Transition: Rainfall variability, violence, solutions

After my last post, I wanted to focus on water conflicts and how it is possible to solve them. During my literature search I found an interesting article which kind of connects the different topics I already talked about and topics I want to talk about in upcoming posts. The article is called “Rainfall variability and violence in rural Kenya: investigating the effects of drought and the role of local institutions with survey data” (article) and tries to link multiple questions about this topic. Linke et al. investigate the connection between droughts and conflicts but they also explore the role of local and national institutions within these conflicts and how successful they are with their measures. Therefore, the article offers a perfect transition to the question how water conflicts can be solved.

Linke et al. choose a different approach (different from the one I presented in my first post) and so they include different determinants for identifying the relationship between water scarcity and conflicts. They know about the complex relationship and so they interviewed 504 individuals in three rural Kenyan counties. So in contrast to the research which I presented to you in my first post, they do not (primarily) use statistics and geospatial data for their research. They interviewed individuals from many different social (pastoralists, agricultural groups) and ethnic (Kikuyu (post 2), Kalenjin, Luo) groups from different ecological areas in Kenya. Linke et al. chose Kenya for their research because it is a political stable country and thus there are not too many conflicts which could affect the outcome of their interviews. Furthermore, Kenya is a country with many different environmental zones and different ethnic groups which will offer many different opinions about that topic and thus a more or less representative result (Linke et al. 2015:39).

The main goal of Linke et al. is to offer some new approaches to the existing research about this issue. On the one hand, they want to offer an approach which connects the individual and household level with large samples and on the other hand they want to show that the link between climate change and violence takes place in certain social contexts (Linke et al. 2015:37).

To do their research, Linke et al. make three propositions for their research (Linke et al. 2015:39):

-          They say, that where droughts are more often, support for use of violence will be higher than in other regions where drought are less frequent

-          They say, that governments regulating the use of natural resources will reduce support for use of violence

-          They say, that the presence of intercommunity dialogues can reduce the support for use of violence

During their interviews, they used standard question which are also used for the Afrobarometer survey. They also tried to explain their research very detailed so that interviewed persons are hopefully more honest and not too much influenced by social desirability. They then created different models and also added different determinants like age, education, and gender because all of them can affect the outcome of the research.

Their results are clearly. They find no support for their propositions 1 and 2. That means that people think there is no support for use of violence during droughts and they also think that governments do not have an impact on reducing the support for use of violence.

But Linke et al. make clear that proposition 3 can be seen as true. Many interviewed persons said that community dialogues are very important when it comes to managing conflicts during a drought. Consequently, this informal “institution” is more purposeful than any government institution. According to Linke et al. that is the case because local dialogues are more flexible and adaptive to changing circumstances and consequently more useful for solving problems (Linke et al. 2015:42).

But what are the consequences of these findings?

First, this case study shows that many people in Kenya obviously have the feeling that the government does not have many measures for solving water conflicts. Even though it might not be true, people (in this case) trust more in their local dialogues than in their government. These local dialogues might work in many (maybe most) cases but it is still necessary that governments also take their responsibility in local conflicts.

For this, they need more flexible institutions which know local patterns and which can deal with different ethnic and social groups. In many cases, you can trust in self-responsibility of communities but not always and therefore you need measures which can help to reduce the risk of an outbreak of a conflict.

This research and its results also show that water conflicts are still not really seen as such a big problem nowadays and for the future. Of course, many different problems can lead to a conflict but water can be one of these problems thus a holistic solution for this whole problem is needed. Otherwise governments and nation states will face even more problems in future time. If governments are not able to provide a sufficient solution for the distribution of water (and other resources) more and more conflicts will be the result. Of course this is a huge job but it has to be done now...

As always: Feel free to comment on my post and ask questions!