Beyond Resource Wars: Scarcity, Environmental Degradation, and International Cooperation

1. Resource Scarcity and Environmental Degradation

The relationship among resource scarcity, degradation, and conflict has received a great deal of attention in both the international relations and environment and security literature. Both theoretical and empirical works have considered, either directly or indirectly, the environmental and natural resource roots of interstate conflict (Myers 1993; Tir and Diehl 1998; Homer-Dixon 1999; Matthew 1999). In its extreme yet rare form, the relationship between conflict and the environment has also been epitomized in the “resource wars” argument (Barnet 1980; Mandel 1988; Bullock and Darwish 1993; Baechler 1998; Klare 2001). Past studies, critical of the relationship between resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and conflict, have largely argued that exogenous factors such as ingenuity, second-order resources, and trade often play a role in mitigating interstate violence over scarce resources (Simon 1989; Allan 2001). Yet the part that scarcity and degradation may in fact perform in fostering interstate cooperation, and consequently reducing both violent and political conflict, has received little attention (Deudney 1991, 1999). This volume asserts that while resource scarcity and environmental degradation may well constitute sources of conflict, political dispute, and mismanagement between states, they may also be the impetus for cooperation , coordination, and negotiation between them. While the volume recognizes both sides of the resource scarcity and environmental degradation coin, the cooperative relationship is of particular interest and scrutiny. Indeed, conflict frequently motivates cooperation, and resource scarcity and environmental degradation are important elements of this relationship. Generally, the authors in this volume maintain that increasing scarcity and degradation induce cooperation across states. To that extent, we provide a different perspective than that of the resource wars argument 1 Resource Scarcity and Environmental Degradation: Analyzing International Conflict and Cooperation Shlomi Dinar 4 Shlomi Dinar made with regard to particular natural resources such as oil, freshwater, minerals, and fisheries. Yet beyond this claim, the volume systematically explores the intricacies and nuances of this scarcity and degradation contention across a set of additional resources and environmental problems , which may merely motivate political conflicts such as climate change, ozone depletion, oceans pollution, transboundary air pollution, and biodiversity conservation. In particular, and in line with the collective action school, the volume investigates the notion that as scarcity and degradation worsen, interstate cooperation becomes difficult to achieve since it may be too costly to manage the degradation or there is simply too little of the resource to share (Ostrom 2001). Similarly, low levels of scarcity may depress cooperation as there is less urgency to organize and coordinate. Scarcity and degradation levels, in other words, should matter in explaining the intensity of cooperation. While it is logical to associate the term “resource scarcity” with certain issue topics (e.g., oil and minerals) and the term “environmental degradation” with a slightly different set of issue topics (e.g., oceans pollution and transboundary air pollution), these two thematic labels are quite complementary. Environmental degradation often reduces the quantity or quality of the resource in question, thereby contributing to its scarcity. For example, “air pollution in a city degrades the quality of the air and changes an unlimited public good (clean air) into a scarce one.” Likewise, the “pollution of a river . . . reduces the quality of the water; but it can also be interpreted as reducing the quantity of clean water, and therefore contributing to increased scarcity” (Gleditsch 1998, 387). To the degree that the two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they are (for the most part) used interchangeably throughout this volume, when appropriate. Recognizing that scarcity and degradation alone cannot explain the evolution of cooperation, the volume also considers other crucial factors for understanding the intricacies of interstate coordination. Although each topic boasts its own set of ancillary factors for explaining cooperation , this book investigates how asymmetries across countries (geographic , economic, and political) affect negotiation and cooperation (Botteon and Carraro 1997). To that extent, the volume looks at how respective asymmetries are managed to encourage interstate cooperation or environmental treaty making, in particular across transboundary environmental issues. While the asymmetries ascribed to the various issues help to explain the challenges to cooperation, they are directly interrelated with the book’s theme on scarcity and degradation. In other words, Resource Scarcity and Environmental Degradation 5 countries that value the same resource differently or have varying abilities to deal with an environmental problem implicitly perceive scarcity and degradation in a divergent fashion. This does not necessarily mean that cooperation can’t be achieved. Rather, such differences may...