Climate Dialogue as Functional Peacebuilding in South Asia: Environmental Cooperation as a Contributor to Regional Peace
Publisher: IPRI Journal
Author(s): Dmitry Erokhin
Date: 2026
Topics: Climate Change, Cooperation
This article examines the potential of climate dialogue and practical environmental cooperation to serve as a form of functional peacebuilding in South Asia. It argues that, although climate cooperation cannot resolve the foundational political disputes that structure regional insecurity, it can nevertheless generate politically consequential forms of engagement. These include sustained channels of communication, reduced uncertainty, strengthened technical interdependence, incremental trust-building, and the normalisation of working relations across an otherwise fragmented regional order. In doing so, the article contributes to the environmental peacebuilding literature by developing a South Asia-specific account of functional climate peacebuilding, demonstrating how modest and technically oriented cooperation may acquire political significance even in the absence of progress on core disputes. The article situates this argument within the region’s increasingly transboundary climate vulnerabilities. Heatwaves, glacial melt, riverine flooding, drought, air pollution, and adaptation pressures already exceed national borders and are likely to intensify under continued warming. Drawing on scholarship in environmental peacebuilding, climate security, water diplomacy, and regional governance, the article offers a conceptual and policy-oriented synthesis of four domains in which climate dialogue may support peacebuilding: transboundary water and cryosphere governance hydro-meteorological cooperation and early warning systems, regional air- quality governance, and cross-border electricity cooperation. The analysis suggests that climate cooperation is most likely to contribute to peace when it is technically specific, institutionally regularised, politically insulated from maximalist claims, and framed in terms of mutual risk reduction rather than moral concession. Conversely, its prospects are weakest when cooperation is expected to substitute for political settlement or when it becomes attached to highly securitised questions of sovereignty. The article concludes that climate dialogue should be understood not as a pathway to comprehensive conflict resolution, but as a realistic confidence-building architecture for South Asia, which is limited in scope, yet potentially durable in its political effects.