Natural Resources Management, Environmental Governance, and Peacebuilding in Darfur: Creating a win-win situation when farmers and pastoralists were incentivised to find shared solutions

art by Lynn Finnegan (Ireland)

Dr. Flemming Nielsen and Atila Uras (UNEP Sudan); Eissa Yagoub Musa and Awadalla Hamid Mohamed Osman (Practical Action Sudan); Co-authors

Sharing a contested, limited resource is a difficult starting point for peacebuilding. The Wadi El Ku project improved Darfur’s natural resource base, making the intervention conditional on local communities finding solutions to their resource conflicts.

Context

The Darfur region in western Sudan has experienced large-scale armed conflict since 2003. More than 300,000 lives have been lost. Violence continues despite the 2020 Peace Agreement. The Darfur genocide is often explained as an ethnic conflict between Arab tribes and the indigenous Fur people. However, it was the result of overlapping conflicts related to regional and national politics, competition over natural resources, failed state institutions, marginalization, population growth, desertification, climate change, and other factors that do not always follow simplistic ethnic divisions.

A recurrent factor is the limited natural resource base that provides livelihoods in the region. By the 1980s, all agro-ecological niches in Darfur were fully utilized, making it difficult to accommodate the rapidly growing population. The local leaders, who in the past had allocated natural resources to families and individuals, had seen their authority undermined by the spread of private land ownership and attempts to replace them by post-independence regimes. However, the state has not been able to fully implement various land reforms. The previously symbiotic relationship between pastoralists and farmers broke down. Successive droughts during the 1980s resulted in massive population displacement. Conflicts over access to resources increased, escalating into a civil war in 2003. The movements of millions of people due to war and drought has resulted in multiple claims to the same land and other natural resources.

All peace talks and agreements have acknowledged that lasting peace in Darfur requires resolving contested land ownership and natural resource access. Yet, there has been little progress on these issues over the last decades, in part due to a lack of trust in both formal and informal institutions. 

What’s been done

Agreeing to share a contested limited resource is a difficult starting point for peacebuilding. Instead, the Wadi El Ku Catchment Management project started by increasing the natural resource base, making the intervention conditional on the local communities finding solutions to their natural resource conflicts.[i] A zero-sum game was then turned into a win-win situation where stakeholders were incentivised to find shared solutions.

Being close to the edge of the Sahara, rainfall in the area is just around 200 mm per year, but the vast catchment area of 36,000 km2 collects significant amounts of water, albeit only for a few days or weeks every year.

The riverbed is up to two km wide of fertile loam and clay, but the lack of water means that much of it cannot be cultivated. The solution is low, long earth dams— ‘weirs’—built across the Wadi to hold the water back long enough for the soil to become soaked, before releasing it downstream. The soil’s high absorptive capacity makes it possible to cultivate one, two, or in rare cases, three crops after the rainy season.

Before constructing a weir, each community in the area is supported in developing a vision and a land-use plan. The project facilitates the participation of government officials in this process. The next step is to bring several communities together to identify which resources are contested. The project’s interventions are conditional on the communities reaching a consensus. This creates a strong incentive for finding creative shared solutions. 

The project facilitated a governance structure in which local farmers and pastoralists are represented through local community-based organizations that have representatives in a Natural Resource Committee (NRC) covering several communities. This helped parties reach consensus through the creation of trusted conflict resolution mechanisms. The NRCs have representatives at a Catchment Management Agency (CMA) hosted by the state government, in which all relevant government institutions are represented. An emphasis on bottom-up decision making ensures buy-in from farmers and pastoralists as they see such processes as a way to get formal recognition of their natural resource claims.

Looking ahead

The combination of “expanding” the natural resource base and simultaneously establishing trusted conflict resolution mechanisms has proved highly effective. It has managed to resolve numerous local natural resource conflicts, establish a level of interaction and trust between communities that have not communicated for decades, and enable government staff to engage with the communities again.

The approach of the Wadi El Ku project has been copied by several projects and has inspired many others. The national government is following the experience closely and has shown interest in using a similar model throughout Sudan. Moreover, the project has relevance for the whole Sahel region. Infrastructure investments should be accompanied by good governance mechanisms from the grassroots to state levels, to ensure sustainability and ownership by all actors.

[i] A Wadi is a dry (ephemeral) riverbed that contains water only when heavy rain occurs.