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USAID Workshop on
Conflict Prevention Management
>> USAID Home >> Conflict Prevention >> June 2000 Workshop
"Case Studies in Environmental Cooperation"
Stacy VanDeveer, University of New Hampshire
June 7, 2000
Click here to hear an audio clip from this speech.
In discussions and research concerning the links between environment and violent conflict, it is important to be clear about exactly what is and is not being claimed. Research and analysis about the relationship between environmental quality and violent conflict does not assert or assume that environmental protection is the central factor which causes conflict nor is it understood as more important than economic development, poverty alleviation or conflict prevention. In short, environmental cooperation is not being posited as a magic bullet that can resolve long-standing conflicts. What is being argued, however, is that cooperative environmental protection and resource management can play important roles in economic development and conflict prevention. For example, building capable governance institutions has important connections to sharing resources and resource management institutions. Environmental cooperation connects conflict prevention and other development goals and needs. These connections include resource-sharing and management arrangements, building cooperative institutions across social cleavages, and building capable states and local bodies. Likewise, there are connections among population and demographics, reproductive health, universal education, and opportunities. Thus, environmental cooperation offers new opportunities for both development and conflict prevention.
Dr. VanDeveer is involved in a project, directed by Prof. Ken Conca of the University of Maryland, that looks at the relationship of regional environmental cooperation arrangements to peace-building over time. In general, two possible pathways from environmental cooperation to peaceful relations are examined: (1) altering the strategic climate among actors and (2) civil-society building across cleavages. Questions include, for example, "do states build trust as they increase integration?" Do cooperative associations expand beyond the environment? To what effect? The project's regional cases include the Baltic/Barents regions, the Aral Sea Basin, Southern Africa, the Caspian basin, South Asia and the Rio Grande basin.
Some preliminary findings emerged from this study. These include:
- cooperative environmental institutions are often quite robust, and there is a strong interest in continuing cooperation - even in the face a daunting political and economic challenges
- state capacity (or incapacity) remains a centrally important challenge to the building and maintaining of cooperative environmental and resource management - which is often ignored when developing cooperative institutions
- a large role exists for international actors in creating and maintaining institutions - such actors often miss opportunities to link environmental cooperation to peace-building and development.
Both paths - changing the strategic climate and civil-society building -- offer important opportunities to build more peaceful regional relations. The Baltic-Barents region provides examples of the meeting of both paths. For example, in Estonia, donor collaboration on environmental issues often attempts to span and address the existing social (ethnic) cleavages and to build civil building more broadly. Furthermore, actors in the Baltic region have focused explicitly on building and enhancing the capabilities of public sector actors to perform tasks assigned to them.
In short, environmental cooperation offers opportunities for mutual benefit between environmental protection, economic development and conflict prevention. Integrating environmental cooperation and the build and enhancing of resource sharing arrangements regimes into development programs and conflict prevention efforts can yield win-win outcomes for all three of these aspects of sustainable development.
Transcription of audio clip : "What we see here is that there are huge opportunities in resource, either pollution protection arrangements for seas or in resource or water-sharing arrangements to connect to other things that are vital to people to other reasons that they are afraid because they don't have access to something else or because they're being excluded from political process or because the resource is controlled by some group; however defined, it is not their group. And that there are lots of opportunities for linkage here that I think fit nicely in this preventive framework over time."
[This audio clip requires RealPlayerTM. The RealPlayer software is available for free download from RealNetwork at http://www.real.com/player/index.html.]
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Last Updated on: April 02, 2001
