Narratives of Conflict, Climate, and Development: Re-envisioning Sustainability from Post-War Northern Uganda

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What is the relation between conflict, development, and climate change? This question has taken center stage in policymaking in Africa, as climate change is considered the greatest threat to development as well as a major risk for future conflict. Massive donor funding is being mobilized towards climate change adaptation in the name of averting environmental crisis and promoting development and peace. In this mainstream framework, climate change is to be dealt with through technical fixes to enable African communities to adapt to climatic hazards. These top-down policies are just beginning to be implemented in much of Africa, including in northern Uganda, a highly vulnerable region and the site of this proposed research. But this mainstream, technical approach has not gone unchallenged. For, as many scholars have pointed out, without a history of economic and political deprivation and marginalization that renders certain African communities vulnerable to climate change, it would not present the dramatic threat it does. The implication is that, since climate change adaptation policies seek to help existing social structures adapt to future climatic changes, if those structures are characterized by injustice, inequality, and violence, adaptation policies may be building locking in the very structural inequalities that make African communities vulnerable to climate change in the first place. In northern Uganda, like many post-conflict situations, today's injustice, deprivation, and inequality is largely a legacy of war, which has left the region far behind the rest of the country in all development indicators. The conflict saw the mass forced displacement of over a million rural people into internment camps by the government, leading to environmental devastation and a legacy that continues today in forceful land dispossession, massive deforestation, pollution from expanding oil extraction, and displacement by infrastructure, all enforced by the Ugandan military. This has led to large inequalities in land access, loss of livelihoods, and a growing, precarious semi-urban population as the resources needed for sustainable development are being stripped away. In the midst of this ongoing environmental devastation, expansive climate change adaptation policies are being inaugurated - but, if they ignore the ongoing violent legacy of conflict and focus on technical fixes, they risk worsening that legacy, setting the stage for future conflict, and foreclosing inclusive and sustainable development. This leads to the project's primary question: how can climate change policy for post-conflict northern Uganda - and, by extension, for other post-conflict contexts - be re-envisioned so that it enables peace and development? The project will explore how two different disciplinary frameworks understand the relation between conflict, development, and environmental crisis and how they can be put them into conversation with each other in order to produce highly innovative results both academically and for climate change policy. First, we will employ a political ecology framework to look at the post-conflict situation in northern Uganda. Political ecology understands the relation between conflict, development, and environmental crisis as largely representing struggles over resources between state and capital on one side and the community on the other. Second, we will employ history and literary and cultural studies to explore the community of northern Uganda's own understanding of conflict, development, and climate change, representing very different bases for dealing with the threat it poses. The community's visions are accessible only through intensive knowledge of language and culture and through extended engagement with the northern Ugandan community. It is the creative dialogue between these disciplinary paradigms as they are employed in research in northern Uganda that will produce our innovative answers.