Monthly archive for May 2008. Show all posts
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Ghana’s Oil: Curse or Blessing?
›May 7, 2008 // By Liat RacinConcerned Ghanaian officials believe the country’s discovery of domestic oil reserves last year represents “perhaps the greatest managerial challenge” since its independence, reports IRIN News. Though oil revenues could boost Ghana’s sagging economy and improve its infrastructure, there are real fears that mismanagement could destabilize the country and exacerbate social inequalities. Francis Ackah, engineering manager of the Ghana National Petroleum Company (GNPC), confessed that the country currently lacks the “know-how” to manage the resource constructively.
In an attempt to avoid the “resource curse,” Ackah confirmed the government’s desire to implement the “Norway model” of resource revenue management, which deposits oil funds in a national petroleum fund at the central bank, hires external managers to invest the money, and uses the revenue to fund social services.
Ghanaian President John Kufuor warned that “oil sometimes proves the undoing” of countries blessed with reserves. Other oil-rich African countries—such as Nigeria, Chad, and Angola—have been plagued by insecurity and underdevelopment. Nigeria has been plagued by rebel attacks on strategic oil pipelines.
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New ‘Foreign Affairs’ Heavy on Natural Resources, Security
›May 7, 2008 // By Sonia SchmanskiThe complex relationships between natural resources and political stability are gaining prominence in the political science community, as evidenced by three articles on those connections in the May/June 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs. As each article argues, more effective international approaches are needed to combat inequitable benefit distribution, population pressures, and infrastructure underdevelopment.
Michael Ross’ “Blood Barrels: Why Oil Fuels Conflict” explores the paradox that in an increasingly peaceful world, oil-producing countries are plagued by a unique level of violence. Developing countries that produce oil are twice as likely to suffer internal rebellion as those that do not. “Oil alone cannot create conflicts,” he says, “but it both exacerbates latent tensions and gives governments and their more militant opponents the means to fight them out.” He calls for a four-fold solution, with provisions including increased transparency in oil-producing governments and international assistance for countries in managing their revenue responsibly and equitably.
In “The Trouble With Congo: How Local Disputes Fuel Regional Conflict,” Severine Autesserre argues that international peacekeeping efforts have missed the “critical fact that today local conflicts are driving the broader conflicts, not the other way around.” She argues that the international focus on elections as the mark of a peaceful nation is misplaced and can do more harm than good. “The international community must fundamentally revise its strategy” for addressing local grievances, especially those around land ownership, Autesserre says. Her take-home message: “Think local, act local.” In ECSP Report 12, John Katunga offers his perspective on resources and conflict in the DRC.
Former U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios writes in “Beyond Darfur: Sudan’s Slide Toward Civil War” that land and resource management issues are of primary importance in Darfur. He also criticizes international aid efforts for missing the mark; rather than focusing on resolving the ongoing crisis in Darfur, he writes, the United States should work to enforce the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005. Because the CPA has been ineffectively applied, many issues continue to contribute to instability. For instance, tensions over oil revenue are working against the emergence of stability in Sudan. The revenue-sharing agreement outlined in the CPA has not been consistently implemented, and until this happens, Natsios writes, the outlook for Sudan is not promising. -
Weekly Reading
›CIA Director General Michael Hayden identified demographic change as one of three trends that will shape the 21st century earlier this week, noting the “importance of underlying population trends and the factors that influence them…things like fertility rates, life expectancy, the prevalence of HIV, and ease of migration. Clearly,” he said, “there will be many implications for our national security to come out of this, and these trends will contribute to the complexity of the security threats facing America over the next several decades.” Population growth will hit African countries the hardest, he said, and may threaten stability on the continent.
ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses how the environment can be used as a tool for peace today in the concluding program in Chicago Public Radio Worldview’s weeklong “Environmental War and Peace” series.
The U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute has released a collection of the proceedings of a colloquium on “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications,” held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this year. Contributors agree that climate change is a security issue that merits serious attention and discuss the proper role for the U.S. Armed Forces in addressing it on a global scale.
“Intensifying environmental catastrophes and downturns in living standards caused by interlocking crises of energy, water, food and violent conflict” are likely to characterize the coming century, warns Jeffrey Sachs in Time magazine’s web-exclusive feature, “What’s Next 2008.” But all is not lost; Sachs encourages us to recognize that by “seeking global solutions, we actually have the power to save the world for all, today and in the future.”
As population pressures increasingly strain ecological resources in Madagascar’s biodiversity hotspots, CARE’s Extra Mile Initiative is working in partnership with Madagascar’s government to provide family planning and reproductive health services to six remote communities on the “eighth continent.” A new report discusses the program’s challenges and successes. -
PODCAST: Natural Resources and Conflict: Advice for Funders
›May 2, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoNatural resources, conflict, and human security were front and center at a premier forum for philanthropists focused on global issues last month. Five hundred experts and funders gathered in Redwood City, CA, at the annual Global Philanthropy Forum (GPF) to tackle a range of connected challenges under the rubric of “Human Security, Conflict, and the Responsibility to Protect.” I caught up with an old friend and social entrepreneur, Juan Dumas, executive director of Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA), an NGO based in Ecuador. Juan and his colleagues work closely with a broad range of stakeholders in facilitating peaceful resolutions to natural resource conflicts. Resting on the premise that natural resource management is conflict management, their work prioritizes resolving these disputes in a peaceful manner. In this podcast interview, Juan highlights FFLA’s activities and lists some specific actions funders must take if they wish to make a real difference in supporting efforts to break the links between natural resources and conflict.
Juan was just one of the voices on natural resources, conflict, and human security at the GPF conference. Patrick Alley of Global Witness weighed in on the “resource curse,” Maria Theresa Vargas of Fundación NATURA Bolivia outlined her group’s innovative use of payment for ecosystem services to solve upstream-downstream resource use conflicts, and I commented on the need for donors to fund cross-sectoral efforts to capture the peacebuilding benefits of environmental management.
While they didn’t address natural resource management issues, you can watch plenary session stars Archbishop Desmond Tutu on forgiveness as a reconciliation strategy, Annie Lennox on HIV/AIDS, and Peter Gabriel on the power of the cell phone for social progress.
Click below to stream the podcast:
Natural Resources and Conflict: Advice for Funders: Download. -
New Paper Says Longer-Term, Innovative Approach to Security Analysis Needed to Address Climate Change Threats
›May 1, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarClimate change will create hard security problems—including increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, pandemic disease, desertification, and mass migration—but these challenges will not have hard security solutions, argues Nick Mabey in Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World (subscription or purchase required), a policy paper published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. Instead, policymakers, NGOs, the private sector, and the security community will need to develop nontraditional, innovative policies and programs to mitigate these threats.
Mabey, who served as a senior adviser in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit before becoming founding director and chief executive of E3G, an NGO working on sustainable development, thoughtfully outlines the security challenges that many previous reports on climate security (including by the CNA Corporation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security) have discussed. But he also examines several less frequently mentioned risks. For instance, he warns that some countries will try to use the need for renewable energy as a cover for obtaining nuclear technology for military purposes. Mabey argues that the development and dissemination of less risky energy technologies is the best way to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
In addition, Mabey notes, if the international system fails to address the threat of climate change effectively, its legitimacy will be undermined, and it will find it more difficult to resolve other global threats.
Mabey also calls our attention to the critical role that the environment plays in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts. Strategic planners developing 10-15-year security strategies for Afghanistan based on sustainable livelihoods must take climate change into account. Attempts to use a “hearts and minds” strategy against Islamist extremism may fall short as higher temperatures and lower rainfall dry up some of the main sources of jobs for young men in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, Mabey notes, terrorists are likely to use climate change to feed existing grievances; Osama bin Laden has already spoken several times on climate change’s unequal impacts on different parts of the globe.
“Information on present and future serious climate security impacts is as good, if not better, than other information routinely used in security planning and assessment,” asserts Mabey. Therefore, he argues, the security community has no excuse for not planning for the worst-case climate change scenarios, just as it plans for the worst-case terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation scenarios. Yet Mabey believes the international response to climate change so far has been “slow and inadequate.” He urges nations and international institutions to devote far greater resources to addressing the myriad threats it will pose to political stability and human well-being.