Sustaining Peace through Better Resource Governance: Three potential mechanisms for environmental peacebuilding

art by Shamsia Hassani (Afghanistan)

Florian Krampe and Farah Hegazi (SIPRI); Stacy D. VanDeveer (University of Massachusetts)

Natural resource management, including climate adaptation, can have positive effects on peace by facilitating inter-group cooperation; introducing environmental and other good governance norms; and providing access to public services to address communities’ instrumental needs.

Context

Challenges associated with peacebuilding in conflict-affected states and societies are rarely straightforward, and the effects of war compound them further. Beyond reducing violence and preventing a relapse of violent conflict, peacebuilding efforts seek to help post-conflict countries reset their internal relations toward sustainable peace. The socio-economic and political effects of violent conflict cause long-term challenges to stability and development.[i] Environmental damage and climate change expose post-war populations and peace operations to further risks, exacerbating the impacts of conflict after active combat ends.[ii]

Although research has demonstrated that environmental projects can contribute to peacebuilding,[iii] less research exists about how and why such projects contribute to positive peace legacies.[iv] Recent research on environmental peacebuilding has made important advances.[v] However, scholarship has been less successful in theorizing a causal understanding of the contribution of natural resource management to positive peace in post-conflict settings.

What’s been done

We posit and illustrate three explanations through which environmental cooperation may facilitate processes that sustain positive peace.[vi]

1) Contact hypothesis

The contact hypothesis suggests that increased contact and cooperation between adversarial groups can surmount prejudice and distance.[vii]  Contact hypothesis research in post-conflict peacebuilding contexts indicates that intergroup bias can be lessened through contact between belligerents – potentially leading to reconciliation.[viii] Recent findings indicate that post-conflict natural resource management offers opportunities for cooperation among community members that can contribute to peacebuilding by increasing community cohesion and trust building.[ix]

 In Nepal, community-based, climate-sensitive, micro-hydropower projects designed to bring electricity to rural villages illustrate the potential of this mechanism. This showed substantial socio-economic successes regarding women’s empowerment, better access to education, increased economic opportunities, and increased community cohesion and stronger local governance structures.[x] Although the project contributed to the local perception of a widened gap between Nepali state actors and the local community—a potential “dark side”[xi]—successful implementation of the micro-hydropower project through local labour and financial contributions strengthened communities’ sense of self-reliance and resilience.[xii]

2) Transnational norm diffusion

Norms are essential to building and sustaining more peaceful and cooperative social and political institutions over time—and to engendering more sustainable resource governance.

International peacebuilding actors—both governmental and non-governmental—promulgate norms as they engage local communities, thereby shaping local norms. Global environmental governance scholarship illustrates positive effects of transnational norm diffusion,[xiii] and more complex co-construction and indigenization of global norms in local contexts.[xiv] Natural resource management can thus facilitate trans-societal linkages among actors, which can positively affect peace formation and resource management outcomes.

The often invoked, but less often practiced, concept of gender mainstreaming serves as an example here. The UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was the first UN mission to include a dedicated Gender Affairs Unit.[xv] Initially hesitant, UNTAET officials established the unit after pressure from East Timorese women’s groups and other UN bodies.[xvi] However, similar actions were largely absent in the water sector where local NGOs tasked with promoting women’s participation in user committees argued that cultural patriarchal barriers were too challenging to overcome: “No effort seems to have been made [by national NGOs] to find alternative ways to involve women.”[xvii]

Women’s lack of inclusion in these local water user committees shows why diffusion of norms relies on international actors adapting—to some degree—to local socio-cultural realities. The insufficient training of national NGOs tasked with implementing reforms and facilitating the inclusion of women produced incoherent outcomes, undermining the sustainability of the water systems provided through UNTAET. When done badly, environmental peacebuilding interventions risk worsening the marginalization of women and exacerbating discrimination.

3) State service provision

Fragile and conflict-affected states need to provide security and public services.[xviii] By doing so, states build legitimacy, which supports peacebuilding.[xix] By successfully providing services such as energy and water, state authorities can fulfil communities’ fundamental needs. If states balance revenue extraction from communities with successful service provision,[xx] then delivering public services can encourage public support for the state.[xxi] Researchers and environmental peacebuilding practitioners too often take overly technical approaches to natural resource management,[xxii] ignoring the political nature of service provision and disregarding opportunities to provide services equitably, address grievances, reduce insecurity,[xxiii] increase state legitimacy, and decrease the likelihood of future conflict.

 Iraq provides an example of public service provision’s ability generate legitimacy. Research shows how provision of drinking water services in Iraq increased citizens’ trust in government, which improved state legitimacy when service distribution was equitable.[xxiv]

Looking ahead

Our paper explores wider benefits of natural resource management in post-conflict states and develops three conceptually driven, causal mechanisms to explain how natural resource management can reduce political fragility in violent, conflict-affected countries, and help build sustainable peace. The three mechanisms doubtlessly have important interactions but are framed as theoretically distinct to afford future opportunities for empirical research and policy experimentation. They allow policy practitioners to conceptualize and operationalize development interventions—not least in delivering on the UN Sustainable Development Goals 

While the paper offers timely additions to environmental peacebuilding research, more research is needed to understand the mechanisms thoroughly and explore their relationships to the risks identified by Ide (2020). Comprehensive comparative research probing these mechanisms is urgently needed. Such analyses could be retrospective, looking back at post-conflict peacebuilding initiatives for evidence that the pathways manifested in particular cases and contributed to successful peacebuilding. Prospective research can be done to determine whether peacebuilding initiatives can promote the achievement of goals related to the articulated pathways.

Footnotes

[i] Gates, S. et al. (2012) ‘Development Consequences of Armed Conflict’, World Development 40(9):1713–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.04.031.

[ii] Barnett, J. and Adger, N. (2017) ‘Climate Change, Human Security and Violent Conflict’, Political Geography 26(6): 639–55; Eklöw, K. and Krampe, F. (2019) ‘Climate-Related Security Risks and Peacebuilding in Somalia’, SIPRI Policy Paper

[iii] Conca, K. (2001) Environmental Cooperation and International Peace, ed. Diehl, P. and Gleditsch, N.P. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 225–47.

[iv] Krampe, F. (2017) ‘Toward Sustainable Peace: A New Research Agenda for Post-Conflict Natural Resource Management’, Global Environmental Politics 17(4): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00431.

[v] Beevers, M. (2019) Peacebuilding and Natural Resource Governance After Armed Conflict. Cham: Palgrave; Ide, T. (2020) ‘The Dark Side of Environmental Peacebuilding’, World Development 127:104777. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104777; Ide, T., Kristensen, A. and Bartusevičius, H. (2021) ‘First Comes the River, Then Comes the Conflict? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Flood-Related Political Unrest’, Journal of Peace Research 58(1): 83–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343320966783; Swain, A. and Öjendal, J. (2018) Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding, Routledge; Johnson, M.F., Rodríguez, L.A. and Hoyos, M.Q. (2021) ‘Intrastate Environmental Peacebuilding: A Review of the Literature’, World Development 137: 105–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105150; Dresse, A., et al. (2019) ‘Environmental Peacebuilding: Towards a Theoretical Framework’, Cooperation and Conflict 54(1): 99–119. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718808331; Lee, J.R. (2020), Environmental Conflict and Cooperation: Premise, Purpose, Persuasion, and Promise. London, New York: Routledge

[vi] Krampe, F., Hegazi, F and VanDeveer, S.D. (2021) ‘Sustaining peace through better resource governance: Three potential mechanisms for environmental peacebuilding’, World Development 114:105508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105508

[vii] Pettigrew, T.F. (1998) ‘INTERGROUP CONTACT THEORY’, Annual Review of Psychology, 49(1): 65–85. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.49.1.65.

[viii] Dovidio, J.F. et al. (2008) ‘Chapter 10. Majority and Minority Perspectives in Intergroup Relations: The Role of Contact, Group Representations, Threat, and Trust in Intergroup Conflict and Reconciliation’, ed. Nadler, A., Malloy, T.E. and Fisher, J.D. 1:235, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press; Gibson, J.L. (2004) ‘Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation? Testing the Causal Assumptions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process’, American Journal of Political Science 48(2): 201–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00065.x.

[ix] Kashwan, P. (2017), Democracy in the Woods. Oxford University Press; Johnson, M.F., Rodríguez, L.A. & Hoyos, M.Q , (2017) ‘Intrastate Environmental Peacebuilding’; FAO (2017) ‘Linking Community-Based Animal Health Services with Natural Resource Conflict Mitigation in the Abyei Administrative Area’; Krampe, F. (2016) ‘Empowering Peace: Service Provision and State Legitimacy in Nepal’s Peace-Building Process’, Conflict, Security & Development 16(1): 53–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2016.1136138.

[x] Krampe, F. (2016) ‘Empowering Peace: Service Provision and State Legitimacy in Nepal’s Peace-Building Process’

[xi] Ide, T. (2020) ‘The Dark Side of Environmental Peacebuilding’

[xii] Krampe, F. (2016) ‘Empowering Peace: Service Provision and State Legitimacy in Nepal’s Peace-Building Process’

[xiii] Roger, C. and Dauvergne, P. (2016) ‘The Rise of Transnational Governance as a Field of Study,’ International Studies Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viw001.

[xiv] Kauffman, C.M. (2017), Grassroots Global Governance: Local Watershed Management Experiments and the Evolution of Sustainable Development, New York: Oxford University Press

[xv] Ospina, S. (2006) A Review and Evaluation of Gender-Related Activities of UN Peacekeeping Operations and Their Impact on Gender Relations in Timor Leste

[xvi] Olsson, L. (2009) Gender Equality and United Nations Peace Operations in Timor Leste, Leiden: BRILL; Ospina, S. (2006), A Review and Evaluation of Gender-Related Activities of UN Peacekeeping Operations and Their Impact on Gender Relations in Timor Leste

[xvii] Asian Development Bank (2004) ‘Project Performance Audit Report TIM 81890’, Water Supply and Sanitation Rehabilitation Projects Phase I (Grant 8185-TIM[TF]) and Phase II (Grant 8189-TIM[TF]) in Timor-Leste, 37.

[xviii] Brinkerhoff, D.W., Wetterberg, A. and Dunn, S. (2012) ‘Service Delivery and Legitimacy in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States’, Public Management Review 14(2): 273–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2012.657958.

[xix] Brinkerhoff, Wetterberg, and Dunn.

[xx] Holsti, K.J. (1996) The State, War, and the State of War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

[xxi] Lipset, S.M. (1959) ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review 53(1): 86. https://doi.org/10.2307/1951731?ref=no-x-route:6cbf1e314a396f7f35145a3fc6ac74f5

[xxii] Aggestam, K. (2015) ‘Desecuritisation of Water and the Technocratic Turn in Peacebuilding’, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 15(3): 327–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-015-9281-x; Aggestam, K. and Sundell-Eklund, A. (2013) ‘Situating Water in Peacebuilding: Revisiting the Middle East Peace Process’, Water International 39(1): 10–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2013.848313; Ide, T. ‘The Dark Side of Environmental Peacebuilding’; Krampe, F. and Swain, A. (2021) ‘Environmental Peacebuilding’, The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation, ed. Richmond, O.P. and Visoka, G, Oxford: Oxford University Press

[xxiii] Ide, T. (2020) ‘The Dark Side of Environmental Peacebuilding’; Krampe, F. ‘Empowering Peace: Service Provision and State Legitimacy in Nepal’s Peace-Building Process’

[xxiv] Brinkerhoff, Wetterberg, and Dunn, ‘Evidence from Water Services in Iraq’