Conflict in Abundance and Peacebuilding in Scarcity: Challenges and Opportunities in Addressing Climate Change and Conflict
Publisher: World Development
Author(s): Daniel Abrahams
Date: 2020
Topics: Assessment, Conflict Causes, Monitoring and Evaluation, Programming
Countries: Uganda
Over the past decade, academic and policy communities have given significant attention to the potential connections between climate change and conflict (climate-conflict). While the degree to which climate change alters conflict outcomes remains a topic of considerable debate in academic communities, policy organizations are already being tasked with incorporating climate-conflict into policy and programming. This article investigates how climate-conflict discourses inform development policy and, in turn, how the structures of development enable or constrain institutions’ ability to address climate-conflict priorities. Drawing upon mixed-methods and multi-sited data collection, including nine months of participant observation, interviews, a survey of local government officials, and a document review, I investigated the ways in which development practitioners seek to address climate-conflict. Data collection focused on two particular programs being implemented by Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian and development NGO, in Karamoja, Uganda, a region emerging from a period of violent conflict manifesting largely between ethnically defined pastoralist groups. In examining how the wider discourses of climate-conflict inform these programs, I demonstrate why there exists such a wide disparity between the demand for development programming that addresses the conflict risks of climate change and the distinct lack of clarity regarding what such programming might entail. More specifically, I identify the following overlapping challenges facing development agencies seeking to address climate-conflict: complex spatial scales across disconnected geographies, imprecise and limiting discursive framings, and challenges related to program governance. In addition to identifying these barriers, I also demonstrate that clearer paths for development intervention emerge when the narrow conceptualizations of climate-conflict are widened beyond climate change’s role as a driver of conflict or ‘threat multiplier’.