Environmental Conflict: A Values-oriented Approach

Abstract

While attention to ‘environmental conflicts’ is well merited, intervention and action require understanding — an element still visibly lacking in the study of how environmental and natural resource degradation act as an agent in international and civil conflicts. After presenting a review of the conceptual confusion existent in relevant literature from the social sciences, it is proposed that a definition and a model of environmental conflict can be distilled by focusing on the perceptions of parties in environment-related conflicts and considering the environmental and social values these reflect. In striving for a model that forms a viable conceptual equivalence class and serves as an acceptable descriptive and analytical tool, the relevance of existing models describing human—environment linkages is considered, with special consideration of conflicts in which ecological degradation and scarcity play a role. A distinction between ‘resource dispute’ and ‘environmental conflict’ is made in concluding this preliminary investigation, and the utility of such a distinction is discussed in the context of the body of existing literature on conflict resolution, with an eye toward highlighting those implications most relevant to the task of developing institutional response strategies.

This chapter is based in part on an essay submitted in September 1995 for the MSc degree (Development Studies) in the Faculty of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The contents reflect the personal opinions of the author and do not represent the position of the World Foundation for Environment and Development.