Conclusions

While this is the promise, it is not an easy win. There is a growing literature on the difficulty of getting international institutions to change, even when they have formally subscribed to these changes. Bell (2008) explores the World Bank’s attempts to make its work more conflict sensitive and shows that while power relations and identities such as caste or ethnicity have widely acknowledged impact on governance and access to economic opportunity, the World Bank is institutionally predisposed to downplaying the importance of these dynamics and the effects it has on them. Similarly Batmanglich and Stephen (2011) find limited support within the World Bank system for initiatives designed to strengthen the institution’s impact in complex and fragile environments. The authors trace this in part back to the daily details of how institutions work, how job responsibilities are defined, how time is managed, what tasks are prioritised, and what successes acknowledged. Smith and Vivekananda (2012) provide further discussion on what is needed in getting the institutions right to address the climate-conflict-fragility nexus.

The focus of the quantitative literature on identifying correlations and arguing causality between climate change and conflict has been of limited value for the peacebuilding community as it provides no answer to the question of how climatic changes and conflict might be related. The framework set out in this paper stresses the need to understand the linked conceptual pairs of fragility and stability, vulnerability and resilience, and human security and insecurity, in order to analyse the pathways between climate change and violent conflict or peace. It has been previously acknowledged that factors such as instability, inequality, and poverty making a society vulnerable to conflict are the same drivers that make a society vulnerable to climate and environmental changes. On the one hand, this means that there is potential for a vicious cycle connecting climate change, vulnerability, and violent conflict. On the other hand, this implies that there is a positive cycle between climate change, resilience, and peace. The double dividend of resilience to conflict and climate change can only be achieved if the contextual complexities are taken into account. For the climate change community this means to ensure their adaptation efforts are peace-positive, and for the peacebuilding and development communities it means to ensure their conflict mitigation and development efforts are climate-proof. While in theory this integrated, resilience-centred approach is highly promising, its practical implementation requires far-reaching structural changes. Climate, development, peacebuilding, and government actors (including donors, NGOs, governments, and practitioners) would have to overcome bureaucratic and institutional barriers and cooperate across thematic and regional silos.