Constructing Environmental Conflicts from Resource Scarcity

Constructing Environmental Conºicts from Resource Scarcity • Peter M. Haas* PeterConstructing M. Haas Environmental Conºicts from Resource Scarcity Resource scarcity and environmental security are long standing themes in international relations and security studies. These are important ideas because they inform or justify US and other countries’ foreign policies. The commitment of resources, and possibly intervention, is warranted against these justiªcations. Claims that human societies are exhausting scarce resources, and that this pro- cess may contribute to armed conºict with and between states, has been part of the economics and politics literatures for at least 130 years. Yet an analytic focus on material scarcity as a provocation for conºict is but a meager part of much richer approaches to understanding conºict and cooperation more generally. The question is, can these doctrines of resource scarcity and environmental security bear the weight of justifying US interventions? My argument is that these doctrines are ºawed, and are selectively invoked by policy makers and in- attentive academics in order to justify preexisting state goals. My interest here is why they enjoy such resilience, despite the fact that each is widely contested within the relevant policy communities, and that there are many other ways of formulating interesting questions about resource scarcity. The attractiveness of these doctrines is not solely the nature of the argument they make, but rather their afªnity to the values and beliefs invoked by the person making the argument. We have a lot of names for such things, including myths, mental models, worldviews, frames, narratives, ideologies, paradigms, epistemes, referentielles, or worldviews, all of which can be encompassed in a broad view of “discourses.” Discourses impart meaning to an ambiguous policy domain. Discourses are important because they institutionalize cognitive frames. They identify issues as problems, set agendas, and deªne the salient aspects of issues as problems for decision-makers. Each discourse or perspective rests on different assumptions, goals and values, or ontologies and epistemologies as we now call them, and suggests different policy solutions. They have the effect of deªning provocations or crises. One could wonder why the US construes Iraqi potential * This essay was originally presented as an invited talk to the Peace and World Studies Program at Hampshire College, Amherst MA on 12 June 2001. I am grateful to Steve Rayner and Jennifer Clapp for editorial comments. Global Environmental Politics 2:1, February 2002 © 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638002317261436 by guest on 30 September 2021 2 • Constructing Environmental Conºicts from Resource Scarcity control over oil as a security threat but Saudi or Venezuelan control is not. The answer lies not in the nature of the resource, but with the presumptive motiva- tions of the party with potential leverage over a resource that the US needs. Why do these exaggerated beliefs about resource scarcity and their possi- ble threats to environmental security persist? There are two reasons. The ªrst reason is the absence of any consensual mechanism for reconciling inter- discourse (or inter-paradigm) disputes in either the arena of environmental issues or international politics. This absence of consensus distinguishes debates about environmental security, which are cast at the level of ritualized debates between highly polarized positions, from debates about multilateral environmental policy, around which consensual agreement has been reached about the utility of sustainable development approaches to environmental policy. The second reason is the elective afªnity between environmental and security discourses on the one hand, and other dominant discourses in social discus- sions such as neoclassical economics and realism in international relations and security studies on the other hand. Consequently self-interested political actors can borrow from discourses that are similar in their ontology and structure and that justify pre-existing political ambitions. In a sense, none of these discourses is “right.” A good approach to developing foreign policy, then, is procedural. It should be based on a public discursive dialogue between proponents of each. However, because each rests on its own assumptions, and is upheld by a different political constituency, it is difªcult to imagine a committed debate, much less achieving closure. Honest social scientists can do two things: identify myths that aren’t widely appreciated, thus illuminating the effect of tacit assumptions on people’s thinking, and help to dispel or debunk pernicious myths. I hope to do both. Dominant Discourses about Environment and Security Cultural anthropologists who look at environmental politics have identiªed four overarching discourses or myths of nature.1 Myths organize our thinking by presenting a tacit set of cause and effect relations that we can apply when con- sidering an issue at hand, and also by providing a screen to select out factors that are not germane to the question at hand. Cultural anthropologists organize the four dominant voices in environmental discourses about risk and the implications of environmental change on human affairs, into the following categories: Cornucopian, Malthusian, Sustain- able Development, and Radical/Postmodern [I am relying only on their taxon- omy, and not on the grid-group scales that are sometimes associated with them]. In general authors fall into just one of the categories above, although some, such as Norman Myers, draw from Malthusian and Sustainable Develop- ment Discourses.2 1. Schwartz and Thompson 1990; Thompson and Rayner 1998; and Timmerman 1986. 2. Myers 1989. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638002317261436 by guest on 30 September 2021 Peter M. Haas • 3 Cornucopian writers see nature as boundless, and thus unlikely to exercise signiªcant constraints over human action.3 Nature is seen to be essentially ro- bust and benign. Summarizing this view, Jordan and O’Riordan write that “the management style associated with this view is relaxed, non interventionist and laissez-faire. It is associated with a market perspective on institutional function- ing, and a belief in the prominence of the individual in coping with chal- lenges.”4 Economic growth encourages technological innovation and technical solutions to resource scarcity. Malthusians see nature as “precarious and unforgiving, vulnerable and constraining on human agency.”5 Resources are seen as ªnite and limited and thus exercise constraints on human action. Population grows more rapidly than the resource base, and creates inexorable scarcities. “Human agency can “tip it over” to the point where human well-being itself is threatened.”6 Malthusian policy responses tend to be hierarchically designed, with a strong state based managerial bent aimed at reducing population growth and resource usage. Sustainable Development sees nature as resilient within a context of some range of parameters that are themselves dynamic.7 “Nature is manageable so long as its limits are taken into account, either by conscious “holding back” or by the application of ecological principles to human affairs.”8 This perspective calls for deliberative procedural responses to environmental risks, stressing the need for involving multiple voices in formulating and assessing policy responses. Economic development and social growth is not seen as inconsistent with environmental preservation. Radical views and Postmodern views see Nature as capricious, and unre- lated to discourses about it or to social efforts to regulate it. Such authors dis- pute the underlying utility of discussing resource availability in the abstract. They argue that the true questions have to do with inequitable resource access and distribution.9 They focus on redistributive policies to address questions of resource scarcity, and thus look at the social context in which resource decisions are taken, rather than taking resource availability as an exogenous factor. To date, the principal debates have been between Malthusians and Cornucopians. Intellectual History of Resource Scarcity The intellectual history of concern about resource scarcity probably goes back to the Greeks. Early environmental determinism, and vulgar environmental analy- 3. In the US see Simon 1981; and Simon and Kahn 1984. In the UK see Beckerman 1992. For a recent Danish articulation see Lomborg 2001. 4. Jordan and O’Riordan 1997, 28. 5. Jordan and O’Riordan 1997. Major Malthusian writers include Myers 1989; Homer-Dixon 1991; and Klare 2000. 6. Jordan and O’Riordan 1997. 7. Holling 1978; Clark and Munn 1986; and Holdren 1991. 8. Jordan and O’Riordan 1997. 9. Galtung 1973; Dalby 1999; and Redclift 1987. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638002317261436 by guest on 30 September 2021 4 • Constructing Environmental Conºicts from Resource Scarcity sis, were based on univariate causality in which climate or natural resources de- termine a country’s development potential and political position in the international system. In its most vulgar form, environmental determinism claims that climate dictates national potential and individual psychological character. In its more sophisticated form it means that physical geography and access to and control over material resources inºuence

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