Elaine C Hsiao

Transboundary Conservation Areas (TBCAs), such as Parks for Peace, have been heralded for their potential to foster peaceful relations, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development. Yet, critics point out failings of TBCAs, including multiple conflicts between protected ecosystems, local communities, and neighboring governments. This essay suggests that TBCAs’ failings result in part from a lack of connection between three intertwined types of peace: international peace between states, social peace within and between communities, and ecological peace between humans and the non- human. This calls for integrative approaches bringing about multi- scalar socioenvironmental peace, whereby each category of peace reinforces the others. These connected peaces are essential for just and positive peace, not only in TBCAs, but for the Whole Earth.

It has often been cited that major armed conflicts (>1,000 casualties) afflicted two-thirds (23) of the world’s recognized biodiversity hotspots between 1950 and 2000.1 In 2011, the International Law Commission (ILC) included in its long-term work program Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflict. This led to the adoption of twenty-eight Draft Principles, including designation of protected zones where attacks against the environment are prohibited during armed conflict. Protected zone designations apply to places of major environmental and cultural importance, requiring that they “[…] shall be protected against any attack, as long as it does not contain a military objective.” Most research on armed conflict and protected areas has focused on impacts to wildlife and less on how to protect these natural habitats from the ravages of armed conflict.

This article highlights some of the gaps in the ILC Draft Principles towards protecting protected zones in bello. It uses transboundary protected areas (TBPAs) formalized through multilateral agreements to illustrate challenges on the ground. TBPAs are internationally designated “[...] protected areas that are ecologically connected across one or more international boundaries […]” and sometimes even established for their promotion of peace (i.e., Parks for Peace). There is little legal research on how to design TBPA agreements for conflict resilience, conflict sensitivity, and ultimately positive peace. The research draws from two case studies in Africa’s Great Rift Valley: the Greater Virunga Landscape (GVL) between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, and Uganda, and the Kidepo Landscape, which forms part of the broader Landscapes for Peace initiative between South Sudan and Uganda. Both suffer from armed conflicts of various types and present two of the only TBPAs in the world that have incorporated environmental peacebuilding into their transboundary agreements. The case studies illustrate different approaches to TBPA design and the pros and cons of each modality in the context of conflict resilience and conflict sensitivity. This guides us on how to better protect protected areas in bello, ensuring that protected zones endure on the ground and not just in principle.

Protected areas can play a variety of roles in the context of environmental security, conflict and peace processes.  As resource-rich biodiversity hotspots, they may become the locus of natural resource conflicts or the resource ‘bank’ for armed groups trafficking natural resources to finance violent conflicts.  They might become refuge for armed combatants, or perhaps even the sanctuary of endangered species fleeing armed conflicts.  These 'wild spaces' offer different opportunities and challenges in the various stages of conflict, conflict transformation and peacebuilding.  When insecurity or conflict involves international borders, the crossborder conservation areas become particularly salient. 

Uganda is a land-locked East African nation with eight of its ten national parks sitting on conflictafflicted international borders.  In each of these border regions, park managers have collaborated with neighboring parks to protect natural resources. Geographically they are all part of the Albertine Rift and Great Rift Valley, one large-scale landscape that has been an ancient pathway for transcontinental elephant migration and cattle corridor for nomadic pastoralists - both increasingly challenged by land fragmentation and climate change. Understanding transboundary conservation on these borders can provide insight into how we can improve legal arrangements through transboundary conservation for peace.

Reports on the world's water in recent years share a resounding message that the planet's hydrological systems and resources are increasingly insecure. Africa, home of 34 Least Developed Countries, is considered the most vulnerable continent to impacts of anthropogenically induced climate change, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting great instability to Africa's water resources as a result of climate change. In the heart of this vast continent and its impending water crises is the Albertine Rift and eight border-adjacent national parks – Virunga National Park (NP) and Sarambwe Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); Volcanoes NP in Rwanda; and Semuliki NP, Rwenzori Mountains NP, Queen Elizabeth NP, Bwindi Impenetrable NP and Mgahinga Gorilla NP in Uganda. These parks form the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (GVTC), one of Africa's key water towers. The GVTC provides a useful case study of water management for peace and resilience; it highlights the challenge of maintaining the needs of biodiversity and hydrological systems while satisfying overlapping human needs. Based on nine months of field research in the region, this study describes socio-ecological issues raised in interviews on water and environmental change in the context of transboundary conservation in the Central Albertine Rift (CAR). It then examines international and national (Uganda) approaches to managing water and promotes the patchwork peace park model of collective action by front-line communities to create a local conservation network that capitalizes on the peace building nature of water. Wildlife managers are already collaborating in park protection in the CAR; likewise, broader stakeholder participation could help to balance congruent needs in a manner that safeguards community and ecosystem resilience for generations.

The global environmental outlook is increasingly bleak and the human condition does not fare better. The IUCN Red List of endangered species is longer than ever, with predictions foretelling the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs.[1] Human development reports reflect growth but do not measure well-being, deep inequality or apathy.[2] A hundred years ago, North America was coming out of a war fought overseas and entering an era of fossil fuel electrified industrialization. It was claimed that economic 'progress' would inspire efficient use of resources, but rather what it transpired was reckless waste of natural capital and an epoch of environmental crises, the Anthropocene, defined by overwhelming anthropogenically induced environmental change.[3] Narratives on peak oil, disasters, resource wars, and water and food insecurity challenge all paradigms, including law and legal systems. The Anthropocene has been derived in part through the mechanization of exploitati...

Environmental law has long sought to protect the interests of nature and all of its elements. Sometimes this has been framed as beneficial to human health and well-being. Sometimes it has involved commodification of natural resources or systems in the form of market mechanisms. Rarely has it involved a recognition of an aspect of nature as a living entity with rights of its own equivalent to human rights. This is what a recent agreement between the Maori of the Whanganui River and the government of New Zealand pledged to do on August 30th, 2012. This essay recounts a history behind the agreement of indigenous struggle for environmental sovereignty amounting to the longest standing legal battle in New Zealand. Then it highlights accomplishments of that agreement, namely recognition of the Whanganui River in its entirety as a living being and legal entity. It also recognizes that these achievements without the enduring indigenous struggle by Maori tribes in New Zealand to maintain control of their lands and rights, of a peoples representing the rights of nature, and of a continual process to decolonize both nature and peoples.

Whanganui River Agreement - Indigenous Rights and Rights of Nature (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235671679_Whanganui_River_Agreement_-_Indigenous_Rights_and_Rights_of_Nature [accessed May 3, 2016].

Esta obra recoge los trabajos realizados durante los años 2006 a 2008 por un equipo investigador constituido por profesores y alumnos de las Universidades de Yale y Pace en Estados Unidos y de la Rey Juan Carlos y Politécnica de Madrid en España. El objetivo era encontrar una salida a la situación de pobreza y deforestación en la que se encuentran las zonas montanas transfronterizas entre Honduras y Nicaragua, especialmente las de pinares de Pinus oocarpa. La declaración de un espacio protegido binacional podría suponer para una zona de por sí enormemente atractiva, un interés ecoturístico como motor del desarrollo local, un estímulo para la conservación y un modo de colaborar entre pueblos hermanos. Así pues, en estos trabajos se estudia el potencial que tiene la región de Madriz en Nicaragua y Choluteca en Honduras para ser declarada como “Parque Binacional para la Paz” con el objeto de fomentar la paz, la conservación de los recursos naturales y la mejora de las condiciones de vida de los habitantes.

Esta zona binacional protegida incluiría la reserva natural de Tepesomoto y Cañón de Somoto en Nicaragua y las áreas protegidas de La Botija y Cerro de Guanacaure en Honduras. Todas estas áreas forman parte de un mismo ecosistema, aquejadas por una misma problemática a ambos lados de la frontera. Su puesta en común bajo un espacio binacional protegido más extenso permitiría poner en valor áreas que de modo independiente difícilmente podrían alcanzarlo.

Este trabajo se ha hecho siguiendo la metodología del ciclo de proyecto adaptada a la generación de nuevos espacios naturales protegidos como motor de desarrollo rural. El método general propuesto parte de afrontar un problema o una necesidad (1a parte de la obra), con una idea que se plantea a los agentes involucrados (2a parte de la obra). A partir del análisis de sus respuestas y las posibilidades que estos ofrecen para el desarrollo del proyecto se realiza un estudio de previabilidad fundamentado en análisis sociales y políticos que debe conducir a una estrategia de implementación de parque (3a parte). Si este estudio es positivo, como fue el caso, se pasa a la siguiente fase o estudio de viabilidad que incluye los análisis biofísicos y socioeconómicos, definición de los límites territoriales y planificación física, aspectos hidrológicos, legales, ecoturísticos y selvícolas realizados para fundamentar la propuesta de Parque Binacional (4a parte). Por último se dan una serie de recomendaciones para plantear definitivamente un proyecto de parque binacional con una doble vertiente, lograr una declaración oficial de parque binacional y por otra mostrar las principales directrices que se estima debería tener cualquier proyecto de desarrollo ecoturístico y de ordenación territorial para la zona (5a parte).

Transboundary Conservation Areas (TBCAs), such as ‘Parks for Peace’ which have an explicit peace objective, have been heralded for their potential to simultaneously contribute towards biodiversity conservation and peace. In a world affected by frequent armed conflicts and widespread environmental degradation, the ecological peacebuilding potential of TBCAs should inspire hope.

However, TBCA literature is unclear as to whether TBCAs with or without an explicit peace objective contribute positively to peace. Political ecologists describe them as externally-imposed, heavy-handed or even coercive, neoliberal constructs, and even long-time proponents caution that they can contribute to conflicts if not undertaken appropriately. This dissertation proposes that TBCAs and Parks for Peace have not generated the peace dividends envisioned because they are not appropriately designed for peace, conflict-sensitivity, or conflict resilience.

The dissertation’s analytical framework combines a political ecology approach with socio-legal analysis and peace studies perspectives. Empirically, the dissertation examines 56 transboundary agreements representing 32 TBCAs, responses to a survey of 88 TBCA practitioners, and field research conducted in two case studies from the Great Rift Valley in East Africa – (1) the Greater Virunga Landscape (GVL), and (2) the Kidepo Landscape. Findings indicate that TBCAs can contribute to peace if they are properly designed and negotiated at the appropriate level for desired functionality (i.e., operational integration on the ground may be better achieved through localized agreements, whereas regional political integration requires higher-level agreement), that sustained support to activities on the ground is essential in conflict or post-conflict settings, and that bottom-up agreements can provide greater conflict resilience. TBCA agreements must provide clear mandates supporting peace and conflict resolution through cross-border institutional frameworks and on-going activities. Most importantly, they must be conflict-sensitive for TBCAs seeking to transform violence and conflict, and conflict-sensitivity must refer to all three categories of international, social and ecological peace.

Peace parks provide a land ethic that transcends borders and seeks to stabilize tensions between bordering States, honoring the unity of biosphere systems in its efforts to achieve peace, conservation and cooperation. In theory, peace parks recognize that humans and the biosphere are one and that natural resources, just as cultural resources, must be collaboratively protected. In the cases of inhabited border regions, peace park principles of holistic conservation, cooperation and peace require that local communities be incorporated into park management. I posit that this is all the more true for frontier communities in regions of conflict, weak governance or political instability. This paper examines legal frameworks for instituting peace parks by local communities themselves, when action on the part of their governments is absent or counter-productive. In doing so, I will comparatively analyze transboundary protected areas in different regions of the world, extracting useful legal mechanisms that best reflect peace park principles. I focus this study on transboundary mountain regions because they demonstrate many valuable attributes, such as forests or watershed tributaries, and are oftentimes inhabited by marginalized communities. Degraded environments and disenfranchised peoples are particularly vulnerable to conflict and border strife (they are difficult to defend or reach), making such areas particularly interesting for a study on cross-border collaborative conservation.

Despite the many linkages between environmental well-being, security and armed conflict, Onita Das' book, Environmental Protection, Security and Armed Conflict: A Sustainable Development Perspective, is one of a rather small body of legal scholarship on the topic. It is not that legal scholars have not been concerned with these issues. Contributions to law and armed conflict, or law and security, as well as law and the environment are profuse. Rather, what has been limited are integrations of all of the above. What we find mainly are writings on international humanitarian law protecting the environment and a proposed international crime of ecocide or geocide. Das brings light to this void and argues for the relevance of sustainable development law to environmental security pre-, during and postconflict.

Transboundary Conservation Areas, such as Parks for Peace, have been heralded for their potential to simultaneously contribute to biodiversity conservation and peace, but evidence to this effect has been elusive. In my recent doctoral dissertation, I propose that transboundary conservation areas and Parks for Peace have not remedied the violence of protected areas or facilitated the peace dividends envisioned because they are not appropriately designed for international peace (between states), social peace (between peoples) and ecological peace (between humans and the rest of nature).