Regional Cooperation on Environment, Economy and Natural resource Management: How Can It Contribute to Peacebuilding? Synthesis Report
Publisher: IFP Regional Cooperation on Environment, Economy and Natural Resource Management Cluster
Author(s): Moira Feil, Diana Klein, and Meike Westerkamp
Date: 2009
Topics: Cooperation, Renewable Resources
Countries: Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Burundi, Colombia, Congo (DRC), Ecuador, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Peru, Rwanda, Uganda, Venezuela
The Initiative for Peacebuilding (IfP) Regional Cooperation on Environment, Economy and Natural Resource Management Cluster has been looking at the role regional cooperation initiatives in these three areas can play in peacebuilding.
Regional cooperation initiatives are a common mechanism for supporting an improvement in relations between parties, or achieving transboundary goals (such as improving the environmental situation or increasing trade). Many claim to have a positive contribution to peacebuilding. The EU supports and funds various such regional cooperation initiatives.
The cluster’s work primarily focused on researching initiatives in the Andean Region of Latin America, the Great Lakes Region of Africa, the Middle East and the South Caucasus, with the view of assessing their current contribution to peacebuilding and extracting lessons learned for regional cooperation initiatives in other areas, whether geographic or thematic.
This synthesis report highlights and extracts common patterns from the following case studies:
• Conflict, economy, international cooperation and non-renewable natural resources in the Andean Region; • Regional cooperation in the Great Lakes - A contribution to peacebuilding;• Regional water cooperation and peacebuilding in the Middle East; and• Regional cooperation in the South Caucasus – Lessons for peacebuilding.
The first section of the findings presented in this synthesis report introduces different types of regional cooperation. They are derived from the mapping and research of the case studies and serve the purpose of giving an analytical overview. The second section briefly summarises the opportunities presented by different themes for regional cooperation. The third section discusses important obstacles to regional cooperation and gives examples from the case studies.
The report concludes that while regional cooperation may play an important role in developing constructive relations between countries, these and general peacebuilding benefits cannot be assumed as an automatic outcome of regional cooperation initiatives. Drawing on the case studies and synthesis findings, the report then makes recommendations to policy-makers designing new or overseeing existing initiatives with the aim of contributing to peacebuilding.