What’s missing in this picture?
Climate change. I’ve been aware and concerned for a long time, but two articles got me thinking: this Esquire article and Daniel Pinchbeck and Schuyler Brown’s recent piece on Medium, ‘The World in an Extreme State of Transition’. The details were engaging, but what really hit me was the explicit message, the call to action running through both. The urgency was infectious as was the realization that it’s not just the big-thinkers and the media personalities who are responsible for promoting the way forward. We all are.
Taking up writing is a reaction to this provocation. It feels like the right time to explore my personal responsibility and my professional engagement with climate change. I’m not a scientist, not a talking head on the subject. I’m a Senior Governance and Conflict Adviser with a decade of experience for the UK government’s Department for International Development under my belt and a peacebuilding background before that. So, how does that qualify me to talk about climate change?
Our shared reality sees between 150–200 species lost a day in the world’s most bio-diverse places. The oceans have become 30% more acidic in the last 40 years. CO2 emissions continue to rise. The evidence that our post-industrial, capitalist habits are damaging the planet is overwhelming. Not only are we inflicting catastrophic damage on our surroundings, but also on ourselves. Psychologists are linking stress, depression even, to our over-cluttered lives. Retail therapy is a myth; shopping is actually making us ill. Facts like that should provoke everyone to talk about climate change, but in my case I want to use the lens I have; my long experience of working with diverse people to find solutions to complex governance problems.
And governance often feels missing from the picture in debate around climate change. So much of it can feel very technical, demanding management solutions, whereas my take is that acting on climate change is political, demanding governance solutions. Natural resource governance zooms in further to a set of issues important in climate change, but perhaps less obvious that CO2 emissions. And who gets what from exploiting natural resources is certainly political. Navigating demands for timber or access to water is political. Sorting it out requires good governance.
The governance of our forests, water bodies, fisheries, land and biodiversity pose enormous challenges. Put simply, lots of different people stand to gain from exploiting these resources. The pull to utilize for economic gain and to access international markets is extremely strong. It’s also completely in line with the thinking behind the new set of sustainable development goals or SDGs, which were adopted by world leaders in 2015. One goal in particular aspires for countries to achieve ‘sustained, inclusive and sustainable growth, full of productive employment, and decent work for all’. Yet how do we ensure the exploitation of natural resources that can create jobs and fuel growth also preserves those resources for future generations? How also do we make sure the benefits of exploitation are felt by the many, not just the powerful few?
Competition and controls over the exploitation of natural resources does create conflict. We’ve seen that again and again; lack of agreement on the use of a lake resulting in green, irrigated fields for some and barren desolation for others. Within such a cobweb of competing claims effective governance can ensure all voices are considered equally, claims on resources are weighed up against agreed strategic aims, that decision making is accountable under the law, and that the resource itself is preserved and regenerated. But that’s tough, especially in countries with corrupt, bankrupt or ineffective systems of government. There are some governance innovations out there designed to deal with the complexity of natural resources, but implementing them takes dedication, funds, capacity and the will to sustain and ensure equity in the benefits of natural resources. And even when writing this I hear the voice of biodiversity experts in my mind questioning if you can ever achieve ‘equity’ if dealing with the governance of wildlife, but that’s a deep discussion for another post.
SDG 13 urges us to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. If we don’t pay attention to the politics around exploiting natural resources, and neglect governance, this goal is much harder to achieve. Adaptation to climate change, including building resilience to climate-related crises, is also notoriously difficult to plan for, budget, implement and maintain without governance frameworks in place. Governing natural resources to ensure their sustainability, even their renewal, is surely at the heart of making a difference on climate change. The counter-factual suggests that ill-managed resources with no effective governance arrangements in place are likely to become depleted, disenfranchising people locally and globally.
Right now I’m based in Ethiopia, where language on green growth runs through national development planning, but where severe climate realities present numerous challenges. This year’s ‘super’ El Nino — unusually warm seawater in the eastern Pacific that disrupted weather globally and caused erratic rains and high temperatures in the Horn of Africa — has worsened conditions for already vulnerable, impoverished communities. It’s a tough setting and natural resource governance remains a challenge. Managing wildlife, grazing land, forests and water here perfectly illustrate that governance arrangements are necessary but often imperfectly executed.
I want to use my experience to tell the story of natural resource governance. My hope is that this will provoke and in turn generate more discussion on natural resource governance. It’s time to put governance back in the picture.
