Conference Agenda

This paper presents the results of a four-year inter-disciplinary research project that scrutinizes the mutual constitution between environmental protection, environmental justice and peacebuilding processes after internal armed conflicts, with Uganda and Colombia as case studies.

We first introduce our rationale and the concept of environmental peacebuilding that guided our project. We propose a broad understanding that takes all cycles of the peacebuilding process into account and puts stronger emphasis on long-term social and environmental impacts. The linkages of internal armed conflicts to environmental justice are complex; such conflicts may entail direct environmental destruction and a deterioration of livelihoods, e.g. through population displacement, land grabbing and illegal extraction of natural resources. On the other hand, internal armed conflicts may provide unintended protection for forests, wetlands and other ecosystems.

Based on this conceptualization, we sketch our analytical framework that establishes various dimensions (social, ecological, political, economic) of post-conflict environmental peacebuilding and their interactions. To research these dimensions, we employed a cross-disciplinary variety of methodical approaches, including legal and policy analyses, GIS and spatial analyses. Adding to this, we conducted field research in biodiversity hotspots at risk, with semi-structured and focus group interviews, transect and narrative walks.

An integral part of our research design is the difference in timing between our two selected case studies. In Uganda, the signing of the peace agreement officially ended the conflict in December 2002. As we show, tensions over resources have persisted, implying mineral exploitation, land grabs and conflicts between returnees and community members. Together with high poverty and low education levels, they bear a high potential of relapse into violent conflict.

Colombia, by contrast, is still in the midst of the peace process. Areas formerly used by guerrillas as hiding places are now undergoing rapid transformation. For Sumapaz and Putumayo we can show that the post-peace agreement period has seen an intensification of land conversion, illegal land grabbing and new forms of natural resources exploitation, also including new actors such as large mining companies attempting to enter the area.

In a final step, we ask to what extent certain lessons for environmental justice, positive and negative, can be learnt from Uganda for the Colombian case. We advance a set of cross-cutting recommendations for practitioners, stakeholders and scholars: for how to enhance measures of environmental protection and natural resource management in post-conflict peacebuilding processes; and for how to support and improve the situation of vulnerable communities.

Sustainability transformations are intensely contested and at risk of backlash to ambitious policy action. Political elites and mass publics opposing policy action sometimes push back fiercely, especially in wider contexts animated by populism, resentment, and deeply divided preferences and values. This threatens policy enactment and durability, potentially setting back broader policy agendas, and derailing efforts towards realising transformations in governance and society. This is particularly evident for climate change policy where experiences of backlash have shown that even when ambitious policy is adopted, heated political battles may continue, and policy durability and expansion is not guaranteed. However, literature on sustainability transformations pays insufficient attention to the potential for such conflict, and its implications for understanding how ambitious policy action may be advanced in non-ideal real-world arenas, where conflict is endemic and consensus is elusive or impossible.

In this paper, we develop a framework for conceptualizing policy action in societal transformations as an unfolding sequence of ‘battle-settlement’ events. Distinct from (and complementary to) recent literature emphasising the role of coalitions and policy feedback in achieving durable policy action, we argue that the notion of battle-settlements better captures the open-ended character of ongoing political struggles over deliberate societal transformation and their oftentimes messy and lurching trajectories. By ‘settlements’, we refer to limited and often bitter compromise between rival actors over distributions of power and resources which are forged through mutual struggle. Arguably, a policy feedback view risks jumping too quickly over the politics of reaching settlements and reflecting a narrowed focus on endogenous policy effects which can overlook unexpected consequences and wider contradictory interactions. The notion of battle-settlement events usefully foregrounds historical and contextual contingency, a combination of authoritative enforcement and mutual buy-in, and a fragile balance of provisionality and finality to decisions which may not easily become locked-in. We illustrate the utility of this approach through various empirical experiences of backlash in climate and environmental politics to show how conflict arose and settled, and the implications for broader trajectories of transformation.

This contributes to envisioning and analysing new ways of dealing with inevitable conflict in sustainability transformations, by bringing ideas about political settlements from other fields into conversation with developmentalist thinking on political change and transformation in sustainability (e.g., coalitions and policy feedback). Thereby, it contributes to understanding dynamics of policymaking and resistance within sustainability transformations at the interface of ‘Democracy and Power’ and ‘Architecture and Agency’.

With our paper we would like to contribute to a better understanding of the inherent politics of sustainability transformations. To do so, we reflect on findings of the research project ‘Securing Tenure, Sustainable Peace?’ which explored efforts to localize land tenure registration (LLR) in Burundi and eastern DR Congo. Rather than demonstrating success or failure, we question whether key assumptions about localized land tenure registration hold in practice, notably the idea that it will contribute to sustainable peace. More specifically, we analyse whether localized land tenure 1) results in a clarification of land rights and thus better protection; 2) helps marginalized groups, notably women; and 3) prevents disputes. Our findings demonstrate that these assumptions need to be nuanced. Localized land tenure registration is not just a response to tenure insecurity and conflict, but tends to become part of the socio-political dynamics that nurture these. Frequently, efforts for transforming land tenure effectively undermine the prerequisites for sustainable peace. We consider these findings also relevant for better understanding the politics of sustainability transformations more widely. In particular, we draw attention to the tendency of de-politicization of land tenure interventions, which in our case involves 1) the discursive power of technical optimisation, which reduces policy makers’ engagement with fair outcomes and renders invisible the political choices these require; 2) the underestimation of elite capture and institutional competition accompanying land registration programmes; 3) overlooking of the level of risk involved in land registration programmes and unforeseen outcomes of transformation.

The frequency of extreme weather events has increased over the last decades in different regions across Europe. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), just in recent years, extreme weather events have displaced hundreds of thousands of people. For example, heavy rainfall across western Europe in mid-July 2021 led to at least 84,000 displacements. In the same year, wildfires triggered around 155,000 displacements in Southern Europe. On top of that, the number of reported cases of relocation or planned retreat of settlements due to exposure to risks such as floods and Sea Level Rise is increasing (e.g. East Anglia and Norfolk counties on the eastern coast of England or the municipality of Almada in Portugal). Despite this, news media and politicians seem more interested in discussing climate change-induced mass migrations towards Europe rather than recognising people’s internal mobility responses to environmental change. Furthermore, there is a geographical bias in the scientific literature as well, as research on climate change, environment and human mobility is underrepresented in European cases and mainly focuses on the Global South. This paper reviews where the discussion on the effects of environmental change on human mobility in the European context stands. To do so, we review the relevant scientific literature and a selection of European and National strategies on climate change adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction to understand whether and how human mobility is contemplated in these frameworks. The present study is an initial attempt to fill the geographical gaps in the literature on environmental change and human mobility. At the same time, it questions the assumption that European countries can consider themselves immune to environmental change-related human mobility.