ABSTRACT
Eleven thousand kilometers and an ocean away, environmental cooperation is also helping southern Africa recover from devastating conflicts and prevent new violence from emerging. The peace park initiative may jump-start conflict transformation between the two governments, but the human struggle for peace and sustainable development remains a daily battle. As the environment-conflict debate progressed within the scholarly community, the concept of "environmental security" began to attract attention from security institutions and policymakers throughout the industrial world. As a peacemaking tool, the environment offers some useful, perhaps even unique qualities that lend themselves to building peace and transforming conflict: environmental challenges ignore political boundaries, require a long-term perspective, encourage local and nongovernmental participation, and extend community building beyond polarizing economic linkages. Environmental peacemaking strategies offer the chance to craft a positive, practical policy framework for cooperation that can engage a broad community of stakeholders by combining environment, development, and peace-related concerns.
