Lessons from environmental peacebuilding programming

This rapid literature review collates lessons from conflict resolution/peacebuilding programmes that include land, resource management, and/or environmental issues. This is a burgeoning area of research which draws on a number of interrelated concepts such as environmental peacebuilding, resilience building, and bottom-up peacebuilding. Ide and Scheffran (in Ide, 2017, p.545) conceptualise environmental peacebuilding as including “all forms of cooperation on environmental issues which simultaneously conceptually aims at or de facto achieves the transformation of relations between hostile parties towards peaceful conflict resolution”. The environmental peacebuilding literature has moved the focus from resource scarcity, violence and competition to how the environment can incentivise cooperation and peace (Dresse, Fischhendler, Nielsen & Zikos, 2019) through rebuilding key relationships, trust, and a desire for coexistence (Bromwich, 2014; Roulin, et al., 2017). Thus rebuilding and restoring cooperation over natural resources and the environment is important for both peacebuilding and for governance more generally (Bromwich, 2014). Environmental peacebuilding includes a wide range of environmental and natural resource activities, e.g. including activities in the areas of: climate change mitigation and preparation; agriculture and farming; natural resource exploitation; access, use and ownership of land; rewilding; and nature conservation; etc. This query draws on a range of examples from these areas, and from different countries, and provides lessons for the key issues most mentioned in that literature.