Beyond greenwashing: Prioritizing environmental justice in conflict-affected settings

Abstract

Building on recent studies that call for further attention to marginalized communities at the intersection of environment, climate action, and peacebuilding initiatives, this article recommends an environmental justice lens for work in conflict-affected settings. We highlight examples of resistance to environmental action where a justice lens has been missed, amplifying minority voices and perspectives, and including a case where environmental peacebuilding is perceived as greenwashing. Lacking this lens, environmental action and research risk—albeit inadvertently—further entrenching sociopolitical injustices. Employing a conflict-sensitive, peace-positive, and environmental justice-responsive approach can produce more sustainable outcomes.

1. Introduction

Development and peacebuilding practitioners working in fragile and conflict-affected settings are increasingly aware of how environmental action can not only help address but also aggravate drivers of political conflict. Our own work, as well as interviews with other researchers and practitioners working at the nexus of the environment and conflict in South Asia, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, West and Central Africa, and Latin America, illuminates the ways in which environmental action can undermine prospects for sustainable peace when it is not conducted with a robust environmental justice lens.

Across the globe, minority communities, in particular, have long called attention to actions taken in the name of improving environmental conditions that have (often inadvertently) reinforced discriminatory systems, created new grievances, or exacerbated social and economic inequalities. Environmental peacebuilding, which we define broadly as any environmental action that seeks to contribute to “conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution, and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by conflict” (EnPAx, 2023), is practiced in many projects and organizations, though it is not always referred to as such. The increase in environmental peacebuilding initiatives—notably driven by an interest in how actions to adapt to climate change can help prevent conflict and improve prospects for peace—has also resulted in greater scrutiny. In some communities, environmental peacebuilding has even elicited resistance, resulting in characterizations of greenwashing.

Recent research focusing on the environment as a tool for conflict prevention and peacebuilding, disaster risk reduction, and post-disaster reconstruction also warns about the potential negative implications of some approaches for marginalized communities (Brown & Nicolucci-Altman, 2022; Dabelko et al., 2022; Ide, 2020; Reynolds, 2017). In this article, we seek to bring further attention to this stream of work by pointing to the importance of an environmental justice framing in environmental peacebuilding initiatives, as well as in the broader sphere of environmental and climate action in conflict-affected settings. This aligns with contemporary trends in the environmental peacebuilding literature to focus on localized, bottom-up, and social justice perspectives (Ali, 2011; Bruch et al., 2022).

2. Background

Academics and practitioners have documented and analyzed environmental cooperation initiatives for decades. However, the increasing awareness of the impacts of climate change on peace and security dynamics in fragile environments has brought renewed, fast-growing interest to the ways in which climate action (climate change adaptation initiatives in particular) can reduce pressures on the natural resource base while incentivizing collaboration, trust-building, and shared objectives between parties. As a result, many actors, including in the development, conservation, humanitarian, and security fields are increasingly active in environmental peacebuilding, seeking to improve food security, adapt agricultural practices and other livelihoods to a changing climate, restore degraded ecosystems, and protect remaining tropical forests in ways that contribute to conflict prevention or maximize the peacebuilding dimensions of existing initiatives.

This rapid expansion is unsurprisingly accompanied by scrutiny of the impact of these actions on the socioeconomic and political conditions of the contexts in which they are carried out. In some cases, marginalized groups have expressed concerns that such actions may not have their claimed or intended effects on conflict dynamics. Recent studies exploring the “downside” or “dark side” of environmental peacebuilding (Ide, 2018, 2020) have reflected these sentiments.

The concept of greenwashing has emerged to characterize such potentially harmful effects. For example, scholars have noted how private companies can be potential agents of environmental peacebuilding but should avoid greenwashing (Dresse et al., 2021; Hamann & Kapelus, 2004; Hilson, 2012). This usage of greenwashing refers to a concept frequently discussed in business journals: namely, misleading or deceptive environmental signaling.

The term greenwashing is one of several colorwashing terms increasingly used in public discourse, including pinkwashing (purported support of female empowerment) or brownwashing (purported support of people of color). Alternative meanings of these terms are likewise employed when leaders or governments are accused—in both non-conflict and conflict contexts—of highlighting their liberal, inclusive, and positively associated policies to distract from discriminatory and negatively associated policies (Franke, 2012a, 2012b). For example, queer Palestinian and Israeli anti-occupation activists have used the term pinkwashing since the early 2010s, arguing that the Israeli government champions LGBT+ human rights while simultaneously (and as a means of) deflecting from its human rights violations against Palestinians (alQaws, 2013).

As the subsequent cases show, uses of greenwashing in relation to environmental action or peacebuilding in conflict-affected or fragile contexts can refer to the corporate meaning (misleading environmental signaling) or—drawing on the social justice underpinnings of pinkwashing by Palestinian and Israeli activists—to environmental action that normalizes the status quo, overlooking structural inequality.

The importance of focusing on inequality, social justice, and the disproportionate impacts of political or environmental action on marginalized communities is strongly emphasized within the discourse and literature on environmental justice (Pellow, 2016; Timmons Roberts et al., 2018); however, this emphasis is less common in the environmental peacebuilding literature, as some scholars have noted (Ide, 2023). Environmental justice refers to the meaningful integration of all communities in initiatives with an environmental outcome, including these initiatives’ development and implementation. In particular, this lens focuses on ensuring fair treatment for populations most adversely impacted by environmental consequences (and most often overlooked due to government or community policy). In its emphasis on the equitable distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, environmental justice also adopts a structural perspective, taking into account how more powerful parties may benefit and less powerful parties may suffer harm.

Current critical trends in the environmental justice literature also call for a deeper consideration of multiple forms of inequality by taking intersectional perspectives into account, in line with a more recent focus on intersectionality in environmental peacebuilding work (Yoshida & Céspedes-Báez, 2021). This perspective centers marginalized groups and calls for attention to the ways environmental problems and injustices connect to broader systems of inequality, like capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, contending that “threatened bodies, populations, and spaces are indispensable to building socially and environmentally just and resilient futures for us all” (Pellow, 2016, p. 224).

3. Examples of resistance to environmental action

Drawing on our work as researchers and practitioners focusing on the intersection of the environment and conflict, along with interviews with colleagues from 30 development and environmental organizations working in South Asia, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, West and Central Africa, and Latin America, we review some of the unintended, detrimental impacts of environmental action and environmental peacebuilding as described by affected minority communities: impacts characterized as greenwashing or which led to specific forms of resistance. Adopting a perspective that considers not only the perceived benefits of environmental actions or environmental peacebuilding initiatives but also potentially adverse impacts on marginalized communities, can help avoid some of the issues raised in the following cases.

3.1. How environmental action can contribute to social injustice

Actions to combat climate change or ensure critical ecosystem services through environmental protection, conservation, or restoration are not immune to criticism. In fact, some of the most emblematic environmental initiatives—such as the creation or expansion of protected areas, forest conservation schemes, or renewable energy projects—have elicited strong resistance from communities (or marginalized groups within them). Some projects and initiatives under the REDD+ programme, for example, have drawn sharp criticism in a variety of contexts, such as the Amazon, Southeast Asia, East and Central Africa, for (according to critics) ignoring the rights and needs of Indigenous and local communities, leading to displacement, appropriation of land critical to traditional livelihoods, or political exclusion. Failure to recognize customary tenure or governance systems, failure to uphold communities’ rights to information and participation in decision-making, and failure to safeguard income or opportunity have generated significant mistrust, deep grievances, and in some cases, local conflict (Lord, 2018; Sarmiento Barletti & Larson, 2020).

Similarly, social movement activists and land defenders in Latin America have contended that some climate change mitigation initiatives, like renewable energy projects, have ignored human rights and gender equality imperatives, in some cases contributing to socio-environmental conflicts (De Jaegher, 2018; Ixchíu & Cruz, 2022). In our interviews, researchers and practitioners point to characterizations of greenwashing and green capitalism, both used pejoratively and leveled at some renewable energy projects due to their adverse impact on Indigenous communities (particularly Indigenous women). They note how some companies exploited asymmetries of information to manipulate decision-making, dealing directly with elites while avoiding community consultation (Dunlap, 2017). Such tactics created significant impacts on communities, including the inadvertent signing away of land. Women are often excluded from these decisions and disproportionately impacted due to their particular dependency on land for their livelihoods. Some of these cases are noted in the environmental peacebuilding literature (Yoshida & Céspedes-Báez, 2021).

3.2. When environmental action justifies securitized approaches that compound injustice

Apparent excessive control or repressive tactics by state institutions enforcing environmental protection policies have also raised significant grievances. This is often the case in and around protected areas, where boundary violations or the use of resources can be heavily fined or lead to harsh security responses from park rangers and other state-directed forms of authority. Concerns around “militarized conservation” and similar approaches to protect biodiversity and natural resources are increasing, as the urgency of mitigating climate change grows (Büscher & Fletcher, 2018; Duffy et al., 2019). Observers of militarized conservation caution against approaches that ignore the socioeconomic inequalities and injustices at the root of wildlife poaching and other harmful behaviors and document how these approaches impact marginalized communities, leading to grievances that ultimately undermine environmental goals (Botha, 2021).

In conflict-affected and fragile settings, enforcement of environmental protection through armed, empowered officers of the state can reinforce patterns of inequality and marginalization. In Mali, for example, recent research points to the mistreatment and harassment of Fulani pastoralists by state services in charge of enforcing the protection of natural resources (Nagarajan, 2020; Raineri, 2018). While all livelihood groups depend on the resources provided by forests, Fulani pastoralists have reportedly been particularly targeted by heavy-handed enforcement tactics, reinforcing their stigmatization and political exclusion. State services, bolstered by an environmental agenda largely driven by international donor priorities, have justified such tactics by citing the necessity to stem desertification in the face of climate change (Nagarajan, 2020). Rather than yielding significant conservation gains, however, securitized approaches to environmental protection often result in grievances that further undermine social cohesion and trust in the state. Armed groups and criminal networks exploit this erosion of trust to facilitate recruitment, in turn justifying further military action by the state. Many critics decry the “securitization” of climate change responses in the Sahel and across the globe as counterproductive at best, arguing instead for the primacy of resilience-building approaches grounded in cultivating inclusion, meaningful participation, equality, and justice.

3.3. Environmental justice risks associated with the global energy transition

Accelerating the transition from fossil fuels toward renewable energy is a central component of global climate action. Signatory governments to the Paris Climate Accords, international development organizations, and scientists agree that the world can only stave off the worst of climate change’s predicted impacts if renewable energy production grows significantly and rapidly enough to power the global economy. Achieving this goal, however, will entail massively increasing the extraction of minerals critical to low-carbon technologies, such as lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel. The production of some of these minerals is expected to increase by as much as 500% by 2050 (IEA, 2021).

While transitioning away from fossil fuels is urgent and paramount, meeting the vastly increasing demand for critical minerals involves significant risks for communities and countries holding those mineral deposits. This is especially the case in situations already characterized by protracted conflict, entrenched inequality, weak governance, and corruption. Indeed, recent research by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) found that situations of conflict and fragility are often exploited to “externalize costs and damages [of the energy transition] to vulnerable populations whose rights can be abused, and whose political representation is null” (UNEP, 2023, p. 42).

Mineral deposits have been found in 21 of the 37 contexts the World Bank identifies as “situations already affected by conflict and fragility” (UNEP, 2023). Without adequate safeguards, exploitation of those resources could result in significant environmental damages, displacement, dispossession, human rights abuses, as well as loss of livelihoods, economic distortions, and localized violence, with possible impacts on regional peace and security. Many peace and conflict experts we interviewed see the failure to recognize or mitigate such “hidden costs” of urgent environmental action as tantamount to greenwashing. This echoes broader concerns in the climate justice movement about the need for a just transition in which the costs of greening the global economy are not disproportionately borne by the Global South.

3.4. Environmental peacebuilding: Resistance in the Palestinian–Israeli context

While earlier examples focus on wider cautionary themes related to environmental action in conflict-affected settings, we also wish to highlight an ongoing discussion of environmental peacebuilding and its association with greenwashing: namely, in the Palestine–Israel context. While this intractable conflict presents unique challenges, organizations operating in more extreme contexts can provide helpful practice-based insights (Hällgren et al., 2018) and (in this case) an example of the complex power dynamics embedded in organizations explicitly focusing on environmental peacebuilding.

In interviews with practitioners involved in bilateral or trilateral environmental peacebuilding work (Palestine and Israel; or Israel, Palestine, and Jordan), members of all three groups raised the repeated critique that environmental peacebuilding organizations are engaging in greenwashing. In this context, greenwashing is perceived as an extension of normalization: a pejorative term that refers to accepting (or normalizing) the status quo of the ongoing Israeli occupation. Here, greenwashing is defined as participating in environmental cooperation while not simultaneously working toward ending the Israeli occupation. The critique was most often directed at the more prominent environmental peacebuilding initiatives.

Staff members in these organizations expressed diverse perspectives regarding how and to what extent environmental peacebuilding initiatives should be involved in more direct anti-occupation work. They all noted the challenges of doing environmental peacebuilding without engaging in more explicitly political work that confronts existing injustices. Some overtly stated that when organizations overemphasize their impact in relation to either peace or the environment, or when they avoid being political in an unavoidably political and polarized context, they further entrench existing asymmetric power relations. Others reflected on how more overt political positioning could both enable new possibilities and inhibit current areas of their work.

These sentiments echo Palestinian authors and activists who have pointed to the shortcomings of environmental organizations operating from a peacebuilding framework that dismiss what these authors refer to as “climate apartheid,” seeking cooperation and dialogue instead of more radical, justice-based political change (Dajani, 2022; Nassar, 2022). Greenwashing concerns that members, constituents, and critics have highlighted could potentially be better addressed by drawing on an environmental justice framework. ¹ However, this perspective has yet to be fully explored or addressed in the environmental peacebuilding literature.

4. Toward an environmental justice framework for environmental peacebuilding

The cases discussed above illustrate how environmental and climate action can result in negative social outcomes or elicit resistance from marginalized groups when it does not recognize—or does not actively seek to address—socioeconomic and political inequalities. They also show that environmental peacebuilding initiatives are not immune to criticism for contributing to injustice. Moving forward, practitioners and researchers should consider how environmental justice perspectives can ensure more inclusive, sustainable outcomes in their fields.

Growing understanding of the complex linkages of environmental degradation, climate change, displacement, and conflict has led to a surge in projects—particularly in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and West Africa—that aim to reduce risks of conflict and build peace. Such projects adopt approaches typically considered “developmental” in nature: among them, work on livelihoods, food security, water management, ecosystem restoration, or natural resource-related infrastructure.

In many cases, these approaches are based on a sound analysis of the conflict dynamics affecting the context and are carried out in such a way as to address the drivers of conflict and vulnerability, including the marginalization or exclusion of minorities. For example, a recent review of 74 projects addressing the linkages between climate change, peace, and security supported by the UN Peacebuilding Fund found that the projects “overwhelmingly reflected [an] integrated approach, both in the conflict assessments […] and the mechanisms chosen to address the identified issues” (UN University-Centre for Policy Research, 2023, p. 40).

In other cases, however, practitioners noted that the incentive of rapidly increasing funding for addressing climate-related risks for peace and security, as well as the pressure to conform to new policies and guidelines on conflict-sensitive programming, also led some actors to repackage traditional development work as environmental peacebuilding without applying a conflict lens, namely, paying particular attention to addressing drivers of conflict and inequality. Without this, practitioners said, these projects risk inadvertently exacerbating grievances around shared natural resources or unwittingly contributing to entrenching inequality. Adopting an environmental justice framework can help avert these risks and support long-term peace.

5. Recommendations

Drawing on insights from these cautionary cases and the many voices of practitioners and researchers we interviewed, we recommend that environmental action and environmental peacebuilding initiatives systematically adopt a justice lens, considering both the benefits and burdens of environmental action and its impact on marginalized and disenfranchised groups. Development organizations, peacebuilding practitioners, and academics can integrate environmental justice perspectives by doing the following:

• (1) Ensuring that an intersectional analysis, ² based on disaggregated data and indicators, forms part of any conflict or socioeconomic assessment underpinning programmatic interventions, in order to guarantee that the differentiated needs, vulnerabilities, and priorities of all groups are considered; that dissenting voices are heard; and that structural barriers and inequalities are highlighted.

• (2) Harnessing local knowledge and the capacity of primary users of natural resources, including women, Indigenous groups, and other marginalized communities.

• (3) Enabling or building the capacity of marginalized groups to engage in environmental planning, dialogue, and dispute resolution.

• (4) Holding governments accountable for the full protection of environmental defenders, Indigenous peoples, and communities, including protection from physical and verbal attacks or threats in compliance with states’ human rights obligations and international human rights standards.

• (5) Investing in empirical research to expand the evidence base on the benefits of environmental justice approaches to environmental peacebuilding.

• (6) Within environmental peacebuilding research, offsetting the sampling bias (Ide, 2023) by looking outside strictly academic work, incorporating perspectives from Indigenous activists and climate defenders who choose other (often nonacademic) platforms to disseminate their messages.

Taking a conflict-sensitive, peace-positive, and environmental justice-responsive approach can help ensure that historical harms are not entrenched and that environmental peacebuilding initiatives contribute toward more sustainable outcomes in all contexts.