Wednesday, 19 May 2004

NAIROBI, Kenya.

The coming-out party for the Institute for Environmental Security in The Hague assembled a heavily North American and European group of people with a few notable participants from Africa and Latin America. We all held a diverse set of visions of environmental security, a diversity that can alternatively be a blessing and a curse.

Environmental security as a concept is commonly criticized as meaning all things to all people and therefore being of little analytical value. On balance, however, I would maintain that scholars and politicians alike are wise not to try for a universal and narrow definition. Environmental security needs to be an umbrella term to capture real differences often grounded in site-specific sets of environment and security links. If we pretend we can achieve a consensus definition, we’re bound to ignore, willfully or carelessly, key development challenges in both the global North and South.

Where you sit typically informs where you focus your environmental security lens. Sitting in low-lying Holland, climate change was repeatedly the center of attention at this Hague conference. Meeting in the Peace Palace, some participants had visions of solving environmental conflicts through formal legal procedures in which everyone has a lawyer and access to developed judicial or arbitration courts. Others worried about minimizing biodiversity loss in wartime.

But at U.N. Environment Program headquarters in Nairobi just days after the conference in The Hague, a decidedly more Southern set of participants wanted to know about a different set of resource-conflict issues. Analysis of developing-country conflicts with natural-resource components often fails to take account of the Northern consumption footprint that helps fuel those “local” conflicts.

Kenyan police officer near Masai Mara.

Where are most of the diamonds from Liberia, trees from Indonesia, or fish of the South Pacific going, after all? These “lootable” resources often end up on the fingers of women in New York, in the walls of houses in Beijing, and in restaurants in Paris. African NGO representatives and U.N. staff alike asked why environmental-security researchers and policy makers commonly viewed the causes of the conflicts associated with these natural resources as local without addressing the more remote contributions. Those of us brought to Nairobi as the environmental-security “experts” had to acknowledge that historically environmental security efforts have been weak on integrating international economic dynamics.

The need to have a fuller view of what fuels conflicts does not obscure the on-the-ground challenges I witnessed in both the crowded slums of Nairobi and the Masai’s cow-dung houses on the fringes of the Serengeti. Environmental degradation and resource competition are part of the complex poverty mix that forces many Kenyans to struggle daily for “human security” on a very personal level. The objective of environmental security should be to find ways to better understand the environment’s contributions to these “livelihood” challenges as a means to more effectively address them.

In their own ways, participants in The Hague conference and the U.N. officials in Nairobi are working toward this end. Environmental security provides a banner under which a diverse group of scholars, policy makers, and practitioners can pursue environmental links commonly neglected in today’s discourses on security and even development.