EnPAx Honors Environmental Peacebuilding Leaders

Jan 20, 2022 | Environmental Peacebuilding Association

The Environmental Peacebuilding Association® (EnPAx™) is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2022 Awards honoring outstanding contributions to the research and practice of environmental peacebuilding. David Jensen (Coordinator, Digital Transformation Task Force, United Nations Environment Programme) has been named the recipient of the Award for Impactful Practice in Environmental Peacebuilding. In his previous role as Head of Environmental Peacebuilding at UNEP, David collaborated with other UN agencies to understand the role of natural resources and the environment in peace operations. In this capacity, he led the collaborative development of foundational knowledge products and operational guidance for UN agencies, whose relevance extends more globally. He helped establish the Environmental Peacebuilding Community of Practice, Environmental Peacebuilding Knowledge Platform, and Environmental Peacebuilding Association. The massive open online course on Environmental Security and Sustaining Peace, which David helped launch, enrolled more than 20,000 people and is the SDG Academy’s most successful course to date. Awards for Enhancing the Environmental Peacebuilding Knowledge Base are presented to Tobias Ide and McKenzie Johnson. Tobias Ide (Lecturer in Politics and Policy, Murdoch University) has published extensively in journals such as Global Environmental Politics, International Affairs, the Journal of Peace Research, and Political Geography. He has consulted on environmental security issues for the German Federal Parliament, the German Foreign Ministry, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Governor of Western Australia. The Association especially recognizes Tobias’s 2020 article in World Development on “The dark side of environmental peacebuilding”, which challenged the environmental peacebuilding community to reflect more critically on our own work, positionality, and impacts. The Association also notes Tobias’s leadership in editing a special issue of International Affairs on Environmental Peacebuilding, and developing a new program of study in Environment, Conflict, and Security.  McKenzie Johnson (Assistant Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) explores how global environmental governance initiatives create local opportunities to enhance social justice and environmental sustainability. She has previously worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Kabul, Afghanistan, and published in journals such as Conservation & Society and Global Environmental Change. The Knowledge Base Award is granted especially for her recent review of “Intrastate environmental peacebuilding”, published in World Development and co-authored with Luz A. Rodríguez and Manuela Quijano Hoyos. The review emphasized the need to consider mixed evidence about natural resource management in peace and conflict outcomes while showcasing capabilities and integration as particularly important contributors to successful peace processes. The Association further appreciates McKenzie’s current work encouraging attention to a variety of peace and conflict contexts through her examination of community justice, energy policy, and pipeline development in the United States. The Award for Outstanding Early Career Contribution to Environmental Peacebuilding is presented to Clare Church (PhD Student, Aberystwyth University) for her work developing EnPAx’s Young Professionals Interest Group and her research on conflict minerals. After co-founding the Interest Group with Lydia Cardona, Clare has continued to champion early career research, moderating webinars on how to get published and mentoring several other early career researchers. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Clare worked as a policy analyst at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. During her time there, Clare co-authored a report with Alec Crawford on "Green Conflict Minerals: the Fuels of Conflict in the Transition to a Low Carbon Economy", building awareness about the environment-conflict-cooperation nexus. The Award for Best Student Paper on Environmental Peacebuilding is presented to Flavia Larissa Eichmann (Student, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies) for her work on “Fostering Peace through Natural Resource Governance: The Case of Community Forestry in Karen State”. Flavia's work examines forestry in Myanmar, arguing that community-based management can support peacebuilding by focusing on livelihoods and agency. The well-articulated Master’s thesis engages deeply with environmental peacebuilding literature to produce meaningful conclusions about participation and recognition in environmental governance. The Association appreciates the groundedness that Flavia brought to the local case study, while maintaining good self-awareness about the study’s limitations. The Environmental Peacebuilding Association would like to thank committee members Ken Conca, Zabrina Welter, and Fakunle Aremu, and volunteers Eunice Koid and Rachel Stern for their support of the 2021-2022 Awards, as well as all the nominators. “It was a pleasure to learn more about environmental peacebuilding work happening around the world”, says committee chair Becca Farnum. “Nominations–especially for the Early Career Contribution and Best Student Paper–brought our attention to several regions and issues underrepresented in the literature, and we look forward to learning more from all of the nominees, as well as the winners, at the upcoming conference.” Recipients will be honored at the 2nd International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. All are invited to attend the virtual conference, which is free and open to everyone: https://www.environmentalpeacebuilding.org/conferences/2nd-international-conference-on-environmental-peacebuilding/. The Awards Presentation and a subsequent dialogue with the award winners will be held on Thursday 3 February 2022, 3:00-4:30pm Central European Time / 9:00-10:30 am Eastern Standard Time, and will be chaired by Lauren Herzer Risi of the Wilson Center. Registration for the Awards Ceremony and Dialogue is available at https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vn9G2AJ4R8azOSgt3eLhWg.   Notes to editors More information on the Environmental Peacebuilding Association is available at www.environmentalpeacebuilding.org. For further information, please contact Becca Farnum at awards@environmentalpeacebuilding.org. 

Click here for a PDF of the press release.