Environmental Engineering Reference
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the tri-national Virunga Volcanoes region, home to the last remaining 380 mountain
gorillas; while Büscher has done the same for the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier
area in Southern Africa (Büscher 2009). Apart from international or trans-boundary
work, environmental peace building also includes cross-ethnic or cross-identity-group
initiatives at the sub-national level. Frerks et al. (2006), for example, discuss how eth-
nic identity groups in the conflict-ridden context of Sri Lanka collaborate in a Dutch
funded peace and development programme that was organised around shared inter-
ests, both environmental and cultural. Gaasbeek (2010) examines the collaborative
inter-ethnic interaction of Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese communities in the midst of
war in the Sri Lankan Allai extension scheme, where the interest in joint water man-
agement and the shared feeling of all being farmers were able to resist divisive ethnic
sentiments stirred up by outside forces for a long time.
2.2.6 Livelihoods
In this broader framework of analysis, Leiff Ohlsson's work on livelihood conflicts is
especially relevant. His basic premise is that a common denominator of many conflicts,
if not most conflicts in Africa, South Asia and Latin America, is poverty resulting from
loss of livelihood that is in turn caused or exacerbated by environmental degradation.
While poverty and environmental factors per se only have weak links with the occur-
rence of conflict, (agricultural or pastoral) livelihoods constitute a missing link in the
explanations. Ohlsson (2000: 4) argues:
Great and growing scarcity of healthy, productive eco-systems in the world today
seems to co-exist with an equally great and unused asset made up of all those
women and men who lost their livelihood due to environmental destruction or
unsustainable agriculture. A combination of these two aspects offers the potential
for conflict prevention, poverty elimination and environmental reconstruction.
This may require refocusing on issues such as resource governance and manage-
ment, and shifting from so-called failing states to the required earth system governance,
as proposed for example by Biermann (2007). This connection between long-term
changes in livelihoods and the institutional roles of conflict and cooperation in
enhancing or destroying livelihoods deserves a relatively extensive historical analy-
sis approach, as stated in the foundation literature of political ecology (e.g. Blaikie
and Brookfield 1987). It requires an emphasis on the dynamics in the 'entitlements
to natural resources' (Dietz 1996), an integration of aspects of power, ideology and
violence that affect access to and control over 'livelihood assets' (Jackson 2006), as
well as empirical attempts to connect histories of relative abundance and scarcity with
histories of conflict (as in Witsenburg and Adano 2007; Adano and Witsenburg 2008).
Highly efficient resource use systems have often developed under conditions of resource
scarcity. In more popular terms, tension and conflict may also be seen as a source of
innovation and creativity to adapt land-use and governance systems. In a broader set-
ting it may link up with Boserup's theory in opposition to Malthusian thinking that
looks at population pressure and scarcity as a requirement for technological innovation
(e.g. Burger and Zaal 2009).
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