Nature as Diplomat: Scale, Agency, and Purpose in Environmental Peacebuilding
Publisher: King's College London
Author(s): Becca Farnum
Date: 2020
Topics: Cooperation, Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Peace and Security Operations
Environmental peacebuilding, the idea that the environment can be integrated in peacebuilding practices, is a growing trend in international relations and public diplomacy. Advocates for environmental peacebuilding believe that natural resources and environmental concerns hold positive potential for peace. Environmental peacebuilding is a fairly new idea, but it is growing in prominence, frequently connected to discourses of environmental security, conflict, and cooperation. United Nations programmes around the world, as well as a variety of other international and local organisations, are beginning to use and apply the rationale in many of their projects. However, the bulk of these initiatives encounter and reproduce a divorce between formal negotiations over international armed conflicts and interpersonal relationship- and community building efforts in broader settings. Additional gaps emerge between fields of practice, with distinct bodies of scholarship and practice emerging around different resources and conflict types. These siloes mean that research, policy, and practice miss out on possible benefits of sharing lessons and strategies. Building on participatory methods with practitioners in Morocco, Lebanon, and Kuwait, the study contributes to emerging scholarship by focusing on the environment’s unique role in peacebuilding. Scale, agency, and purpose are employed as interrogative concepts to examine practitioner viewpoints on the nascent field. Primary research questions interrogate: 1. How are the relationships between the environment, peace, and conflict conceptualised in scholarship and practice? 2. How is the scope of environmental peacebuilding approached differently by theoretical scholarship and empirical practice? 3. How do marginalised stakeholders and non-traditional actors hold and enact power in environmental peacebuilding? 4. How are various objectives for environmental peacebuilding work contradictory, complementary, or mutually reinforcing? In addressing these themes, the study makes an original contribution through a definition for this emerging field that highlights its duality as study and practice, emphasises the relational agency of nature, and encourages attention to complex power dynamics yielding different outcomes for diverse stakeholders: Environmental peacebuilding is the critical study of the environment-conflict cooperation nexus and the applied practice of integrating the environment in action towards positive peace. Effective environmental peacebuilding recognises the potential of the environment to be a bystander to, object of, tool for, and actor in peacebuilding, engaging with nature as a partner for peace and minimising negative impacts on marginalised stakeholders by using environmental justice frameworks to inform the approach.