2.3 Literature Review
2.3.2 Climate-induced Scarcity as Analytical Prism
Much of the discourse on the implication of climate change for conflict focuses largely on its effect on renewable natural resources (Baechler, 1998; Homer-Dixon and Blitt, 1998).
Dependence of a vast number of people on natural resources in poor regions, it is argued, makes the depletion of the natural environment a human security subject (Barnett, 2003;
Gleditsch and Urdal, 2002; Wolt, 2011). As such, heightened vulnerability resulting from climate-induced natural resources degradation and scarcity further highlights its importance to peace and security in those regions as scarcity plays an important role in precipitating violent conflicts and other forms of insecurity (Percival and Homer-Dixon, 1998; Gleditsch and Urdal, 2002). Bauhaug Gleditsch and Theisen (2008) define scarcity as “low per-capita access to a resource” and explain further that by resource scarcity, they refer to “a low per capita availability of a renewable resource, such as freshwater” which results from either, or both of two processes including: (1) “a dwindling resource base, and (2) increased demand for the resource through increased population pressure and/or increased consumption” (p. 7).
Similarly, Percival and Homer-Dixon (1998) argue that the relationship between environmental scarcity and violent conflicts lie in determinants that are context-specific.
These factors include the “quantity and vulnerability of environmental resources, the balance of political power, the nature of the state, patterns of social interaction, and the structure of economic relations among social groups” (p. 280), which have influences on how resources are used, the effects of scarcity on social systems and processes, the potential for scarcity engendering grievances, and the degrees to which violence may be aggravated. The authors further identify three forms of environmental scarcity, namely: supply-induced scarcity resulting from the degradation and depletion of resources in an environment; demand- induced scarcity arising due to population growth in a given environment or increased per capita consumption of a particular resource and increasing its demand; and structural scarcity
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which results from inequality in social distribution of a resource concentrating access to relatively few people. These result in resource capture and ecological marginalization.
Apart from scholarly expositions on the role of environment induced scarcity and renewable resources in violent conflict onset, the resource scarcity and conflict connection is also a major concern for policy makers. For example, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, expressing concern on the issue, pointed out that ‘If we don’t respond adequately to the challenge of global climate change, over the course of these next years there will be people fighting wars over water and over land’ (U.S. Department of State, 2013, n. p.)35.
Similar concerns are held at multinational levels. The United Nations’ Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon notes that “competition between communities and countries for scarce resources—especially water—was increasing, exacerbating old security dilemmas and creating new ones, while environmental refugees were reshaping the human geography of the planet, a trend that would only increase as deserts advanced, forests were felled, and sea- levels rose”.36 The Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Achim Steiner also identified climate change as a threat multiplier which fuelled
“competition over scarce water and land, exacerbated by regional changes in climate, [which is] already a key factor in local conflicts in Darfur, the Central African Republic, northern Kenya and Chad”.37
While there appears to be a logical weight behind analogies in security sector narratives on the resource scarcity and conflict dynamics, much of the academic attempts at identifying the specificities of the connection draw validity from conjectured variables. As a result they have generated mostly sceptical, inconclusive, or very controversial findings. A number of quantitative studies suggest that there is a link between intrastate conflict and low levels of precipitation (Fjelde and von Uexkull, 2012; Raleigh and Kniveton, 2012) or between scarcity of freshwater resources and violent conflict (Gizelis and Wooden, 2010; Raleigh and Urdal, 2007). Some others also argue that there is no significant relationship (O’Loughlin et al., 2014; Wischnath and Buhaug, 2014), with some finding a negative correlation between
35 Secretary Kerry Holds a Google+ Hangout With NBC's Andrea Mitchell http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2013/05/209273.htm. Accessed 24/08/2014.
36 Security Council Meetings Coverage Security Council 6587th Meeting, 20th July 2011.
http://www.un.org/press/en/2011/sc10332.doc.htm.
37 Ibid.
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the incidence of low rainfall or water scarcity and intrastate violent conflict (Hendrix and Glaser, 2007; Salehyan and Hendrix, 2014).
Similar controversies characterise quantitative studies aimed at specifying causal relations between scarcity and conflict such as those on soil degradation (Hendrix and Glaser, 2007;
Raleigh and Urdal, 2007; Rowhani et al., 2011; Theisen, 2008) or deforestation (Esty et al., 1999; Theisen, 2008). The findings of qualitative studies are no less ambivalent. While some authors find important links between scarcity of renewable resource scarcity and violent conflict under certain circumstances (Homer-Dixon, 1994; Kahl, 2006; Schilling et al., 2012), many others reject such claims (Selby and Hoffmann, 2014; Adano et al., 2012), others give mixed results (Benjaminsen and Ba, 2009; de Chaˆtel, 2014).
How then can knowledge about resource scarcity and violent conflict linkages be advanced?
Three challenges are often highlighted by scholars. First, as Barnett (2000) noted, relate to understanding how resource scarcity result in grievances, livelihood insecurities and conflicts. This has been positively argued by scholars, but gaps exist in our knowledge of how, why and when an escalation into open violence results from such grievances. Hence Engels and Chojnacki (2012: 94) argue that “the transition from conflict to violence has not yet been analyzed in a sufficiently sophisticated manner in the literature on environmental conflicts’’. Second, results generated in previous studies and shared by nearly all authors on the subject (see Hauge, Wenche and Tanja Ellingsen, 1998; Homer-Dixon and Blitt, 1998;
Scheffran et al., 2012), suggest that renewable resource scarcity is linked to violent conflict only in the presence of certain conditions or a combination of conditions. This position brings to fore the important question relating to understanding “why violence [associated with scarce resources] occurs in some places and not in others” (Peluso and Watts, 2001: 29).
In recent times, a number of quantitative studies have been conducted with a view to identifying the causal contingencies underlying environment-conflict transformation. This has been done by investigating the interaction between certain contiguous variables from climatic variability functions such as changes in the level of precipitation, to the nature of socio-political structure: the level of political exclusion or levels of socio-economic marginalization (Fjelde and von Uexkull, 2012; Theisen, 2012). This line of research is constrained however, by limitations arising not only from the nature of some of these variables as non-static processes most of which are not amenable to qualitative analysis or statistical regressions, but also by the multiplicity of interacting variables (Vis, 2012).
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On the other hand, while case studies are relatively more suitable for examining the complex interactions among different variables because they address a particular context, it also suffers from limited validity, utility in generalization and comparability because outcomes pertain to the specific context of the study. This problem relates to a third and more general issue which bothers on the methods often used in the study of linkages between scarcity of renewable resource and violent conflicts. More often than not, studies rely on either a large-N regression analyses or a qualitative single-case study approach. While the single-case study approach is often faulted for its low external validity especially in drawing conclusive findings (see for instance: Koubi et al., 2014; Gleditsch and Urdal, 2002), studies using large- N regressions have also been faulted as well for missing details are crucial to shaping social processes such as incidences and scale of conflict. The validity question is without prejudice to Flyvbjerg’s (2006) observation that in principle, generalize-able results can be produced from case study methods.
Apart from being constrained generally in regards to their suitability for capturing non-linear effects (Sterzel et al., 2014), large-N regressions are also unable to accommodate important variables such as resource distribution patterns, on which there are no available quantitative datasets, or in situations where data are difficult to generate, for example data on social identities or traditional conflict resolution mechanisms (Selby, 2014; Ide and Scheffran, 2014). In view of these limitations, there have been increased call for further studies to find middle ways between qualitative single-case and quantitative large-N studies that more suitably combines the strengths of both methods (Solow, 2013; Meierding, 2013).
However, while there is yet no consensus on this linkage, the climate change, scarcity and conflict nexus presents the closest empirical prism in contextualising the climate-conflict nexus. Arguments proceeding from this line of the narrative are mediated by varying significance of intervening effects of institutions, innovative adaptation systems and adaptive capacity which defines how communities adjust to resource scarcity and avert or respond to threatening changes (Forsyth and Schomerus, 2013)38 and essentially, approach used in analyzing causal linkages. The next section examines three main perspectives in the climate change scarcity and conflict debate.
38 As illustrated in Merchant, 1990, Turner and Ali, 1995, Lambin et al. 2001, Turner et al, 1990, Lambin et al, 1999.
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