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Conflict in abundance and peacebuilding in scarcity: Challenges and opportunities in addressing climate change and conflict

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  • Abrahams, Daniel

Abstract

Over the past decade, academic and policy communities have given significant attention to the potential connections between climate change and conflict (climate-conflict). While the degree to which climate change alters conflict outcomes remains a topic of considerable debate in academic communities, policy organizations are already being tasked with incorporating climate-conflict into policy and programming. This article investigates how climate-conflict discourses inform development policy and, in turn, how the structures of development enable or constrain institutions’ ability to address climate-conflict priorities. Drawing upon mixed-methods and multi-sited data collection, including nine months of participant observation, interviews, a survey of local government officials, and a document review, I investigated the ways in which development practitioners seek to address climate-conflict. Data collection focused on two particular programs being implemented by Mercy Corps, an international humanitarian and development NGO, in Karamoja, Uganda, a region emerging from a period of violent conflict manifesting largely between ethnically defined pastoralist groups. In examining how the wider discourses of climate-conflict inform these programs, I demonstrate why there exists such a wide disparity between the demand for development programming that addresses the conflict risks of climate change and the distinct lack of clarity regarding what such programming might entail. More specifically, I identify the following overlapping challenges facing development agencies seeking to address climate-conflict: complex spatial scales across disconnected geographies, imprecise and limiting discursive framings, and challenges related to program governance. In addition to identifying these barriers, I also demonstrate that clearer paths for development intervention emerge when the narrow conceptualizations of climate-conflict are widened beyond climate change’s role as a driver of conflict or ‘threat multiplier’.

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  • Abrahams, Daniel, 2020. "Conflict in abundance and peacebuilding in scarcity: Challenges and opportunities in addressing climate change and conflict," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 132(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:132:y:2020:i:c:s0305750x20301248
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.104998
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