CHAP T E R 12

Environmental Conict Resolution

By the start of the second decade of the twenty-rst century, it was clear that environmental and resource issues would be central to prospects for global conict and cooperation. The outcome of the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in December 2009 suggested that cooperation to prevent dangerous climate change would be hard to achieve. With no legally binding limits in place, there seemed little to stop the onward rise of global temperatures and the corresponding impacts on vulnerable populations. Time is short, since an effective response in the next ten or at most twenty years is required to avert dangerous climate change. But our capacity to respond appears alarmingly limited. It is easy to forecast an apocalyptic picture of interconnected global emergencies. Gwynne Dyer (2010: back cover) argues that an increase of as little as two degrees Celsius in average global temperature which is almost inevitable would heat global politics to boiling point and trigger massive conicts over scarce food and water, while James Lovelock (2006: 60) is even more pessimistic: although the earth has recovered from fevers like this in the past, if these huge changes do occur it seems likely that few of the teeming billions [of human beings] now alive will survive. Drying out of the continental interiors, prolonged droughts, melting of the ice in the Himalayas on which the river valleys of China and India depend, ocean acidication, harsher conditions for agriculture, melting ice caps, rising sea levels all these present an alarming picture. Moreover, climate change is only one of a range of environmental challenges. We face a devastating crisis of biodiversity and unprecedented pressure on the renewable and non-renewable resources on which the world at present depends. If peak oil occurs before societies have prepared an adequate transition from fossil fuels, will competition for strategic supplies fuel new wars? Will societies be able to feed their populations and provide the energy and material basis of life to all? Will the poor and vulnerable be able to survive? If we picture the world as a single country, it would surely be a Third World country. It would have great inequalities, widespread denial of basic needs, weak or non-existent governance, human insecurity, and a mass of religious, ideological, ethnic and cultural divisions.1 Would such a country be capable of responding to these overwhelming challenges? It surely has all the conditions for protracted social conict. What, if anything, can conict resolution offer to conicts on this global
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scale? Does conict resolution apply at all in the case of environmental conicts? What is the relationship between environmental damage, conict between societies and potential conict resolution? We begin our discussion by looking at local, small-scale environmental conicts and the responses which characterize the new eld of environmental conict resolution. We next move up a scale to look at conicts of interest over climate change within a single country, and then between and within countries. We sketch a role for conict resolution in the negotiation and evolution of cooperative agreements and look at the conditions for cooperation to evolve. We allude to the social transformations that may be needed to make the transition from the carbon era and suggest that, insofar as we are dealing with an asymmetric conict, confrontation as well as conict resolution may be required. Finally we discuss the potential for armed conicts over climate change, concluding that we cannot speculate on whether climate change will become an important factor in the causation of wars, but that we would be well advised to adopt policies of prevention and conict transformation to reduce this risk.

Tragedies of the Commons

Garret Hardin (1968) pointed out the fundamental dilemma of collective action problems that lead to environmental conicts of interest. If interdependent actors pursue only their own interests, with no concern for the collective good, they risk collective ruin. Thus, for example, overexploitation of North Sea sh led to the collapse of the Hull shing industry, where most of the trawlers have been driven out of business. As Hardin put it, freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. The Tragedy of the Commons is an extension of the prisoners dilemma to many players (see chapter 1). Each farmer (or sher) can cooperate, by limiting withdrawal of common resources, or defect, by withdrawing resources without restraint. If the renewal of resources depends on collective restraint, a policy of restraint is collectively rational. But, if the farmers cannot trust one another, it is individually rational to defect, whatever strategy others play. Rapoport (1988) demonstrated in a series of experimental games that sustained cooperation is difcult to achieve in an n-person prisoners dilemma, even when the social trap is explained, although cooperation increases when players are allowed to communicate. Nevertheless, in real commons, people often do cooperate. Historians have shown that, in the medieval and modern period, peasant farmers generally did not ruin the commons. Instead they developed institutions to regulate access. Ingleborough, a mountain whose long, at summit and steep sides form a familiar landmark for miles around, is one of the three peaks in West Yorkshire in England. In 1652, the rights of the tenants of the neighbouring manor of Twistleton to common lands at Ingleborough were dened:

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so much common of pasture on and throughout all the commons on Ingleborough within the Lordship of Ingleton formerly agreed upon and to be occupied and enjoyed by the said Tenants and thacke and stone thereunto belonging with egress and regress at all times, as doth or ought to belong unto three oxgange and a-half to any of the tenants of Ingleton aforesaid without any rent paying for the same. (Balderston and Balderston, 1888: 272)2

The implication was that the peasants access was regulated by the size of their holding in the manor (an oxgang was about 15 acres). In other words, Hardins assumption that peasants had unrestricted freedom in the commons was wrong.3 Although at times unregulated competition does take place, in general people are aware of the consequences of the competition and use rules specic to the particular social setting to regulate collective use.

A Californian water conict

Elinor Ostrom, in her book Governing the Commons (1990), studied how traditional and modern communities cooperate to manage scarce resources. Here we summarize her example of water abstraction conicts in California to give a sense of what can be done. She shows that, even when large numbers of parties are involved (in one case as many as 500 parties, more than the number of states in the world), people were able to overcome a potential tragedy of the commons by negotiating, adopting common rules and creating new institutions. In the 1930s, landowners, cities and water supply companies were pumping water from groundwater basins in southern California. These basins were fed by run-off from the surrounding hills, but the amount of groundwater that could be taken without damaging the groundwater basins was limited. Up to the 1930s, the legal regime gave incentives to users to pump as much water as they needed. As a result, too much water was extracted, the water table began to sink and intrusion of seawater threatened the groundwater basins. The communities and producers had different interests and were vulnerable to different extents. Communities closest to the coast were most affected. Higher-up communities could extract water longer without suffering from seawater intrusion. Since different producers operated in different areas, the course of negotiations was distinctive in each basin. In the rst basin to reach an agreement, the largest water user, the city of Pasadena, attempted to secure a voluntary agreement that all the others should restrict their use. When these others would not agree, Pasadena took legal action against the city of Alhambra and thirty other producers. A long legal case ensued. As part of this case, scientists undertook detailed hydrological studies. With the legal case outstanding and the results of the science clearly favouring restraint, the parties eventually agreed to reduce their abstraction. They agreed to a new legal regime, which claried the mutual obligations of the producers and created a new authority to monitor the agreement. This agreement then became

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a model for other basins. Elsewhere, though, the legal battles were more prolonged. Negotiations reached impasses. In one basin, an adjudicating committee nally arrived at an agreement after two years of negotiations. Even after the agreement was reached, one of the cities refused to sign up and continued to abstract more than its share of water, and it was brought into line only by successful legal action by the other cities. Recognizing that agreements could not be policed by continuous resort to the courts, and also recognizing the interdependence of the coastal and interior basins, the producers eventually negotiated an agreement to create a new authority in charge of water management across the whole of southern California. This authority built freshwater reserves along the coast that could be used to prevent seawater intrusion and protect the interior basins. It was no longer in the interests of the producers to withhold cooperation. The improved regulatory regime gradually put an end to overextraction, and the water tables in the basins recovered to a sustainable level. Although the negotiation process was protracted and uneven, a satisfactory outcome was eventually reached. The key ingredients were the ability of the parties to negotiate, the presence of a legal system that could resolve legal conicts, and the multiplicity of basins, which allowed the evolution of cooperation in one basin to become a model for another. Having resolved the main conicts, an institution evolved with the capacity to act as a dispute settlement regime. The producers were able to monitor one anothers impacts, and eventually came to accept an individual and collective interest in the rules that regulated access to the water basins. This outcome was reached as a result of negotiation, adjudication, legal settlement and cooperation on rules and institutions. In more recent environmental conicts in the United States, a new breed of environmental conict resolution professionals is applying third-party methods to manage local environmental conicts (Blackburn and Bruce, 1995; OLeary and Bingham, 2003). The idea is to identify the key stakeholders, map their conicts, bring them together, and set up a facilitated process which allows the key issues to be identied and collective approaches negotiated, ideally without the costs of legal action. In 1998, the US Environmental Policy and Conict Resolution Act set up the US Institute of Environmental Conict Resolution to assist parties in conicts involving federal agencies. Can such an approach be applied to the more global environmental challenges we face, in an international environment where agreed norms and legal enforcement are harder to achieve? We will approach this question by focusing on climate change perhaps the most dramatic of the linked environmental crises that we face.

Conicts of Interest over Climate Change

Climate change is a collective action problem because the individual and collective incentives to reduce carbon emissions are different. There is a strong

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collective benet in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as the Stern report (Stern, 2007) demonstrated. The social cost of mitigation and adaptation is far lower than the cost of unrestricted climate change. The problem is that different individuals, interest groups and states perceive very different costs and benets, and institutions capable of balancing global costs and benets do not yet exist. For example, the Association of Low Lying Island States would like more radical mitigation policies than OPEC. Consider rst the conicts of interest within a single country over the response to climate change. Let us take as an example a country with different stakeholder groups, some representing fossil fuel industries, who perceive high costs in a programme of mitigation, others representing cities and householders, who perceive higher costs from failure to act. We can represent the actors preferences for a collective policy on climate change as lying along an axis representing a more or less ambitious carbon mitigation policy for that country. The conict of interest between any two actors can be taken as a function of their perceived costs and benets over the range of possible collective policies. In general, the further they are apart, the greater the conict of interest. Each actor will have a range of acceptable outcomes on the axis. Following Putnam (1988), let us call this range its win-set. Now, if there are joint outcomes that lie within the win-sets of the actors, an agreement on a collective policy is possible otherwise, not. There are a number of ways in which the conict can be overcome. Either or both parties can move their position to adjust to the other. They might accept a compromise in between their positions, even though the compromise is not the highest preference of either. They might reward or coerce each other to move positions. Or they might rely on an arbitrator, such as a government, to make a decision for them. If the government is perfectly responsive to the wishes of the stakeholders and represents their interests equally, it will choose the policy that maximizes joint benets. In practice, however, governments respond to inuence from the stakeholders, so the stakeholders compete to move the government closer to their particular position. In countries where the government has a large stake in the fossil fuel industry, which is usually the case in countries with large fossil fuel industries, governments are more likely to favour industry. In countries which import fuel and are vulnerable to climate change, the government is more likely to favour the cities. Both the governments and the stakeholders seek to inuence one anothers positions. Of course, positions are not xed and move in response to changing conditions. Stakeholders may reassess their preferred positions in the light of new information. We know that one way to achieve conict resolution is for the parties to nd new positions that meet their underlying interests and needs. For example, if the government were to set up a market in reducing carbon emissions, the fossil fuel producers might be able to offset a potential loss of demand for fuels by higher value operations in energy efciency. They might

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then move towards supporting a more active climate mitigation policy, which might in turn bring both the government and the cities to adopt still more active proposals. Such a shift in positions could become self-sustaining. A process like this took place in California in the 1980s and has now spread to energy companies elsewhere. Facing rising marginal costs of supplying electricity and regulatory constraints on investment in new supply capacity, utilities such as Pacic Gas and Electric invested in energy efciency and renewable energy in consumers dwellings. They gave substantial incentives to consumers to invest in solar panels and energy efciency, offering to install these measures themselves and creating nance packages that were competitive with new energy supply. In effect, the electricity company became an energy services company, providing the end-user with energy services through an appropriate mixture of energy efciency and energy supply. Because the electricity company had the expertise and access to nance to invest in energy efciency and renewable energy, and many householders did not, this innovation removed one of the barriers to change. Such cooperation could make householders and fossil fuel companies more willing to accept policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions. If fossil fuel companies realign themselves as energy service companies and nd new markets in providing energy efciency and renewable energy services, or if new companies emerge to provide these services in competition with the fossil fuel companies, a more favourable environment for further steps to mitigate climate change would develop. This process is an example of changing preferences, which is an important element of conict resolution. Of course, such a change is unlikely to take place all at once. Many actors will wait to see what others do. There are likely to be unconditional cooperators, who will pursue mitigation strategies irrespective of what others do, and unconditional non-cooperators, who will resist mitigation policies irrespective of what others do. But many will be conditional cooperators, who will move to pursuing mitigation if others do and if the economic and institutional context changes to make mitigation a strategy with higher pay-offs to inaction (as in the case of the Californian groundwater basins). There are social learning effects here, which may produce a tipping point and a change in system behaviour over time. Such changes do not depend entirely on cooperation and goodwill. If there is sufcient demand for mitigation, governments will require stakeholders to accept different policies, and they have sufcient legal, scal and regulatory powers to enforce a change. Conict, as well as conict resolution, may be a necessary part of the transition from carbon. While the major governments remain heavily under the inuence of the fossil fuel industries, such changes may require both political mobilization and a general swing away from the carbon economy. Where governments create incentives for mitigation, such as carbon taxes or carbon trading schemes, the various stakeholders will be inclined to take more steps towards mitigation; in turn, this is likely to create

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a more propitious environment for public policies that foster mitigation. So there are likely to be feedbacks between public policy and the behaviour of energy users, which will make some countries leaders and others laggards in the transition from fossil fuels.

Multilevel Negotiations
How will the interaction between individuals, interest groups, public opinion and government behaviour play out across multiple states? Here the processes can become more complex. The political scientist Robert Putnam (1988) suggested that, in environmental, trade and similar negotiations, states and interest groups bargain together in a two-level game. In order to conclude an agreement, states must agree at the international level, but they also have to carry domestic coalitions, who may be able to block the legislation necessary to ratify an agreement and the policy measures needed to put it into force. Domestic coalitions can therefore be seen as veto-players who have an important stake in the negotiations at the interstate level. Any successful outcome must therefore lie within the win-sets of all the key veto-players, including governments and domestic interest groups. As Putnam puts it:
At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among those groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments. Neither of the two games can be ignored by central decision-makers, so long as their countries remain interdependent, yet sovereign. (Putnam 1988: 434)

Ward et al. (2001) draw on Putnams approach to analyse two-level bargaining in international climate change negotiations. For the sake of simplicity, they consider a situation with two governments, one a leader in international climate negotiations favouring strong mitigation, the other a lagger who favours an outcome close to the status quo. They suggest that both the leader and the lagger can use political capital to move the positions of the interest groups. But they suggest the lagger will always have an advantage, since it can concentrate political capital on just one vested interest that can be used to block political change. Thus, they argue, climate change negotiations proceed at the pace of the slowest. This is a strong argument, and it seems to capture what has actually happened in the international climate change negotiations to date. But note that the model of Ward and his colleagues assumes that the governments and interest groups preferences stay the same, except insofar as the latter are bribed to move by political capital. If we allow for the possibility that interest groups might evolve towards a cooperative policy through mutual interactions, along the lines of the Californian energy services model, one could see different dynamics. Indeed, over a larger number of countries, the

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possibilities for cooperation (and for conict) are increased. Energy companies in one country may benet from investing in energy efciency or renewable energy in another, and this may not only yield returns in terms of carbon credits, tax breaks or under Kyoto-style Joint Implementation, it may also offer real economic opportunities. Demand for end-use energy services will grow strongly across the world, but this could be met by different combinations of energy supply and energy efciency. There is a large market opportunity in assisting developing countries to leapfrog over the dirty industrial mode of development. Energy service companies in one state may therefore be able to make alliances with cities and householders in another, setting up networks of cooperation, assisted by favourable states. In such a way, cooperation could evolve in different basins, even while other states and stakeholders remain laggards. Once such patterns of cooperation are set up, the benets of sustaining them may be considerable and may not depend only on environmental benets. Indeed, as Giddens (2009) has argued, action on mitigation is most likely to take place when it meets other needs besides collective environmental benet, such as economic advantage and reduction of air pollution. Already we can see examples of signicant cross-national cooperation, such as European investment in Chinese carbon capture and sequestration and plans for trading solar electricity from the North African deserts to Europe. Experiments with the evolution of cooperation (see chapter 1) have shown that players can do better if the chance of bumping into another cooperator is not random (Bowles, 2004). That is, if they can reliably recognize a cooperator and predict who will be a cooperator through some marker, such as group identity, cooperation becomes easier to establish. If the population is not homogeneous but is broken up into groups, cooperation may get established more quickly in some groups than others, enabling cooperative practices to spread from one group to another. A group that is cooperating can then share the benets of cooperation and do better than other groups. Applying this logic to climate change, even if major vested interests remain intransigent, if there is a way of cooperators to recognize each other and share the benets of cooperation, then the strategy may spread. This can be expected to lead to a process of polarization, with leaders (governments and interest groups) pulling away from laggards and creating mutual benets from cooperation from which laggards are excluded. If a point is reached where these benets are clearly seen to outweigh the disbenets of cooperation, the incentive structure for the laggards will change and the whole system tips towards mutual cooperation.

International Negotiations
In practice the actual course of events and negotiations in arranging agreements on climate change has proven challenging (Depledge, 2006). While

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there is growing consensus on the need for international action, states disagree on the terms for cooperation. Considerations of development, sovereignty, equity, trade, and protection of national economies and national industries have come into play. The disappointing outcome at the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 made cooperation to prevent dangerous climate change look harder to achieve and brought the conicts of interest between states into a sharper focus. International agreement remains of vital importance, and it is unlikely that a fully effective climate regime can come into play until a stronger basis for international agreements has been achieved. Climate change has proven more difcult to negotiate than other environmental agreements, since it involves issues of equity and national development and is closely related to the patterns of asymmetric conict and hegemony which divide the world. It may be that progress between willing cooperators will have to develop alongside resistance on the part of non-cooperators before the context for the transition from carbon is clear.

Climate change and armed conict

At present, then, the situation is at the stage of conict of interest and political conict, but there are as yet no armed conicts over climate change. If we count climate change as a factor in conict and violence, it is indirect, through the structural violence which leaves vulnerable populations at risk from natural disasters, droughts and storms, or through the indirect impact of climate on drought-related conicts such as in Darfur. Migration from areas at risk from sea and storms has certainly contributed to ethnic conict for example, in north-east India. But predictions that climate change will be associated with armed conict in a major way remain speculative at present, since we do not yet know how climate change or future conict will unfold. Droughts and declining rainfall will affect agriculture, signicantly lowering the incomes of poorer farmers while possibly raising those of richer farmers. Lower run-off to rivers may trigger conicts between riparian states. Parching continental interiors and loss of low-lying land to the sea may intensify conicts over land and other agricultural resources for example, destabilizing relations between pastoralist and agrarian communities. There will certainly be increased migration, both internally and internationally, though whether this triggers or mitigates conict depends on circumstances. Over the longer term, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers will have a devastating impact on the river valleys of India and China. Rising sea levels and storms will affect the large deltas, which are densely settled and economically important. The melting of the Arctic is already contributing to a race for the hydrocarbon resources thought to lie beneath the ice. So an impact on armed conicts is quite possible, though the major effects lie in the future. Thomas Homer-Dixon (2001) has triggered an as yet unresolved debate with his argument that pressure on resources and environmental degradation

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leads to scarcity and violence. He carefully assembles evidence of the causal pathways through which scarcity may be linked to social responses and may lead to ethnic conicts, coups or insurgencies. He illustrates the argument with the case of Haiti, suggesting that deforestation and erosion contributed to migration to the towns, continuing poverty, strife between the urban elite and poor slum-dwellers, and protracted conict. Homer-Dixons thesis is challenged, on the one hand, by those who argue that the evidence to date does not support a link between scarcity and conict (Gleditsch, 1997; Nords and Gleditsch, 2007) and, on the other, by those who suggest the causation works in reverse unequal social structures generate both environmental scarcity and conict (Suliman, 1999). Another argument is that the main contribution of climate change will be to structural violence and exclusion of the disadvantaged. For example, Rogers (2000) argues that the West is adopting a fortress approach to the problems of the global South, constructing barriers at the borders to keep out migrants eeing from environmental and other disasters. This is likely to be unsuccessful, however, and only contributes to insecurity as the disadvantaged and repressed strike back with unconventional means. Barnett (2007) makes a similar argument, that climate change is most likely to affect the poorest the bottom billion, who already live in weak economies and under weak governance. It will reduce economic prospects, result in loss of income and horizontal inequalities, and contribute to human insecurity and to the fragility of governments. Such countries will be least able to adapt to the challenges of climate change. It is no accident that a large proportion of countries in the bottom billion fall into conict and nd it difcult to escape what Collier et al. (2003) call the conict trap. Likewise, Smith and Vivekananda (2007) presents a list of countries which have experienced recent armed conict and are on the DFID list of fragile states; all of them face additional challenges from climate change. Climate change is best seen as a potential background or proximate cause of conict rather than as a direct cause on its own. It will always be mediated by other social, political and international relationships. Other causes of conict may be more immediate sources of violence. Competition over hydrocarbons and lootable resources, which become scarce for political as much as environmental reasons, may well be more immediate causes of wars. There is certainly no doubt that growing populations and economies will face severe challenges to adapt if peak oil becomes a reality (Klare, 2005, 2008). The way in which these issues are securitized is itself an essential aspect of the transition from conict of interest to armed conict, as the Copenhagen School suggests (Buzan et al., 1997). Energy is already more securitized than climate change, but both are rising rapidly up the list of new security challenges with which states are concerned. Similar policies of transition from carbon are required to deal with the potential conicts over both energy and climate change, so, whether we regard environmental conict resolution in this case as a form

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of conict prevention or as an approach to transforming existing political conicts, the need for imaginative collective response is similar. The academic controversy on the possible relationship between patterns of climate change and armed conict continues to rage. A paper by Burke et al. (2009), arguing that climate is already a factor in armed conicts in Africa, met with a devastating critique by Buhaug (2010), who argued that social and political variables are sufcient to explain African wars and that climate has not been a factor. James R. Lee (2009) has combined climate change research and scenarios with an analysis of global conict data and argues that conict research and conict analysis need to be adapted and developed in order to provide problem-solving and conict prevention methodologies for anticipating climate-generated conicts and to provide space and time to avoid these emerging and becoming violent. He outlines six future scenarios of climate change and conict: these are based on the end of the Ice Age (the melting of polar ice); raised temperatures in the tropics; water wars related to desertication; livelihood wars in Africa; the heating up of Central Asia and the prospect of resource wars between nation states; and rising sea levels in South Asia and the islands of the Indian and Pacic oceans. Each of these scenarios contains latent and, in some cases, manifest patterns of conict in response to the climate changes. One will sufce to illustrate Lees thesis and its relevance for environmental conict resolution. In Lees scenario, Central Asia will see increasing desertication, and the heating of the interior of the landmass will affect the river systems and the large downstream populations in many countries in the region. Control of the headwaters provides control of the rivers and water resources. Of the ten great rivers in the region, eight originate in China and, in Lees assessment, Chinas control of water resources will put it on a collision course with downstream users, intensifying scarcity in South and South-East Asia and potentially leading Russia, India, Pakistan and Vietnam to consider violent means to ensure their water supplies if threatened in this way. Lees conclusion about the choices that need to be made to increase the chances of managing climate-generated conict in non-violent ways echoes what has been found in conict research about other modes of conict. Climate change and conict needs to be understood in a long-term timeframe; good analysis and scientic understanding is a necessary precondition for effective policy response; and climate-driven conict needs to be taken seriously as a conict driver within the conict resolution eld. James Lovelock and Gwynne Dyer, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, argue that it is already too late to prevent the devastating effects of global warming, including associated political struggles and climate wars. Lovelock thinks that a catastrophic reduction in the size of the human population is now inevitable. These apocalyptic scenarios, together with the proposed causal connections that underpin them, are in turn contested. The cosmopolitan conict resolution response to this controversy is to refuse to accept

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either the resignation characteristic of the former or the complacency that can accompany the latter. The supreme test for the human species is to learn collectively how to understand and anticipate these unintended systemic effects of human action and, even at this late hour, to succeed in adapting conict resolution approaches for overcoming local tragedies of the commons, as described in this chapter, to a global setting.
Recommended reading Gleditsch (1997); Homer-Dixon (2001); Lee (2009); OLeary and Bingham (2003); Ostrom (1990). Recommended video Michael Klare (2008) Blood and Oil. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation.

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