Environmental Peacebuilding: Recognizing Its Roots, Progress and Future Challenges

Dec 16, 2019 | Teresa Lappe-Osthege and Elaine Lan Yin Hsiao
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Breaking from narratives that overemphasise the relationship between natural environments and violent conflict, environmental peacebuilding aims to explore and utilise cooperative mechanisms that can emerge from the environmental sphere in addressing conflicts or in post-conflict settings. These mechanisms can revolve around shared environmental challenges, such as pollution of transboundary rivers, or relate to issues surrounding equitable natural resource management and benefit-sharing. Cooperation towards identifying joint solutions can be a valuable tool for peacebuilding. It theoretically provides a more neutral platform upon which conflict parties can (re)build trust. 

But who decides what such cooperation should look like?