Environmental Peacebuilding: What Is it Good or?

Jun 5, 2018 | Nina Engwicht
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Policy interventions seeking to break the link between natural resource abundance and violent conflict aim to tackle the quality of environmental governance both in producer countries and global markets. Proponents of such peacebuilding efforts hold that effective reforms in conflict-prone natural resource sectors can enable transitional societies to mitigate conflict risks, build cooperative societal relations around environmental management and reap the benefits of their resource endowment. The rationale that better natural resource governance will reduce the risk for conflict and human rights violations has informed the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation, and many other initiatives tackling natural resource governance at the global, national and local level.    Sierra Leone: A model case? One of the first and most prominent cases of reforms aimed at curbing the production and trade in conflict resources was in the Sierra Leonean diamond sector. During an 11-year long civil war, Sierra Leone gained sad notoriety for its trade in “blood diamonds”. Since the end of the war in 2002 the mineral sector has been thoroughly reformed. Sierra Leone was one of the first members of the Kimberley Process, which aims to regulate the global trade in rough diamonds through government-issued certificates guaranteeing that a given parcel of diamonds is “conflict free”. Sierra Leone is also a member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which seeks to make industry payments to governments transparent, and has been declared EITI-compliant in 2014. On the regional level, the country has harmonized its export taxes with adjacent diamond producing countries in an effort to curb smuggling. Institutional changes at the national level have been extensive. They have included legal reforms; the establishment of a National Minerals Agency charged with monitoring the implementation of regulations in the diamond sector; the development of a cadastral system; and the institution of a Diamond Area Community Development Fund, channeling back a small percentage of tax income derived from diamond exports to diamond mining communities.