This book provides an empirically formulated foundation for conflict-sensitive conservation, a field in which the existing literature relies primarily on anecdotal evidence. Seeking to better understand the impact of conflict on the implementation and outcomes of environmental projects, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Independent Evaluation Office and the Environmental Law Institute undertook an evaluation of GEF support to fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Following a qualitative and quantitative analysis of documents from more than 4,000 projects, the research team discovered a statistically significant negative correlation between a country’s Fragile States Index score and the implementation quality of environmental projects in that country. In this book, the evaluation and research team explain these groundbreaking findings in detail, highlighting seven key case studies: Afghanistan, Albertine Rift, Balkans, Cambodia, Colombia, Lebanon, and Mali. Drawing upon additional research and interviews with GEF project implementation staff, the volume illustrates the pathways through which conflict and fragility frequently impact environmental projects. It also examines how practitioners and sponsoring institutions can plan and implement their projects to avoid or mitigate these issues and find opportunities to promote peacebuilding through their environmental interventions. Examining data from 164 countries and territories, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental management, conservation, international development, and the fast-growing field of environmental peacebuilding. It will also be a great resource for practitioners working in these important fields. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

"In preparation for COP17 (17th Conference of the Parties) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC), the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) in Durban, held a two- day expert seminar to identify issues and recommendations for ensuring that adaptation to climate change is conflict-sensitive ...papers presented during the meeting were peer-reviewed and compiled for this pertinent book." -- ACCORD.

An insightful guide to understanding conflicts over the conservation of biodiversity and groundbreaking strategies to deal with them.

When the guns are silenced, those who have survived armed conflict need food, water, shelter, the means to earn a living, and the promise of safety and a return to civil order. Meeting these needs while sustaining peace requires more than simply having governmental structures in place; it requires good governance. Natural resources are essential to sustaining people and peace in post-conflict countries, but governance failures often jeopardize such efforts. This book examines the theory, practice, and often surprising realities of post-conflict governance, natural resource management, and peacebuilding in fifty conflict-affected countries and territories. It includes thirty-nine chapters written by more than seventy researchers, diplomats, military personnel, and practitioners from governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental organizations. The book highlights the mutually reinforcing relationship between natural resource management and good governance. Natural resource management is crucial to rebuilding governance and the rule of law, combating corruption, improving transparency and accountability, engaging disenfranchised populations, and building confidence after conflict. At the same time, good governance is essential for ensuring that natural resource management can meet immediate needs for post-conflict stability and development, while simultaneously laying the foundation for a sustainable peace. Drawing on analyses of the close relationship between governance and natural resource management, the book explores lessons from past conflicts and ongoing reconstruction efforts; illustrates how those lessons may be applied to the formulation and implementation of more effective governance initiatives; and presents an emerging theoretical and practical framework for policy makers, researchers, practitioners, and students. Governance, Natural Resources, and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding is part of a global initiative to identify and analyze lessons in post-conflict peacebuilding and natural resource management. The project has generated six books of case studies and analyses, with contributions from practitioners, policy makers, and researchers. Other books in this series address high-value resources, land, water, livelihoods, and assessing and restoring natural resources.

Conflicts frequently arise over environmental issues such as land use, natural resource management, and laws and regulation, emerging from diverging interests and values among stakeholders. This book is a primer on causes of and solutions to such conflicts. It provides a foundational overview of the theory and practice of collaborative approaches to managing environmental disputes. Joshua D. Fisher explains the core concepts in collaborative conflict management and presents a clear, practical, and implementable framework for understanding and responding to environmental disputes. He details strategies to bring stakeholders together in pursuit of collective solutions, emphasizing ongoing processes of dialogue, analysis, action, and learning. This collaborative approach can create new opportunities for stakeholders to better understand each other and the natural world, which enables more effective and context-appropriate environmental governance. The primer examines why and how system dynamics can constrain or expand the possibility of constructive management of conflicts. It features a case study from the Amazon Basin, where local communities, extractive industry operators, conservationists, and land managers have often clashed over access to natural resources, drawing out lessons to illustrate how to adapt the conflict management framework to distinct contexts. Managing Environmental Conflict synthesizes knowledge, methods, and practices spanning consensus building, collaborative governance, complex adaptive systems science, environmental conflict resolution, and environmental peacebuilding. Its presentation of this important and timely topic will be invaluable for academics and practitioners alike, including decision makers, scientists, and conflict management professionals.

How native people—from the Miwoks of Yosemite to the Maasai of eastern Africa—have been displaced from their lands in the name of conservation. Since 1900, more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas have been established worldwide, largely at the urging of five international conservation organizations. About half of these areas were occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. Millions who had been living sustainably on their land for generations were displaced in the interests of conservation. In Conservation Refugees, Mark Dowie tells this story. This is a “good guy vs. good guy” story, Dowie writes; the indigenous peoples' movement and conservation organizations have a vital common goal—to protect biological diversity—and could work effectively and powerfully together to protect the planet and preserve biological diversity. Yet for more than a hundred years, these two forces have been at odds. The result: thousands of unmanageable protected areas and native peoples reduced to poaching and trespassing on their ancestral lands or “assimilated” but permanently indentured on the lowest rungs of the money economy. Dowie begins with the story of Yosemite National Park, which by the turn of the twentieth century established a template for bitter encounters between native peoples and conservation. He then describes the experiences of other groups, ranging from the Ogiek and Maasai of eastern Africa and the Pygmies of Central Africa to the Karen of Thailand and the Adevasis of India. He also discusses such issues as differing definitions of “nature” and “wilderness,” the influence of the “BINGOs” (Big International NGOs, including the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy), the need for Western scientists to respect and honor traditional lifeways, and the need for native peoples to blend their traditional knowledge with the knowledge of modern ecology. When conservationists and native peoples acknowledge the interdependence of biodiversity conservation and cultural survival, Dowie writes, they can together create a new and much more effective paradigm for conservation.

Conflicts about wildlife are usually portrayed and understood as resulting from the negative impacts of wildlife on human livelihoods or property. However, a greater depth of analysis reveals that many instances of human-wildlife conflict are often better understood as people-people conflict, wherein there is a clash of values between different human groups. Understanding Conflicts About Wildlife unites academics and practitioners from across the globe to develop a holistic view of these interactions. It considers the political and social dimensions of ‘human-wildlife conflicts’ alongside effective methodological approaches, and will be of value to academics, conservationists and policy makers.