Environmental Peacemaking? An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Environmental Agreements on Interstate Reconciliation

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Tobias Ide
• Subject Area: Human Geography ; Political Science
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283629920

In the last two decades, it has become increasingly clear that global environmental problems will negatively affect the lives of millions of people. A large amount of literature deals with the question whether these environmental challenges fuel state failure, competition for scarce resources, and ultimately armed conflicts. However, this research has been criticized for having contra-productive policy implications and producing self-fulfilling prophecies of future conflicts. An alternative body of literature on environmental peacemaking suggests that adverse environmental changes bear the potential to stimulate cooperative interactions between hostile parties in order to cope with these changes more efficiently. Such interactions, in turn, can pave the way for further cooperation and eventual reconciliation. However, despite its high policy relevance, research on environmental peacemaking is still at an early stage and has produced few consensual results yet.Hence, the main research question of this project is: Do shared environmental problems provide incentives for cooperation between rival states, thus improving the general relationship between them? But how do we know that states acknowledge the existence of an environmental problem and perceive it as urgent enough to cooperate on it? And how to account for cases in which the hostility between the respective states is strong enough to prevent them from cooperating on environmental problems? Both the acknowledgement of urgent environmental problems and the willingness to solve them together with other (rival) states are indicated by the existence of mini-lateral environmental agreements. According to environmental peacemaking theory, such agreements should facilitate communication and further cooperation, trust building, and mutual understanding between competing states. In the middle- to long-term, rivalries should then be reduced. However, can such environmental peacemaking processes be empirically observed, and if so, under which circumstances do they occur?In order to answer this question, a comprehensive list of all interstate rivalries after World War Two will be created. Then, it will be determined whether and when the rival states concluded a mini-lateral environmental agreement in the form of either a river or a transboundary conservation area treaty. Based on this data, the circumstances under which the establishment of environmental treaties contributes to reconciliation between rival states in the medium- to long term will be investigated. In order to integrate quantitative and qualitative data and to account for important context factors, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) will be the preferred method. The results of the QCA will be verified and refined by conducting two to four case studies along the lines of set-theoretic multi-method research.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Australia
• Host: Professor Dr. Jon Barnett