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

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’.