The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

9.1 Environmental security: a contested concept

One approach to environmental security simply

adds the ‘environment’ to the list of potential

threats to the external security of individual

sovereign states: in short, will environmental

degradation lead to violent conflict or war?

From this perspective, the key threats to the

environment arise from resource conflict as

states seek control over increasingly scarce

resources such as water, arable land, forests

and fisheries. Water shortages, particularly in

the politically volatile Middle East, where

several countries compete for the limited

waters supplied by a few major rivers, are often

mentioned as a potential cause of conflict

(Bulloch and Darwish 1993 ). Another is the

growing pressure on arable land, especially

due to rapidly rising populations, and resulting

food shortages (Homer-Dixon 1999 ). As these

problems worsen, exacerbated by climate

change, environmental refugees threaten to

become a major source of destabilisation. Up

to 25 million environmental refugees flee

annually from drought, famine, deforestation

and degraded land; they are a particular source

of conflict when seeking safety by crossing

national borders.

An alternative critical approach condemns

the traditional security discourse for using the

language of the ‘military model’ of states,

conflict and territorial security to analyse

environmental problems. After all, military

solutions to such environmental threats seem

self-defeating because war wreaks massive

environmental destruction, as illustrated by the

use of the Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam

and the burning Kuwaiti oilfields during the

1991 Gulf War. Instead, the threat to the

environment demands a demilitarisation of

security away from defining threats

nationalistically as coming from other states,

towards a recognition that most environmental

problems are transboundary and require

international co-operative solutions that

address their root causes, rather than the

symptoms (Dalby 2002 ; Deudney 2006 ).

See Elliott ( 2004 : ch. 9), Deudney ( 2006 ) and

Swatuk ( 2006 ) for overviews of the environmental

security debate.

Realists, therefore, treat the environment primarily as a security issue

in so far as problems of the global commons could be a source of conflict

between states (see Box9.1). But the rising tide of international environmen-

tal co-operation poses a problem for the realist view that in international

politics ‘Anarchy and conflict are the rule, order and co-operation the excep-

tion’ (Hurrell and Kingsbury 1992 : 5). One explanation is that it may be

rational for actors to co-operate when they are assured that others will co-

operate too.^2 If individual states have common interests, such as to prevent

pollution, then the mutual recognition that each state will have to interact

repeatedly with others over the long term might build the trust necessary to

provide the assurance that co-operation will be forthcoming and that other

states will not free-ride (see Paterson 1996 :101–8). Realists may be also inac-

curate in characterising all international relations as concerned with power

politics; for example, the claim that states seek to maximiserelativegains can

be replaced with the reasonable assumption that they pursueabsolutegains.

If each state is seeking to improve its absolute position rather than always

seeking to ‘win’ each play of the game (i.e. to accept an absolute gain even if

it is lower than the gains accruing to another country), then co-operation is