project on environmental scarcities, state capacity, & civil violence

Overview

The American Academy of Arts and Science and the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto have concluded a three-year research and policy project on “Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence.” The project sought to determine if scarcities of cropland, forests, water, and other renewable resources are decreasing the capabilities of governments in the developing world and, if so, whether this raises the probability of widespread civil violence such as riots, ethnic clashes, insurgency, and revolution. The project has studied the cases of water in China, cropland in India, and forests in Indonesia.

The target audiences for this project are the policy-making community and general public in the United States, Canada, and the three countries examined. Project organizers will also disseminate findings to policymakers in the case-study countries and to relevant international organizations and NGOs in the developing world.

Background

This collaborative research effort is a successor to the project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict, also jointly sponsored by the American Academy and the University of Toronto. The Acute Conflict project, which began in 1990 and concluded in 1993, brought together a team of forty experts from four continents to study the links between large-scale human-induced environmental change and conflict involving a substantial probability of violence.

During the course of the Acute Conflict project’s work, participants recognized that “environmental change” is only one of three main sources of renewable resource scarcity. The second, population growth, reduces a resource’s per capita availability by dividing it among more and more people. The third, unequal resource distribution, can concentrate a resource in the hands of a few people and subject the rest to extreme scarcity. The term “environmental scarcity” allows these three distinct sources of scarcity to be incorporated into one analysis.

The evidence gathered by the Acute Conflict project pointed to a disturbing conclusion: although environmental scarcities are often hidden by immediate political, ethnic, or ideological factors, they are already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world. Moreover, these conflicts may foreshadow a surge of similar violence in the coming decades, particularly in poor countries where shortages of water, forests, and especially of fertile land, already cause great hardship.

The Acute Conflict project also identified one issue that needs more detailed research: the multiple effects of environmental scarcity, including economic decline and large population movements, might sharply weaken the administrative ability, internal coherence, and legitimacy of the state in some poor countries. This, in turn, raises the likelihood of civil violence.

Outline

The project on Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence began in January 1994 and released its results in North America at a workshop at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington in May 1997. Project findings will be disseminated in China and India in late 1997 and early 1998.

At its height, the State Capacity project was composed of about fifty participants: three country-teams of three experts each, a group of seven general experts, and three in-country advisory teams of ten persons each. Each country-team included two senior specialists and one junior scholar commissioned to gather field data and write a substantial case-study research paper. The group of general experts included a leading environmental economist; an expert on the causes of civil strife and state breakdown; and an internationally known environmental policymaker. The in-country advisory teams consisted of scholars, media people, and policy makers representing a broad cross-section of opinion in each case-study country.

The Academy convened a preliminary workshop of all North American project participants in April 1994 to identify the main hypotheses guiding the research and to discuss sources of data and potential obstacles to research. Throughout the course of the project, project directors, in consultation with project participants, sought to determine whether the findings of the case studies supported their original hypotheses, whether the hypotheses could be changed to have greater explanatory power, and whether there were cross-case generalizations about the effects of environmental scarcity on state capacity and civil violence.

In 1995 and 1996, project directors convened three overseas workshops. These allowed a selected group of the project’s North American experts to meet the in-country advisory teams. The workshops ensured that the research was informed by the best current thinking and data available within the case-study countries and that the findings reflected the interests and perspectives of these countries.

The studies of China and Indonesia were completed in mid 1997 and have been published as occasional papers. They have been extensively reviewed by experts in North America and the respective case-study countries. The India study, along with an additional set of reports on the economic impact of environmental stress on the Chinese economy — reports prepared by a group of Chinese scholars in Beijing — should be published by the end of 1997.