What lessons can be learned from work by NGOs to address climate and environmental conflicts in the southern Sahel? This study suggests that NGOs and international organisations can play an important role in providing funding and technical support to address climate and environmental related conflicts. They can help to reduce environmental threats, to address structural factors (deprivations and exclusions) that increase people’s vulnerability to such threats, and they can help to build conflict resolution capacity. Current participatory methods can enhance traditional conflict resolution mechanisms.
In Sudan’s southern Sahel, communities and their governments have already developed coping and conflict resolution mechanisms to help mitigate environmental threats and to prevent and manage conflicts. However, traditional conflict resolution mechanisms have been eroded by a number of factors.
The study uses a human security perspective and a ‘deprivation-vulnerability’ analytical framework. This framework involves the consideration of:
- Environmental threats – such as water scarcity, droughts, desertification, and competition over land for grazing and farming.
- Deprivations and exclusions – current hardships and scarcity resulting from poverty and inequality.
- Vulnerability – the likelihood of suffering harm from a specific threat in the context of particular deprivations and exclusions.
NGOs seek to build conflict resolution capacity in the study area and provide opportunities for interactive conflict resolution and reconciliation. Examples include providing conflict resolution training, peacebuilding workshops and reconciliation meetings. In addition:
- Most NGOs recognise the importance of traditional conflict resolution (TCR) mechanisms, and some seek to strengthen and modernise customary methods through capacity building, consultation with stakeholders, dialogue facilitation and negotiation.
- NGOs address environmental threats to human security through the use of innovation and technology (such as seed banks and sand dams). For example, the Sudan Environmental Conservation Society’s Water for Peace project provides affordable water at strategic points along livestock routes to help prevent conflict.
- NGOs address deprivations and exclusions by seeking to enhance livelihood resilience (by providing new skills, or facilitating access to other markets) and through participatory analysis, problem-solving and action with communities that is inclusive of marginalised groups.
The report argues that in areas where customary mediation is practiced and has legitimacy, factors that presently undermine it should be addressed. Such factors include competing legal frameworks, and a lack of coordination between local, state and federal levels of government, and between state and non-state actors engaged in conflict resolution. TCR is highly context-specific, and may only be effective in small areas, or in conditions where outsiders can buy into local values. However, modern participatory methods can enhance TCR. Other implications of the findings include the following:
- Institutional capacity building and economic development are critical in addressing present environment-related conflicts in Sudan. Coupling capacity building in conflict resolution with other informal reconciliation activities, such as human relations workshops, can be beneficial, as can developing synergistic relationships between different stakeholders involved in conflict resolution.
- Institutional and policy measures should be put in place to ensure that when agreements are reached through modern and/or traditional mechanisms, they are implemented.
- Attention should be given to structural and institutional factors, such as government policies on mechanised farming and land policies that govern migration routes and pastoral land rights.
- State government-sponsored mediation may have a key role to play in addressing environment-related conflicts in Sudan. However, political and ethnic manipulation and interference should be addressed.
- More research should be undertaken into the role of TCR mechanisms in resolving climate-related conflicts in Sudan and elsewhere, and into the unique contexts in which particular mechanisms might be more suitable than others.
