A report and a new database on trainings for environmental conflict resolution reveal that while natural resource management is largely covered, the crucial link between the environment and civil conflict is missing. While many capacity building measures exist for natural resource governance, their scope is mostly restricted to the local level and they do not consider the broader socio-political context. However, even though environmentally induced conflicts are increasingly frequent, their root causes are often not the environmental problems themselves, but are linked to broader structural problems of governance, marginalization and existing civil conflict. The report and the database show that these root causes are rarely addressed in trainings. Furthermore, those trainings that focus on (post)conflict settings and peacebuilding only insufficiently include the potential contributions of environmental cooperation.



Adelphi Research compiled this overview as part of their activities in the "Initiative for Peacebuilding" project. Please feel free to contact us by Email (mailto:Houdret@adelphi-research.de) if you would like to add any trainings on conflict over natural resources and their socio-political context. A revised version of the database will be available on ecc-platform.org in November.

A report summarizing the key findings on the availability and characteristics of the trainings are available here. The entire database of all trainings can be viewed here.

Further information on the project "Initiative for Peacebuilding" is available at http://www.initiativeforpeacebuilding.eu/

Published in: ECC-Newsletter, August 2009