Intrastate environmental peacebuilding: A review of the literature

• Published in: World development 2021-01, Vol.137, p.105150, Article 105150
• Main Authors: Johnson, McKenzie F., Rodríguez, Luz A., Quijano Hoyos, Manuela
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aggression; Analysis; Causality; Conflict; Conflict resolution; Diplomatic negotiations in international disputes; Empirical analysis; Environmental cooperation; Environmental management; Environmental peacebuilding; Integration; International security; Intrastate peacebuilding; Legitimacy; Linkages; Literature reviews; Mitigation; Natural resource management; Natural resources; Pacific settlement of international disputes; Peace; Peace negotiations; Post-conflict; Prevention; Resilience; Resource management; Social cohesion; Spoiling; Violence
• ISSN: 0305-750X; 1873-5991
• DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105150

•We review 79 empirical articles on intrastate environmental peacebuilding written between 2002 and 2019.•We examine linkages between NRM and peace dimensions (non-violence, shared identity, capabilities, and substantial integration).•Evidence of environment-peace linkages is mixed: NRM shows both positive and negative linkages to all peace dimensions.•Peace as capabilities and substantial integration are particularly important contributors to peace outcomes.•We highlight five major avenues for future research in intrastate environmental peacebuilding. As a discipline, environmental peacebuilding “integrates natural resource management in conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution, and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by conflict” (EnPAX 2020). Increasingly, peacebuilders have deployed environmental peacebuilding in intrastate and interstate contexts to advance peacebuilding objectives. Despite its growing appeal, environmental peacebuilding has been critiqued for lacking a strong theoretical foundation grounded in empirical evidence. Clear causal mechanisms linking environment and peacebuilding remain poorly specified, meaning many of the core assumptions in environmental peacebuilding circulate in peer-review and policy literature without critical reflection. In this article, we conduct a review of the empirical literature on environmental peacebuilding to examine linkages between NRM and intrastate peacebuilding. Our analysis builds on the notion of a “peace continuum” to identify four dimensions of peace (absence of violence, shared identity, capabilities, and substantial integration), and models how NRM initiatives contribute to or detract from those dimensions, as well as their cumulative impact on wider peacebuilding processes (i.e. positive, negative, or mixed). We systematically coded and analyzed 79 empirical articles on intrastate environmental peacebuilding written between 2002 and 2019 to identify the causal mechanisms and sub-mechanisms driving NRM-peace linkages. We reviewed research from 40 conflict-affected countries, and our sample included articles that found NRM initiatives to have an overall positive (N = 20), negative (N = 13), or mixed (N = 35) effect on peacebuilding (N = 11 coded as other). While we find the evidence for environment-peace linkages is mixed and context-dependent, our analysis suggests that NRM initiatives show consistent indirect and direct linkages to all dimensions of peace, but especially pea