conflict between countries and communities. Yet environmental cooperation does not occur easily or automatically. Knowledge of environmental initiatives designed specifically to address violence and insecurity is limited. Governments and other actors have just begun to share experience and knowledge about environmental peacemaking through peace-and-conflict assessments of environmental programs. The challenge is to amass evidence that these strategies could create opportunities.

The Environment and Security Initiative (ENVSEC), a partnership established in 2002 among the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the UN Environment Programme, and the UN Development Programme, is an important attempt to test environmental peacemaking arguments. Its objective is to identify, map, and respond to situations where environmental problems threaten to generate tensions or offer opportunities for cooperation. Yet ENVSEC also illustrates the hurdles commonly faced by attempts to put environmental peacemaking ideas into operation. Host governments often contest the idea of environment-security linkages, or consider them less important problems. Various stakeholders have different expectations, and political sensitivities must always be considered.

Nevertheless, globalization’s ability to move political dynamics out of narrow interstate settings and into a broader society-to-society context is an important and healthy sign. This new social space holds much of the potential for environmental peacemaking.



Discussion Questions

  1. What can donor nations and international aid organizations do to promote water cooperation globally?
  2. How can cooperative water mechanisms reduce conflict potential?
  3. What are some examples of successful water cooperation on the local level? International level?

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Further information as well as the references for this material is available in State of the World 2005.