From Rhetoric to Response: Addressing Climate Security with International Development

Jun 14, 2021 | Daniel Abrahams
View Original

Over the past decade, our understanding of how climate change affects conflict and security has advanced considerably. Yet, how to best address the overlapping challenges of climate change, conflict, and human security remains an open question. In an article published in World Development, I address this topic by examining how climate security discourses inform development policy and, in turn, how the structures of development enable or constrain institutional capacity to address climate security. This research identifies not only the unique barriers the development sector must overcome, but also the ways in which the most common framings of climate change (i.e., as a threat multiplier) limit the scope for policy and programming.

I conducted this research in partnership with the international development and humanitarian NGO, Mercy Corps, focusing on programming they implemented in Karamoja, Uganda. As I describe in a previous post, Karamoja is recovering from years of intense armed violence. It is also facing a new set of localized security risks associated with increasing pressure on its natural resources. These pressures include contestation over land rights and land access, region-wide changes in socioeconomic structures, and increasingly extreme and unpredictable climatic patterns. Mercy Corps’ programming sought to address these challenges through resilience and peacebuilding programs.