Ecological peace: Exploring the possibilities of environmental peacebuilding for future conflict and resource security

Sustainably managing natural resources is essential for humanity's long-term survival. Climate
change-related effects could expose vulnerable communities or nations, execrating existing tensions
and unearth new conflicts around access and control of vital resources.
[1] The majority of literature
about environmental peacebuilding - building cooperation around ecological resources - is
concerned with catalysing shared resources to prevent conflict.
[2] Researchers have identified
several cases where groups in conflict have put aside their differences and cooperated in the face of
shared environmental challenges [3]
.
Less explored is the potential of transboundary environmental peacebuilding to avert both regional
conflict and environmental problems. This research will examine the use of environmental
peacebuilding to prevent potential conflict or act as an entry point to peace negotiations, and at the
same time explore if environmental peacebuilding can lead to cross-border resource conservation
that improves the specific areas of present and future conflict hotspots, arriving at a set of principles
found in successful cases.
This project links political ecology and peacebuilding using 'conflict ecologies', examines a new
perspective on the relationship between climate change related effects and behaviours of resourceusers and governments, and offers a novel perspective on decision pathways from the local to the
regional level. In doing so, it challenges normative research linking environmental shocks to conflict
and violence, instead pinpointing the cooperative opportunities of peace and conservation of
potential ecological problems. Specifically, the study investigates what make societies vulnerable to
environmental stress and thereby violent conflict, the influence of environmental cooperation on
3
changing intergroup relations (from cooperation to violence and vice versa), and conditions under
which cooperation around ecological resources succeed and conflict therefore reduces.
Using theories of transboundary environmental peacebuilding [4] and regional resource conservation
[5], this research draws on a successful case study demonstrating the importance of multiple scales
of governance to highlight and extract causal conditions of the phenomenon. Applying those
conditions to a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 7-10 further environmental peacebuilding
cases, the research will result in a series of generalisable principles that could contribute to a greater
understanding of how catalysing a shared natural resource can transform a situation from conflict to
peace and secure greater levels of resource conservation.