Incorporation of Environmental Features into Peacebuilding Initiatives at Three Actor Leadership Levels : A Case Study of Liberia

Abstract: Environmental change and degradation, and increasing intrastate armed conflict are two pressing challenges of our time. Regions with highest rates of intrastate armed conflict have shown to overlap with regions of highest dependency on natural resources for livelihood provision and survival, where research of interrelatedness between conflict and environmental degradation, the environment-conflict nexus, increased during the 1990s. However, the environment-peace nexus has been increasingly addressed at the outset of the 2000s, within the academic field of Environmental Peacebuilding (EP) in order to escape narrow focus on conflict and environment links and rather on how to address peace and environmental degradation simultaneously. While debates within the field have focused on how EP initiatives can be deemed successful and through which mechanisms and actors that are the most appropriate, limited intra-state case studies treating actor constellations at its core are available. With a 69% forest cover and more than 70% of the Liberian population being dependent on resources from the forests, this study seeks to increase understanding into EP initiatives within the forestry sector made at three actor leadership levels distinguished by John Paul Lederach of (1) top, (2) middle-range and (3) grassroot. Structuring the project from the three levels assists in viewing the interplay between societal actors with varying decision-making capacity and power in the Liberian society. The actors’ capacity is analyzed in accordance to the Human Needs Theory (HNT), in capacity and reach of the respective actors to target the population’s needs that is argued by the theory to trigger conflict if not satisfied. The study finds that while EP initiatives have been visual at all three levels of society to the writer, the top-leadership level has been the most visible, while the level with highest capacity to create an infrastructure for peace connected to forest resource management is the actors at the middle-range level. However, an interdependence between the actors exists and is crucial for productive peacebuilding with society wide representation.