Learning from climate-related stabilisation strategies in Africa

All over the world, the effects of climate change are exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and increasing the risk of inter-communal conflict over resources such as land, water and food. The UN’s New Agenda for Peace (2023) warns that failure to tackle climate change’s impacts will have devastating effects on peacebuilding objectives.

This year, NUPI is embarking on a new research project, CPS-WASahel, that aims to identify and extract lessons from regional stabilization efforts implemented in the Lake Chad Basin and Liptako-Gourma areas of the West African Sahel Belt.

‘The areas are two special cases that should generate very insightful results because of the degree to which their approaches to climate-sensitive stabilization are locally led, multidimensional and people-centred’ says project manager and NUPI Research Professor Cedric de Coning.

Tackling the effects of climate change

By exploring how stabilization strategies and related policies are structured and coordinated in the Lake Chad Basin and Liptako-Gourma areas, as well as what they have achieved, the aim of the CPS-WASahel-project is to develop insights into the factors that influence the effectivess of locally led efforts to contain and manage climate-related peace and security risks. Ultimately, the goal is to identify key factors that influence the effectiveness of locally led efforts, in order to help guide similar response initiatives elsewhere in the world.

‘Insights on and from the lived experiences of affected and involved communities are essential to truly capture whether and how conflict dynamics have been altered as a result of stabilisation efforts in the Lake Chad and Liptako-Gourma regions. A people-centered approach inspired by critical research methodologies therefore characterises this project’ says Senior Research Fellow at NUPI Minoo Koefoed.

This two-year research project is funded by UK International Development through the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy, and Trends Research Fund (XCEPT).

‘The project is an opportunity for policymakers, governments and academics to rethink how we see and view African agency and capacity at the local levels’ says Senior Research Fellow at NUPI Andrew E. Yaw Tchie.

Action that works

There is a reason for why this project will look at The Lake Chad Basin and Liptako-Gourma regions in the West African Sahel Belt. The countries in these regions face the combined effects of both violent conflict and climate-related extreme weather events. These pressures have led to large-scale population displacement and further increased water and food insecurity. 

In response, the countries bordering Lake Chad developed a regional stabilization strategy. This approach is unique in the way sub-national authorities and local actors are the main drivers and implementers of the strategy. Similarly, in the Liptako-Gourma border region, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have developed a strategy that seeks to achieve locally led holistic, comprehensive, and multi-sectoral approaches to stabilisation.

‘The bottom-up and locally rooted nature of the stabilization efforts that are studied in this project make them a uniquely valuable case in understanding cross-border initiatives that aim to induce peacebuilding and stabilization’ says Senior Research Fellow at NUPI, Thor Olav Iversen.

READ MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT HERE!