Environmental Peacebuilding | Environmental Law Institute

Evaluating Projects and Programs in Fragile, Conflict-Affected, and Violent Contexts

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Friday, April 12, 2024

With violent conflict on the rise around the world, the contexts in which international institutions—including the World Bank, United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF)—support environmental and development interventions are increasingly characterized by fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV).

ELI Report

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Author

Nick Collins - Environmental Law Institute

Environmental Law Institute

Current Issue

March-April 2024

Issue

More than 150 women forge North American branch of global water diplomacy and governance collaboration

Recognizing the urgent need for inclusive water governance on the continent, leading female diplomats have established the North American Women in Water Diplomacy Network. With support from a variety of stakeholders, including Indigenous community leaders, WWDN will establish a regional structure anchored in the Colorado River basin. It will include Indigenous leadership in alignment with the network’s “Path Forward for Women, Water, Peace, and Security” global strategy.

ELI’s partnership with WWDN is a critical part of the Institute’s work to create good governance of water resources. For its part, the network represents a collaborative effort among female decisionmakers and other experts in transboundary water management. Originating in the Nile Basin in 2017, the coalition has partnerships in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas to help amplify women’s voices in water governance, especially addressing the significant underrepresentation of women in decisionmaking roles.

At the December launch event for the North American section, speakers included water commissioners, government officials, and tribal leaders. They underscored the value of collaborative efforts across the Colorado basin to elevate women’s knowledge and experiences in water governance. It marked a pivotal moment, bringing together approximately 150 water policy experts and decisionmakers to emphasize the importance of gender-inclusive approaches in water diplomacy.

The event facilitated networking opportunities, providing a platform for participants to exchange ideas and insights. Additionally, it showcased statements of support from contributing partners and sponsors, affirming the widespread commitment to advancing gender equality in water governance.

Looking ahead, the network is promoting advocacy and partnership through a series of activities, such as informational sessions, consultation workshops, and publication launches—all aimed at global collaboration among women water leaders.

Through these emerging initiatives, WWDN seeks to empower women, enhance their participation in decisionmaking processes, and promote sustainable water management practices worldwide.

ELI will continue to support the network with high-quality research, specifically looking to connect the dots between the Institute’s work on water tenure and gender-equitable water governance.

Wetlands Program’s multi-pronged approach to conservation

February 2 marked World Wetlands Day, always an opportunity to highlight the importance of these critical ecosystems across the globe, as well as the work being done to preserve and restore them. To celebrate, ELI released a new podcast episode with the director of the Institute’s Wetlands Program, Rebecca Kihslinger, along with Staff Attorney Therese Wilkerson and Research Associate Jesse Ferraioli.

The podcast discussed the program, which takes a three-pronged approach: research, stakeholder engagement, and educational outreach. The program analyzes laws and policies and provides tools for wetlands programs at various levels and locations.

The program emphasizes the importance of wetlands as critical ecosystems that provide many important benefits for people and wildlife and are integral to local communities’ cultures and economies. Wetlands benefits include flood protection, resilient infrastructure, carbon storage, and increased water quality.

To help spread the message, ELI hosts the annual National Wetlands Awards, a program that honors individuals who have done extraordinary work in wetland science, conservation, and community engagement.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision has made wetland protection more critical than ever before. Accordingly, recent ELI projects include a review of state wetland programs and evaluation of compensatory mitigation under the Clean Water Act. The emphasis on state and local work also includes stakeholder engagement, like a recent workshop that brought together professionals from resource agencies and federal, state, and local emergency managers to discuss methodologies for prioritizing wetlands restoration.

Building more effective local peacebuilding interventions

Climate change exacerbates global tensions and creates new challenges for policymakers, making it a significant factor in shaping domestic and international relations. An evolving field known as environmental peacebuilding provides pathways to address the intersection of environmental issues, conflict, and efforts toward peace. It is a challenging endeavor, combining different objectives and metrics to address possible interventions.

To assist progress in conflict zones, ELI has published the Toolkit on Monitoring and Evaluation of Environmental Peacebuilding. The toolkit offers guidance to practitioners on establishing and executing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems for interventions that intersect with environment, conflict, and peace.

M&E fosters accountability to intervention participants and beneficiaries, within organizations and to peers. Moreover, it supports learning, which is essential for improving future intervention designs and implementations, as well as providing early warning in the often dynamic and volatile contexts where environmental peacebuilding occurs.

Structured around the intervention cycle, the toolkit comprises chapters on design, monitoring, evaluation, and learning, offering guidance on framing outcomes, developing theories of change, designing M&E approaches, selecting indicators, and managing data collection and analysis.

The toolkit also addresses emerging issues such as big data and geospatial analysis, making it accessible to practitioners from diverse backgrounds.

150 North American Women Join Water Diplomacy.

On Being a Trigger for Peace

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Author

Ken Conca - American University

Geoff Dabelko - Ohio University

American University

Ohio University

Current Issue

July-August 2018

Issue

Ken Conca

Environmental change can be a trigger for conflict. It heightens our sense of group difference. It can make us think about hunkering down rather than reaching out. It tempts us to visualize a world of scarcity and of constraint rather than a world of opportunity and transformation. People assume scarcity begets grievances and grievances beget violence. Our work challenges that determinism.

I would never deny the potential for violence around environmental change. According to Ban Ki-Moon, the former secretary general of the United Nations, climate change “not only exacerbates threats to international peace and security, it is a threat to international peace and security. . . . Mega-crises may well become the new normal.” The human rights organization Global Witness has built a database on the assassinations of environmental activists in the last 10 years or more. The number is large.

What we risk losing if these narratives are only about security and conflict is the possibility that we can instead cooperate around them. They can bring people together, even people who may not be comfortable working together. They can lead us down a path of peace.

The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was the high-water mark for international environmental cooperation. By the late 1990s, when the international community was planning a 10th-anniversary summit meeting in Johannesburg, the bloom was off the rose of international environmental cooperation. The idea of welfare gains and sustainable development was not strong enough to get governments to live up to the commitments they had made in Rio. Many environmental policymakers and activists started casting around for another framework that might give governments that sense of urgency. Environmental security as a concept was born in that quest for agenda setting.

The Cold War was over. It was a time when people who thought about conflict and security were open to new ideas. There was a perception, which today seems quaint, that we would realize a peace dividend, that those massive resources that went into the preparation for war could be redeployed for a more affirmative social purpose.

It was the combination of the quest for urgency and the fluidity in the security space that produced this idea of environmental security. In the run-up to Rio+10, there were governments and activists who wanted environmental security to be the dominant framework for the dialogue and for policy initiatives. In my experience, when the North finds a security incidence in the South, the South would be well advised to duck. They fought too hard to throw off colonialism and have sovereignty over their natural resources to see it be framed simply as someone else’s security agenda.

It also bothered Geoff Dabelko, as the newly minted director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Out of this strategic concern an idea occurred to us. If the environment can be a trigger for conflict, maybe environmental imperatives can be a trigger for peace.

There are three premises to our work.

The first is that because environmental issues ignore human boundaries, they demand cooperation across those boundaries, whether they are between nations, or clans, or identity groups, or neighborhoods, or the people who live upstream and upwind and those who live down. That interdependence can be used to create cooperative incentives, even among actors who are not inclined to cooperate with each other, even among actors in conflict.

The second premise is that the environment can create in people a deeply rooted sense of place. Maybe that can be used to strengthen people’s shared identities, or at least to soften some of the more divisive and conflict-oriented identities that can also take root in specific places.

And third: environmental problems are technically complex, and they challenge us to think forward into an uncertain world. Maybe that uncertainty creates opportunities for learning together. And maybe that learning can be used as a tool to build trust again among parties who might not be inclined to trust.

We never say that environmental cooperation will inevitably lead to peace. Environmental cooperation sometimes only leads to more efficient resource plundering. We instead assess whether particular types of environmental cooperation might be used strategically to make peace by creating cooperative incentives, or by enhancing trust, or by reworking conflict-laden identities.

There is now a large body of evidence that this can in fact be done. There are refugee camps where scarcities of water, or of firewood, or other resources trigger conflict, either within the camp or between the camp and the host community. But there are just as many where we see people developing creative, cooperative solutions. We know that climate change and water scarcity can cause tensions and conflicts between herders and farmers in the world’s dry grassland regions. But we also see creative adaptation under those same stresses. Farmers start to herd, herders start to farm, their children start to intermarry. Grievances are not the only factor. Much depends on our capacity to channel those grievances as productively.

A related observation is that much of what we know is not derived from the work of scholarly research. It is derived from practice.

There is a lot of rich experimentation by communities, by donors, by nongovernmental organizations, by intergovernmental organizations like UN Environment. That raises questions about selection bias. Are people only working in places where it’s easiest? It raises questions about the quality of the data, about long-term effects after the NGOs or the donors go away. It raises questions about community ownership of these processes.

A third observation is that there is not enough attention paid to the institutions that are tasked with implementing these initiatives, such as the UN Security Council. We have to study the institutions that are supposed to deliver on these programs.

Peace is not always the goal. The Palestinians we work with in the West Bank don’t want to talk about peace. They want to talk about justice, they want to talk about dignity. In Flint, Michigan, when the taps started spewing toxic water, those people weren’t interested in peace, either. People who are most directly involved in these conflicts often do not see peace as the principal challenge or the principal problem.

And on the other hand we know that violence can shred any possibility for attaining these other social goals. Peace, even in the most limited sense of forestalling violence, is a very good thing. It’s essential to the realization of other goals. But it’s often not the goal of most of the people who are involved. And we scholars or practitioners who come bearing peace strategies without an emphasis on justice will be looked at skeptically.

Geoff Dabelko

Environmental peacebuilding is often saddled with unrealistic expectations. Some observers ask, Why try environmental peacebuilding if you are not going to solve the whole conflict between India and Pakistan? Where is the evidence environmental peacebuilding works if you are not resolving a conflict? Is it not better to wait to address environmental conditions, goes the argument, until the country is rich, peaceful, and democratic? In this way of thinking, the environment is viewed as a luxury item in post-conflict settings rather than a critical input to saving lives, jump-starting agrarian livelihoods, and spurring economic activity.

Some early practitioners of environmental peacebuilding came from unexpected quarters. Fears of radioactive contamination in the Barents Sea provided an avenue for Russian, Norwegian, and American militaries to interact as the Cold War ended. The resulting Arctic Military Environment Cooperation Program included scientific assessment and safer storage of spent nuclear materials in the Russian Northwest. While radioactivity was a real concern, the collaboration between opposing militaries provided a means to interact regularly on less divisive topics. The program helped U.S. and Norwegian leaders figure out who was in charge of the former Soviet military in the uncertain transition period. Joint scientific assessment and environmental risk management were tools to help build confidence and a post-Cold War peace.

Environmental peacebuilding has faced numerous challenges, and early iterations demonstrated tangible shortcomings. In Johannesburg in 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, only one speaker on a well-attended environment and security panel got questions, many of them hostile. A representative from the Peace Parks Foundation fielded questions about his organization’s peace park efforts in post-Apartheid southern Africa. Signing ceremonies with Nelson Mandela and other heads of state made for good optics, but the beneficiaries of these early transboundary conservation efforts were primarily political elites and large business owners. Local people bore the cost of increased human-wildlife conflict that came with the sudden removal of border fences. They reaped few of the benefits of increased tourism. Fortunately, many early environmental peacebuilders changed their programs, learned lessons, and adapted subsequent efforts inside and outside southern Africa.

The aftermath of the 1990s Yugoslavian civil war was an important place for UN Environment and its post-conflict assessments to make concrete steps toward environmental peacebuilding. Like AMEC, the UN took advantage of the relative lack of controversy around objective scientific assessment in post-conflict settings to tackle the peace and conflict dimensions of the environment and natural resources.

UN Environment identified environmental hotspots and natural resource management steps critical to restarting economies. Their comprehensive reports, done with the permission of host governments, assigned some degree of responsibility for environmental damage and helped formulate a plan forward. The plan was a little more subversive than we realized at the time. UN Environment assessed the role natural resources may have played in starting, extending, and recovering from conflict. It helped formulate a possible foundation for peace through environmental management institutions.

Those field assessments were fairly straightforward steps compared to the politics that surround peace and conflict issues at the United Nations. UN Environment still had many battles about environmental peacebuilding at its headquarters in Nairobi and at UN headquarters in New York. Member governments routinely assert their right to sovereign control of resources as an impediment to engaging in environmental actions designed to prevent conflict in particular. They commonly maintain that environmental issues are not security issues but instead economic ones better suited to be addressed by the economic and environmental bodies at the UN.

Despite these regular objections, those UN-focused efforts have had success. However, I would flag one dilemma raised by this example. I call it “What’s in a name?” What we call environmental peacebuilding really matters to the parties on the ground. Peacebuilding as an enterprise is inherently politically sensitive. The advantage of the environmental sector is often the issues are less so as illustrated by the earlier examples. But labeling an effort as environmental peacebuilding rather than environmental management can make the goal harder to achieve. Parties assume defensive positions and the conflict is renewed rather than reconciled. If making the peacebuilding objectives explicit makes it harder to achieve, how do we do it without that label? When do you use that label explicitly and when is it a critical but unstated goal?

Some have reacted that such a labeling decision can be troubling, since they value transparency and participation among all stakeholders from the outset. It raises challenging tradeoffs for small group negotiations and less transparent approaches versus all-inclusive negotiations in public. In the age of diplomacy by press release and even tweet, this transparency can actually make it harder to achieve success.

Let me share one more case to illustrate the environmental peacebuilding work yet to be done. In this example, practitioners are asking questions of researchers and scholars that we cannot yet answer definitively. I have worked closely with the U.S. Agency for International Development and their Conflict Management and Mitigation team. Many of you have had similar experiences with many other partners in the field. How do we practice, how do we pursue, how do policymakers grapple with environmental peacebuilding within a climate change context?

Twenty-five years ago, climate change was seen as a long-term, diffuse, incremental, and future topic for environment and security scholars and practitioners. The existential threat to small island states, for example, was not yet widely perceived. Steps to address climate change and security were largely separate conversations.

Today, the script has flipped. Since 2007, climate change has become the primary entryway into the environment and security conversation, almost to the exclusion of other important environment and natural resource topics. USAID’s conflict management staff now evaluate the agency’s climate change assistance by asking two questions: Is this climate-related investment going to create new conflict or contribute to existing conflicts? and, How can it be designed to contribute to additional development or peace-supporting solutions? If this investment is in a fragile state, or a conflict-affected state, how can we do environmental peacebuilding with this climate intervention?

Indeed, both scholars and practitioners need to develop better answers to these questions even if one can easily claim climate adaptation and mitigation efforts remain limited within countries and the international community. Our argument should be for finding ways to capture co-benefits and the triple bottom line even as we experiment and develop a research base for better knowing what works. In a financial resource-constrained policy environment, let us collaborate to achieve climate, poverty alleviation, and peacebuilding goals together with coordinated responses.

These are the challenges before us. There has been promising progress. There is lots more to do. TEF

AL MOUMIN AWARD WINNERS ❧ A colloquy on how to use environmental cooperation to alleviate, end, and hopefully prevent armed conflict, by two veteran “soldiers” in the field.

ELI Report

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Author

Laura Frederick - Environmental Law Institute

Environmental Law Institute

Current Issue

May-June 2018

Issue

Artificial Intelligence: Will algorithms benefit the environment? Report points the path to beneficial uses of computerization

Artificial Intelligence is changing how our society operates. AI now helps make judicial decisions, medical diagnoses, and drives cars. AI also has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with our environment. It can help improve resource use and energy efficiency and predict extreme weather.

AI can also exacerbate existing environmental issues. For example, software manipulation of over a half million VW diesel automobiles created one of the largest environmental scandals of the past decade.

ELI’s Technology, Innovation, and the Environment Program was developed to better understand the environmental impacts and opportunities created through emerging technologies and their underlying innovation systems

When Software Rules: Rule of Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a new report from program director David Rejeski, explores the interaction between AI and the environment and the need for some form of governance to ensure that it is deployed in a manner that is beneficial.

“As environmental decisionmaking becomes internalized into AI algorithms, and these algorithms increasingly learn without human input, issues of transparency and accountability must be addressed,” said Rejeski. “This is a moment of opportunity for the legal, ethical, and public policy communities to ensure positive environmental outcomes.”

“When Software Rules” offers the government, businesses, and the public a number of recommendations they can use as they begin to consider the environmental impacts of AI.

The report discusses concerns with AI systems. These include unintended consequences, such as race bias in algorithms, and the common difficulty of understanding the logic of deep-learning systems and how they come to decisions. Other sources of concern include issues like algorithms functioning on the basis of correlation without proving causality; legal liability issues; lack of privacy from data mining; and the risk of hacking.

Some form of governance over AI systems is necessary to address some of these issues, and ensure responsibility, including taking environmental considerations into account. Semi-formal governance systems may include voluntary codes outlining engagement with AI research or self-governance by institutions looking to create “ethical” AI systems. A more formal governance system may include legislation protecting consumers from faulty algorithms.

ELI provides a number of recommendations as to how AI governance can include consideration of environmental impacts. Suggestions are provided for all stakeholders: the private AI sector, programmers, governments, and the public.

For example, the private AI sector can develop research teams that include evaluation of the socio-environmental impacts of their algorithms and assemble stakeholder groups to develop guidelines for sustainable development of AI.

Programmers can increase the transparency of their algorithms so users can understand why decisions are being made, and they can increase their commitment to prioritizing environmental benefits.

Governments can ensure AI systems are powered by renewable energy to meet the energy demand of these new systems and create incentives for the development of AI that tackles environmental issues.

Members of the public can advocate for systems that promote their cultural norms and values, including environmental protection, and they can make responsible consumer choices by supporting AI companies that are transparent and environmentally conscious.

As AI governance becomes a societal expectation and is later bound by semiformal or formal contracts, the environment must be a central focus in AI discourse and subsequent laws and policy, the report concludes. ELI will continue to provide guidance on how these goals can best be achieved.

“When Software Rules: Rule of Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” is available for free download at eli.org/research-report/when-software-rules-rule-law-age-artificial-intelligence.

Al Moumin awardees highlight promise of peacebuilding efforts

ELI co-hosted the annual Al-Moumin Distinguished Lecture on Environmental Peacebuilding, a hallmark of the Institute’s Environmental Peacebuilding Program. Co-sponsored by the Environmental Law Institute, American University, and the United Nations Environment Programme, the lecture recognizes leading thinkers who are shaping the field of environmental peacebuilding and presents the prestigious Al-Moumin Award. The series is named for Mishkat Al-Moumin, Iraq’s first Minister of Environment, a human rights and environment lawyer, and a Visiting Scholar at ELI.

This event, now in its fifth year, honored Ken Conca and Geoff Dabelko for their outstanding contributions to the field.

Conca is a professor of international relations in the School of International Service at American University. Dabelko is a professor and director of environmental studies at the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs at Ohio University; he is also a senior advisor to the Environmental Change and Security Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Fifteen years ago, Conca and Dabelko published Environmental Peacemaking, a rejoinder to grim scenarios foreseeing environmental change as a driver of conflict. Conca, Dabelko, and collaborators argued that, despite conflict risks, shared environmental interests and cooperative action could also be a basis for building trust, establishing shared identities, and transforming conflict into cooperation.

In their lectures, Conca and Dabelko reflected on the evolution of environmental peacebuilding research since their work began in the early days of the post-Cold War era, their seminal publication, and their long-term engagement with policymakers and practitioners applying these insights around the world.

Their work transformed, and continues to have a profound impact on, the way scholars and practitioners approach and understand the intersection of environmental protection, national security, and human rights.

Conca and Dabelko’s work is also the heart of ELI’s Environmental Peacebuilding Program: As the world experiences increasing pressures on its natural resources and climate, countries must learn to peacefully resolve resource disputes and make the environment a reason for cooperation rather than conflict.

Team travels to Indonesia to prep for judicial education course

Legal authorities are now available in Indonesia to enable civil society and the government to file claims to hold responsible parties liable for damages and the restoration of natural resources.

Through an ELI workshop and curriculum developed in conjunction with the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law and others, judges will learn best practices and methods for implementing new legal processes, including environmental damage valuation and restoration and compensation, tailored to the specific needs of the host country.

The goal is to promote environmental accountability through judicial enforcement. Ultimately, the benefits will include reduced deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as improved biodiversity and quality of life for vulnerable communities.

ELI recently traveled to Indonesia to help prepare for the week-long workshop to be held this summer. Staff met with various local stakeholders to gain background on topics like injury quantification, restoration and compensation, and settlement. ELI was also able to hear from judges which topics are most important to cover.

ELI staff held focus groups with ICEL as well as the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, using an oil spill case to discuss valuation, settlement, and transboundary issues.

ELI and ICEL also held focus group discussions with the Supreme Court of Indonesia’s Environmental Working Group and Center for Training and Legal Research. The discussion included a presentation on the needs assessment by ICEL and a presentation on the comparative study of valuation, compensation, and restoration practice in several countries.

ELI’s judicial education program is a hallmark of the Institute’s work. With in-depth consultations, custom design of programs to meet the specific needs of the particular jurisdiction, and success in creating institutional capacity, the lessons learned continue to be applied after the education is completed. Since 1991, ELI has developed, presented, and participated in more than 40 workshops on critical topics in environmental law for more than 2,000 judges from 27 countries.

ELI met with a local NGO and members of the government to prepare for workshop on judicial enforcement of environmental laws.

Field Notes: Water summit showcases ELI legal expertise

ELI President Scott Fulton and Director of ELI’s Judicial Education Program Alejandra Rabasa traveled to Brazil to participate in the World Water Forum. The forum is the world’s biggest water-related event and is organized by the World Water Council, an international organization that brings together all those interested in the theme of water. Supreme Court justices from over 50 counties were in attendance to shine a light on the importance of rule of law in advancing water quality goals.

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ELI hosted a day-long conference on Environmental Law In Practice in Detroit. The conference presented a spectrum of emerging legal issues with a focus on environmental justice. It introduced a wide-ranging exploration of career opportunities in the EJ field. This event featured environmental law experts on panels including Careers in Environmental Justice, Energy & Climate Justice, Water Access and Affordability, and Urban Air Quality.

Agustin V. Arbulu, executive director of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, delivered opening remarks. Keynote addresses were given by Mustafa Santiago Ali, senior vice president of climate, environmental justice and community revitalization, Hip Hop Caucus, and Charles Lee, senior policy advisor, EPA Office of Environmental Justice.

Members of the public came together with lawyers, students, academics, civil rights and social justice advocates and activists, and community groups to discuss pressing issues.

The Conference was co-sponsored by Wayne State University Law School’s Transnational Environmental Law Clinic and Environmental Law Society, University of Chicago Law School’s Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, the American Bar Association’s Environmental Justice Committee of the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice, and the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.

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Director of the Ocean Program Xiao Recio-Blanco moderated a webinar on Current Developments on U.S. Fisheries Policy. The Trump administration’s approach to fisheries management seems to constitute a significant policymaking shift. Recent decisions such as extending the Gulf of Mexico season for red snapper or overturning a decision by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission that would have cut New Jersey’s recreational quota for summer flounder seem to go against NOAA’s traditional approach of situating scientific information at the center of fisheries decisionmaking.

The webinar discussed these and other recent developments and assessed the direction U.S. fisheries policymaking may take in the future.

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ELI and the China Environmental Protection Foundation held the first training session to build the capacity of public interest groups and prosecutors in China since receiving its temporary registration for an environmental protection-related project from China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Beijing Bureau of Public Security.

The session was held at Tianjin University Law School. A total of 53 participants — comprising representatives from public interest groups, environmental courts, prosecutors, and environmental protection bureaus — attended from 16 provinces, autonomous regions, and cities.

Report on perils, promise of artificial intelligence.