Showing posts from category environmental peacemaking.
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Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace
›Download Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace from the Wilson Center.
How does globalization affect natural resource issues such as water on local, national, and international levels? Can our common dependence on these stressed resources be a force for bringing people together rather than dividing us? What lessons can we learn from sharing insights from communities at these very different levels of organization?
Pathways to Peace
In January 2010, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Fetzer Institute invited 22 scholars and practitioners to a two-day seminar to discuss these questions and the deep connection between caring for the environment and caring for community. Pathways to Peace: Defining Community in the Age of Globalization was the second seminar in a three-year initiative to combine scholarship, public policy, and local practice to articulate and support global conflict transformation and reconciliation in communities throughout the world. Examining the effect of environmental peacebuilding on communities, the discussion explored how governments, NGOs, the private sector, and other interested parties can generate positive outcomes while minimizing negative ones.
Participants from Canada, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Israel, Kenya, Nepal, Switzerland, the Philippines, and the United States brought to the table a wide range of experience and expertise from diverse fields, including peacebuilding, community building, health care, economic development, conflict resolution, and foundation management. By convening leaders in environmental peacebuilding and community building, the Wilson Center and the Fetzer Institute drew on a wide range of experience and perspectives related to environment, conflict, and peacebuilding practice and research. The group used water access and peacebuilding case studies as a means to enter into dialogue about the challenges of global community engagement.
Shared Waters
In preparation for the seminar, geographer and renowned water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University contributed a paper, “The Enlightenment Rift and Peacebuilding: Rationality, Spirituality, and Shared Waters,” in which he laid out the complicated, sometimes conflictual, and often surprisingly collaborative aspects of negotiations over water resources. For Wolf, given water’s life-sustaining quality but limited quantity, it seems intuitive that “water should be the most conflictive of resources.” However, he maintains that “while press reports of international waters often focus on conflict, what has been more encouraging is that, throughout the world, water also induces cooperation, even in particularly hostile basins, and even as disputes rage over other issues…there is a long, and in many ways deeper, history of water-related cooperation.”
On this foundation, Wolf illustrates four stages of water conflict: from adversarial, to reflective, to integrative, to action. Lessons from the “spiritual understanding of water conflict transformation” he says, “offer not only new understanding of current disputes, but also models, tools, and strategies for more effective water conflict management and transformation.”
Seminar participants used Wolf’s paper as a starting point from which to write short papers based on their own expertise and experience. From Kenya to Nepal to Harlem, participants shared their perspectives on the challenges and promises of environmental issues, community building and organizing, and peacebuilding.
This report, Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace, draws from the rich dialogue of the seminar and seminar papers to share the broad range of experience and the insight of the participants. To learn more about these remarkable programs and the people working on natural resources, peacebuilding, and community development, see the complete list of papers on page 120, which can be downloaded from the Wilson Center. -
Climate Adaptation, Development, and Peacebuilding in Fragile States: Finding the Triple-Bottom Line
›“The climate agenda goes well beyond climate,” said Dan Smith, secretary general of International Alert at a recent Wilson Center event. “In the last 60 years, at least 40 percent of all interstate conflicts have had a link to natural resources” and those that do are also twice as likely to relapse in the five years following a peace agreement, said Neil Levine, director of the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID. [Video Below]
Development, peace, and climate stability are “the triple-bottom line,” said Smith. “How would you ever think that it would be possible to make progress on one, while ignoring the other two?” Levine and Smith were joined by Alexander Carius, managing director of Adelphi Research, who pointed out that climate change is both a matter of human security and traditional security. For example, as sea-level rise threatens the people of small-island states, “it also affects, in a very traditional sense, the question of security and a state’s sovereignty,” he said.
The Triple-Bottom Line
Conflicts are never attributable to a single cause, but instead are caused by “a whole pile-up, a proliferation, a conglomeration of reasons” that often include poverty, weak governance, traumatic memory of war, and climate change, said Smith. “Climate adds to the strains and the stresses that countries are under,” and works as a “risk-multiplier, or conflict multiplier,” he said.
Focusing development and peace-building efforts on those regions experiencing multiple threats is both a “moral imperative” and a “self-interested imperative,” said Smith. “We benefit from a more prosperous and a more stable world.”
There are currently one and a half billion people in the world living in countries that face these interlinked problems, said Smith, “and interlinked problems, almost by definition, require interlinked solutions.” Responding to the needs of these people requires developing resiliency so that they can respond to the consequences of climate change, which he called “unknown unknowns.”
“What we need are institutions and policies and actions which guard us not only against the threats we can see coming… but against the ones we can’t see coming,” said Smith. The strength and resilience of governments, economies, and communities are key to determining whether climate events become disasters.
Interagency Cooperation
“Part of making the triple-bottom line a real thing is to understand that we will have to be working on our own institutions, even the best and most effective of them, to make sure that they see the interlinkages,” said Smith.
But even though individuals increasingly understand the need to address security, development, and climate change in an integrated fashion, “institutions have only limited capacities for coordination,” said Carius. Institutions are constrained by bureaucratic processes, political mandates, or limited human resources, he said. “Years ago, I always argued for a more integrated policy process; today I would argue for an integrated assessment of the issues, but to…translate it back into sectoral approaches.”
Levine expressed optimism that with “a whole new avalanche of interagency connections” being established in the last few years, U.S. interagency cooperation has become “the culture.” However, if coordination efforts are not carefully aligned to advance concrete programs and policies, they run the risk of “getting bogged down in massive bureaucratic exercises,” he said. “‘Whole of government’ needn’t be ‘all of government,’ and it needn’t be whole of government, all of government, all the time.”
Building Political Will
Europe has a “conducive political environment to making [climate and security] arguments,” said Smith, but the dialogue has yet to translate into action. In 2007, the debate on climate and security was first brought to the UN and EU with a series of reports by government agencies and the first-ever debate on the impacts of climate change on security at the UN Security Council, said Carius. However, none of the recommendations from the reports were followed and “much of the political momentum that existed…ended up in a very technical, low-level dialogue,” he said.
More recently, the United Kingdom included energy, resources, and climate change as a priority security risk in their National Security Strategy. And Germany, which joined the UN Security Council as a rotating member this year, is expected to reintroduce the topic of climate and security when they assume the Security Council Presidency in July. These steps may help to regain some of the political momentum and “create legitimacy for at least making the argument – the very strong argument – that climate change has an impact on security,” said Carius.
Sources: AFP, UK Cabinet Office, Telegraph, United Nations
Image Credit: “Trees cocooned in spiders webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan” courtesy of flickr user DFID -
Watch Michael Renner on Improving Environmental Peacebuilding by Moving From the Technical to the Social
›“When we think about environmental peacebuilding opportunities…at a certain level it seems like a very straightforward, almost technical task,” said Michael Renner, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, in this interview with ECSP. “But really stepping back, in a sense, this is far more than just a technical issue – it’s a broader social and, ultimately, political issue.”
As well as reducing tensions in conflict-prone areas, environmental peacebuilding – like reforestation and land/water management initiatives – can have a great impact on local livelihoods. Renner discussed the importance, therefore, of working alongside affected communities to address specific, long-term needs. “You need to have a buy-in from the local communities,” he said. “If you don’t, you may well undertake these efforts, but it’s not very clear how long they can last and how successful they can be.”
“I think it’s very important to understand these as challenges from an interdisciplinary point of view, that really require us not to think in terms of just ‘what’s the best technology, what’s the best practice,’” Renner said. “But also ‘how do we ensure really that this links up with the needs on the ground of specific communities?’” -
Congressional Report on Avoiding “Water Wars” in Afghanistan and Pakistan
›March 15, 2011 // By Schuyler Null“Water plays an increasingly important role in our diplomatic and national security interests in [Central and South Asia], and we must ensure that our approach is carefully considered and coordinated across the interagency,” begins a new staff briefing, Avoiding Waters Wars: Water Scarcity and Central Asia’s Growing Importance for Stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan, prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “As water demand for food production and electricity generation increases, in part as a result of the quickening pace of climate change, so too must our efforts to provide water security,” write the authors.
The report focuses mainly on Afghanistan and Pakistan but also considers “the interests in the shared waters by India and the neighboring five Central Asian countries – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan.”
ECSP is cited twice in the report, both from “Water Can Be a Pathway to Peace, Not War,” in ECSP Report 13:The Navigating Peace Initiative’s Water Conflict and Cooperation Working Group correctly summarized the current state of water use by saying, “water use is shifting to less-traditional sources such as deep fossil aquifers and wastewater reclamation. Conflict, too, is becoming less traditional, driven increasingly by internal or local pressures or, more subtly, by poverty and instability. These changes suggest that tomorrow’s water disputes may look very different from today’s.”
And again in breaking down the notion of impending water wars:Given the important role water plays in Central and South Asia as a primary driver of human insecurity, it is important to recognize that for the most part, the looming threat of so-called “water wars” has not yet come to fruition. Instead, many regions threatened by water scarcity have avoided violent clashes through discussion, compromise, and agreements. This is because “[w]ater – being international, indispensable, and emotional – can serve as a cornerstone for confidence building and a potential entry point for peace.”
USAID’s “Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia: Addressing Vulnerabilities to Glacier Melt Impacts,” which was launched here at the Wilson Center last fall, also made an appearance:Central Asia and India face critical challenges in monitoring glaciers and tracking changes, particularly differences from year to year. As USAID’s report “Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia: Addressing Vulnerabilities to Glacier Melt Impacts” noted, “[t]he review of scientific information about glacier melt in High Asia revealed, first and foremost, a lack of data and information, a lack that hampers attempts to project likely impacts and take action to adapt to changed conditions.” The United States should engage in collaborative glacier monitoring programs and those that develop local or sub-national water monitoring capacity.
The report concludes that “water scarcity, coupled with how governments address these challenges,” can either exacerbate conflict or promote cooperation in the region. It’s also worth noting that the authors specifically mention the links between increased water use and growing populations in the region, specifically with regard to India and Pakistan:With a population already exceeding 1.1 billion people and forecasts indicating continued growth to over 1.5 billion by 2035, India’s demand for water is rising at unprecedented rates.
The drive to meet energy and development demands from both countries has led to plans for extensive hydrological projects that could spark tensions between the two over the Indus Waters Treaty (which has withstood four Indo-Pakistani wars).
The authors praise the attention given to the matter thus far by the Obama administration, but they also write that “although it is still too early to determine the impacts of our efforts in the broader region, now is the time to begin evaluating water-related trends” at a more systematic level.
Sources: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. -
Teaching Environment and Security at West Point
›February 16, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko
U.S. strategic assessments like the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the 2010 National Security Strategy, and the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment have placed natural resources, climate change, population, and poverty squarely on the American security agenda. But are these broad statements in doctrine and threat assessments translating into tangible changes, such as new approaches to the education of future military officers? My colleague Sean Peoples and I recently spoke with faculty and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy about how West Point’s Geography and Environmental Engineering Department is integrating these issues directly into their curriculum.
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Environmental Security at the UN
UNEP/PCDMB Progress Report From Brussels
›January 11, 2011 // By Lauren Herzer RisiAt a November Environmental Security Assessments conference on methodologies and practices, held jointly by ENVSEC and IES outside of Brussels, I had the opportunity to catch up with David Jensen, a policy and planning coordinator in the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch (PCDMB).
Jensen pointed to several upcoming reports coming from UNEP and expressed some relief that the concept of environmental security was finally getting some recognition without having to constantly be “banging on doors.”
PCDMB is a branch of UNEP created to provide five core services to UN member states: post-crisis environmental assessments; post-crisis environmental recovery; environmental cooperation for peacebuilding; disaster risk reduction; and, most recently, humanitarian action and early recovery.
There has been a steady stream of activity flowing from PCDMB and a lot to look forward to this spring:
Finally, it sounds like PCDMB is getting some recognition from within the upper echelons of the UN. Jensen has been asked to brief senior peacebuilding officials, and the Secretary-General’s political advisor called him in to talk about peacekeeping and natural resource management and conflict prevention.- The guidance notes on conflict prevention and natural resources, recently published on the PCDMB website, are draft notes that will be revised following pilot programs in four countries (Jensen particularly noted that there is much work to be done on them still). Ultimately, they hope to identify funding for 100 experts to deploy to countries (at the country’s request) to apply the guidance notes in the field.
- PCDMB has a project of 150 case studies coming out in six volumes in February 2011 on natural resources and peacebuilding.
- The culmination of a three-year UNEP project in Nigeria, which includes a full analysis and remediation plan of 300 oil-contaminated sites in the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta, is expected to be released in the second quarter of 2011. (Editor’s note: though not finished, the report caught flack last summer over concerns that it will largely exonerate Shell.)
- PCDMB is also partnering with UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Field Support to assess options for resource-efficient technologies and practices in peacekeeping camps (the so-called “green helmets“). They will be issuing a policy report on best practices in May 2011.
In an interview with ECSP last fall, Jensen predicted the UN was finally approaching a fundamental tipping point for inclusion of natural resource issues in the broader peacebuilding process, and the kind of interest noted above appears to be proving him right.
In a report this summer, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted the need for inclusion of environmental security in peacekeeping operations and highlighted the particular work of PCDMB in places like Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, and the Sudan.
It’s no surprise then that when Jensen briefed the full Secretariat, he said he was greeted by a packed house.
Image Credit: Arranged from “UNEP and Disasters and Conflicts at a Glance,” courtesy of UNEP. -
Those Who Would Carry the Water
›December 24, 2010 // By Mark NepoThis article will appear as the introduction in the forthcoming Fetzer Institute and Wilson Center publication, Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace, based on an event cosponsored at the Wilson Center in January 2009.
It is fitting to say “welcome,” since this timeless greeting originally meant “come to the well.” Let me try to describe the well we are coming to. We are at once trying to gather the best experience and thinking of current environmental practice, to help advance the issue of water as a resource, and to use environmental work around water as a case study for the lessons and challenges of global community engagement. In convening leading practitioners and thinkers in the field of environmental peace-building and focusing on the ever-present issue of water, we hope to surface the strengths of human resources and how they impact the emerging global community.
In truth, the issues that bring us here have been present in the human condition forever. They are spoken to in every tradition. A few stories will help create a context for our time together.
If we turn to the Hindu tradition, we learn that Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge, music, and the arts. Her name means “the one who flows” and legend has it that she was born of the Saraswati River, which is an invisible river that carries the waters that sustain all life. From the earliest times, in many traditions, the waters that sustain all life refer to both natural resources and human and spiritual resources; actual water and the water we have come to know since the beginning of time as wisdom and love.
In Hindu lore, Saraswati’s ageless counterpart on earth is the serpent-demon, Vritrassura, who is driven to hoard all the Earth’s water. And so the endless struggle begins; at least this is one tradition’s beginning. Thankfully, in the Rig-Veda, the sacred collection of Sanskrit hymns, we are given hope as Saraswati – with help from her brother Ganesh, the provider and remover of obstacles, and Indra, the god who connects all things – kills the demon who would hoard the Earth’s water.
But clearly, throughout the ages, those who would carry the water and those who would hoard the water have appeared again and again and again. This is why we are here. Unspoken or not, unaware or not, we are by care and kinship of the lineage that would carry the water.
If we turn to the Haitian tradition, we find a very telling teaching story called The Chief of the Well. This story speaks of a time of drought when the streams are dry and the wells are parched. There is no place to get water. The animals meet to discuss the situation and decide to ask God for help. God creates a well that will have endless water as long as one of the animals serves as caretaker and welcomes all who would come in need. The lizard Mabouya volunteers. But intoxicated with his newfound power, Mabouya becomes a gatekeeper, not a caretaker, and sends everyone in need away. Eventually, God replaces the lizard with the frog who croaks to all, “Come! This is God’s well! The hole in the ground is yours, but the water belongs to God.” And we are left, in each generation, to discover what is ours and what is God’s, and to understand what turns the caretaker in us to the gatekeeper?
If we can accept our role as caretakers of resources that outlive us, then the history of the acequia might be relevant. An acequia (a-sā’kē-e) is a community-operated waterway used for irrigation. It is the name for a sluiceway or gravity chute that flows down a mountainside, providing water for a village. The Spanish word acequia, which means “ditch or canal,” comes from the Arabic al saqiya, which means “water conduit.” The Islamic occupation of Spain, beginning late in the eighth century, brought this technique of irrigation to Spain.
Acequias were then brought to the Americas by the Spanish, only to find their indigenous counterparts already in use. Particularly in the Andes, northern Mexico, and the modern-day American Southwest, acequias exist as the outgrowth of ancient systems created to carry snow runoff or river water to villages and distant fields. Many South American villages have settled around the mouth of an acequia that begins high and out of sight in the crags of a mountain. There, the source-water collects all winter near the top and, in spring, with the thaw, it streams into the village.
In many of these South American villages, as in Peru for example, there is an annual ritual in which an entire village climbs the acequia in early spring to clear the rocks and tree limbs and snake nests that during the winter have blocked the path of water that the village depends on. This ancient pragmatic ritual of clearing the acequia provides a powerful model for how community can care for its natural resources together.
In fact, keeping the acequia clear and flowing is a useful metaphor for interdependence and cooperation. The life of the acequia and our responsibility to keep its path of flow clear represents a cycle of natural and human erosion and cleansing that is intrinsic to life on earth. Therefore, keeping the acequia clear – both the actual acequia and the acequia of humanity – bears learning how to do well.
With all this in mind, I am drawn to lift up one more story. It comes from Éliane Ubalijoro, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, who as a Rwandan is working with the generation there orphaned by the genocide. After the mass killings, those surviving were confined to refugee camps. In this particular settlement, women had to cross a dark field outside of the camp and risk being raped to get water for their children, which they did repeatedly. This difficult situation points to the complex levels of the issues before us; all of which demand our attention.
First, we might consider access to the water itself. With regard to the conservation and preservation of natural resources, we are asked to solve the perennial question: How do you bring the water to those who need it? At this level, a direct solution might be to move the water supply inside the refugee camp.
Under this, however, we might consider access to the human resources. What is blocking the human acequia? With regard to conflict transformation and peace-building, we are compelled to ask: What are the values implicit in this situation by which the refugee camp guards put the water outside of the camp in the first place in order to create the opportunity to rape the women?
This leads to the work of education, the work of clearing the human acequia. So with regard to the development of social equity, we are now compelled to ask: What are the assumptions and traditions in this community that enable them to believe that exploiting women is not only permissible but entitled? How do we clear the human acequia so that wisdom and compassion can flow?
Finally, we might consider the conservation and preservation of human resources. For at the heart of this insidious atrocity is the resilience and courage and love of these women who went into the dark to get water for their children knowing the violation that awaited them. What kind of deep water is this and how can we insure access to this resource?
This story from Rwanda is one more example that shows how natural resources and human resources are inextricably linked. One central question before us is: How do we tend all levels at once? How do we develop multiple strategies? How do we convene and surface the wisdom of all frames?
Part of our inquiry here is to take our turn in trying to understand how natural resources and human resources are so linked. What blocks their access? What lets them flow together and sustain life? How do we understand the water of humanity and the water of the earth and how both kinds of water are shared or not in the world today?
We could say that knowledge flows like water between countries and communities. If this is so, then each of you is such water. We are here to drink from you and people like you, and to understand the currents that run between us and beneath us; to insure the clear flow of natural and human resources into the world; and to keep the global acequia clear; to embody and to further the art and science of carrying the water in all its forms to those who need it.
Mark Nepo is the author of The Book of Awakening as well as the forthcoming As Far As the Heart Can See.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “The Water Carrier,” courtesy of flickr user Portrait Artist – Enzie Shahmiri. -
Tracking the End Game: Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement
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The next nine months are critical for Sudan. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) sets January 9, 2011, as the date when southern Sudanese will vote on secession or unity, and the people of disputed Abeyei will vote on whether to be part of North or South Sudan. Between now and July 2011, when the provisions of the CPA come to an end, we could see the birth of the new country of South Sudan—or a return to a North-South war if the referendum is stalled, botched, or disputed. (Few currently expect that a unity vote will create the “New Sudan” envisioned by the late John Garang.)
