Dangerous environments: environmental peacebuilding’s technomoral imaginary and its power-knowledge effects

Research, part of a special feature on The Nature of Peace: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and its Implications for Environment and Livelihoods

INTRODUCTION

In May 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended a high-level meeting on the ongoing violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). During the meeting, he commented that the DRC is enormously “rich in natural resources … We must ensure that (this heritage) becomes a source of prosperity and development (for the Congolese people who it belongs to) — not of conflict, rivalries and unsustainable exploitation. Peace and development must go hand in hand” (Guterres 2023). These words convey the vision of a desired future end-state of sustainable peace and development, while simultaneously appealing to the moral duty to help achieve it (in Guterres’ words: “we must ensure”). Along with the conviction that this end-state can be achieved by rationalizing natural resource management through scientifically informed interventions guided by experts, these views and moral beliefs are at the heart of environmental peacebuilding.

Environmental peacebuilding displays an unfettered belief in the possibility to transform violent conflict through expert-led and technological solutions related to the environment and natural resources. Its vision for peace is therefore cast within a “dreamscape of modernity” (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) that is saturated with a “sociotechnical imaginary” (Jasanoff and Kim 2009). Jasanoff (2015:5) defines such an imaginary as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.” We label the imaginary that informs environmental peacebuilding “technomoral” not because it is not social, but because the moral aspect assumes overriding importance. This moral aspect relates to the “will to improve” (Li 2007) that is a central concern in development discourse and practice. It refers to the imagined responsibility, held by Northern states and aid organizations, to foster development and peace in regions in the Global South deemed underdeveloped and unstable (Ferguson 1990, Escobar 1995, Heron 2007).

In this article, we analyze environmental peacebuilding’s technomoral imaginary and its power-knowledge effects. Specifically, we zoom in on the rules of knowledge production underlying this imaginary, the constructs these rules give rise to, how these constructs inform peacebuilding policy and practice, and, lastly, the immediate and broader effects of these policies and practices. We do so by focusing on both the burgeoning academic literature on environmental peacebuilding and a concrete environmental peacebuilding intervention in eastern DRC, the Virunga Alliance. This intervention was studied through the analysis of project-related documentation and extensive fieldwork in the intervention area carried out by the first author in 2012 and 2019. Based on the dual exploration of the science and practice of environmental peacebuilding, we argue that the technomoral imaginary that informs the field ends up constructing dangerous environments. This notion refers to imaginings of environments in the Global South and their specific properties (e.g., resource abundance, resource scarcity) as putative security threats because of a range of lacks and deficiencies (e.g., weak institutions, poverty) in the sociopolitical orders in which these environments are situated. For Jasanoff, such imagined threats are part and parcel of sociotechnical imaginaries. Although the visions that animate them are generally anchored in notions of social progress, “imaginations of desirable and desired futures correlate, tacitly or explicitly, with the obverse-shared fears of harms” (Jasanoff 2015:5-6). Indeed, it is our contention that the modern dreamscape of environmental peacebuilding is animated simultaneously by dreams of social progress and nightmares of dangerous environments.

The construction of dangerous environments, we argue, occurs through two inter-related epistemic practices: problematization and problem-solving (cf. Li 2007). Whereas problematization entails framing socio-environmental processes in such a way that they become analyzable, intelligible, and, crucially, treatable, problem-solving refers to the treatment of the identified problems (Li 2007). Through problematization and problem-solving, environmental peacebuilding foregrounds certain actors, issues, and processes, presenting them either as threats to peace and stability (e.g., bad governance, unsustainable resource use) or as the solution to such threats (e.g., transboundary resource management, reinforcing state capacity). These phenomena are presented as bounded objects that exist independently of social context and can be classified and known using reason and proper scientific methods. In other words, these phenomena become objectified (Foucault 1982). Objectification, in turn, renders problematized issues amenable to technical solutions overseen by experts (Mitchell 2002, Li 2007). An important limitation of such objectifications is that they render a wide range of socio-environmental processes, power relations, and actors invisible (Aggestam and Sundell-Ecklund 2014, 2016, Aggestam 2015). This selective visibility turns environmental peacebuilding into “a very narrow conceptual field” (Arsel 2011:455), while compartmentalizing its sites of intervention both spatially and temporarily. Objectification also renders the field self-referential, as it comes to define at once the main diagnoses, remedies, and evaluations of environmental peacebuilding. The ensuing self-referentiality, we argue, blinds scholars and practitioners to the broader power-knowledge effects of environmental peacebuilding. Notably, it obscures the field’s complicity in conjuring up dangerous environments, and thus in perpetuating and deepening unequal North-South relations both epistemically and politically.

In the following, we first critically examine environmental peacebuilding scholarship. We show how many scholars express doubts and self-critique about the science and practice of environmental peacebuilding. Yet rather than questioning the core rules of knowledge production, this criticism encourages them to try to transform environmental peacebuilding into a bona fide science. Thus, scholars double down on the search for new evidence and universally valid cause-effect relationships, grounding the field deeper in norms of knowledge production that emphasize objective knowledge, rationalism, systematic evidence, and verification. Because these efforts strengthen the tendency for objectification, they do little to overcome the self-referentiality of knowledge production in the field. In the second part of the article, we focus on the practice of environmental peacebuilding in Virunga National Park in eastern DRC. We show how the self-referential modes of knowledge production that inform this practice render it unable to address key drivers of conflict and violence in the area. Subsequently, we explore its immediate and broader power-knowledge effects. Specifically, we trace how it reproduces the representation of eastern DRC’s natural resources as a dangerous environment, while integrating the area deeper into Northern-dominated circuits of global capitalism and security governance. We end with reflections on the future of environmental peacebuilding, suggesting that it increases dialogue with fields that take colonially shaped power relations and epistemic practices seriously, and that it starts studying socioenvironmental phenomena at broader historical and geographical scales.

Our analysis of environmental peacebuilding differs substantially from existing critical scholarship on environmental peacebuilding. Much of this scholarship points out that both the theoretical foundations and the evidence base for the transformative effects of environmental peacebuilding interventions are weak and incomplete (Krampe 2017, Ide 2019, Johnson et al. 2021). A growing number of scholars further emphasize that environmental peacebuilding interventions can have counterproductive effects, such as creating new forms of exclusion and marginalization or new arenas for competition (Aldrich 2011, Barquet 2015, Ide 2020). Another often-heard critique is that environmental peacebuilding is depoliticized and lacks consideration for power inequalities, including North-South relations, colonial legacies, and gender dynamics (Selby 2003, Aggestam and Sundell-Eklund 2014, Aggestam 2015, Fröhlich and Gioli 2015, Ide et al. 2021, 2023, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022). Yet for many scholars, these weaknesses can be remedied by following proper scientific procedures and accounting for omitted variables, such as power and gender (e.g., Fröhlich and Gioli 2015, Johnson et al. 2021, Davis et al. 2023). These suggestions, we argue, show that most scholarship does not sufficiently engage with the technomoral imaginary that underpins environmental peacebuilding and the epistemic practices and moral imperatives it gives rise to. However, analyzing this imaginary is crucial for understanding the epistemological and political limitations of environmental peacebuilding and for thinking through how and to what extent the field can be reworked.

SITUATING ENVIRONMENTAL PEACEBUILDING

For Jasanoff and Kim (2009:123) sociotechnical imaginaries operate “in the understudied regions between imagination and action, between discourse and decision, and between inchoate public opinion and instrumental state policy.” Environmental peacebuilding, too, operates in such interstices, sitting at the intersection of science, policy, and practice. The same applies to what can be considered its intellectual forebear, the environmental security discourse that emerged in the 1980s and matured in the 1990s. This discourse focuses on how environmental and demographic factors, such as environmental degradation, population growth, and putative resource scarcity, increase the risk of the outbreak of violent conflict (e.g., Baechler 1998, Homer-Dixon 1999). In the early 2000s, this line of thinking was expanded with scholarship in political science and economics that employed rational choice approaches to examine the relations between natural resource abundance, “state failure,” poverty, and violent conflict (e.g., Collier and Hoeffler 2004, Ross 2004). This scholarship, in turn, was part of two broader, inter-related intellectual trends that swept across academia and institutions of development, security, and peacebuilding. The first is the emergence of the “security-development nexus,” or the merging of the discursive fields, institutions, and practices of security and development, which deepened Northern interventions in the Global South (Duffield 2007). The second trend is the rise of so-called “liberal peacebuilding,” which emphasizes state-centric, market-oriented interventions that promote liberal reforms along Northern blueprints, such as fostering democracy, deregulation, and the rule of law (Paris 2004, Richmond 2006). In the later 2000s, critique on liberal peacebuilding’s top-down and Eurocentric approaches provoked a so-called “local turn” in peacebuilding, leading to growing attention on local knowledge, ownership, and participation (Paffenholz 2015, MacGinty and Richmond 2016).

Environmental peacebuilding is intellectually indebted to all these different currents. It arose as a reaction to the singular attention on the link between war and natural resources that characterized environmental security thinking (Dresse et al. 2019, Ide et al. 2021). Instead, it shifted the focus to how cooperation over environmental issues and shared natural resource management could support transformations of conflict dynamics toward peace (Conca 2001, Conca and Dabelko 2002, Kyrou 2007). Although some have claimed that this shift in focus constitutes a “paradigm shift” (Dresse et al. 2019:102), environmental peacebuilding remains inscribed in many of the epistemic premises and practices underlying environmental security thinking. This includes a particular brand of ecodeterminism that depicts the environment and its resources as external forces shaping the development of societies, including the population’s ability to reproduce itself (Selby et al. 2022). However, such environmental constraints are believed to pertain exclusively to the Global South, as people in the Global North are imagined to have transcended ecological determinations through technological innovation (Selby et al. 2022). In this way, ecodeterminist thought and practice (re)produce a “global environmental color line” (Selby et al. 2022:105).

Environmental peacebuilding also works with the same modes of problematization and problem-solving as environmental security thinking, leading to similar technoscientific objectifications. A key example is the contested concept of “environmental scarcity,” which is crucial to ecodeterminist thought. Political ecologists have long pointed out that natural resources are not external to society, but produced, commodified, and made available by technologies, discourses, and human labor (Bakker and Bridge 2006, Selby et al. 2022). Furthermore, in any given context, scarcity is relative and relational as there is rarely an absolute shortage of a particular resource. Instead, shortages are generally the product of uneven access to and the distribution of resources (Fairhead and Leach 1996, Peluso and Watts 2001, Mehta 2010). Despite these criticisms, much environmental peacebuilding scholarship continues to take the notion of resource scarcity for granted (e.g., Johnson et al. 2021). Regarding modes of problem-solving, here too we can detect echoes of environmental security thinking, in particular its rational-choice variants. As pointed out by Dresse et al. (2019:103), environmental peacebuilding is based on “the premise that parties will prefer to engage in mutually beneficial cooperation rather than zero-sum conflict based on a cost-benefit calculation.” Indeed, across the environmental peacebuilding literature, there is a heavy emphasis on win-win solutions and common-pool resource management to overcome collective action problems (Dresse et al. 2019, Johnson et al. 2021).

Environmental peacebuilding also shares many of the Eurocentric modes of problematization and problem-solving that are central to peacebuilding scholarship and practice in general, in both the liberal and local turn variants (Sabaratnam 2017, Mathieu 2019). Like liberal peacebuilding, it problematizes so-called “fragile” or “failed” states as threats to local and global security. Moreover, it commonly assumes that state authority is inherently better than non-state authority, as the latter would leave people “without essential services and public goods” (Krampe et al. 2021). Congruent with this line of thinking, environmental peacebuilding identifies strengthening state service provision and state capacity in relation to natural resource management as important solutions (Krampe and Grignoux 2018, Johnson 2019, Krampe et al. 2021). Furthermore, similar to liberal peacebuilding, it locates problem-solving in market-based economic reforms, such as promoting export-oriented resource exploitation (Beevers 2015, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022, Vogel 2022).

Mirroring the “local turn” in peacebuilding, environmental peacebuilding however also displays a growing orientation toward bottom-up, community-based initiatives. This trend coincides with a shift from examining primarily inter-state conflict and transboundary cooperation to a focus on intra-state conflict, mostly in post-conflict settings (Ide et al. 2021). The resulting emphasis on “the local” has reinforced the tendency within environmental security thinking to compartmentalize sites of analysis and intervention both temporarily and spatially (Hartmann 2001, Arsel 2011). These “localist and internalist biases” (Selby et al. 2022:58) lead to an inability to gauge how these sites, and interventions within them, are entangled with and shaped by broader (national and global) power relations in both past and present, such as global socioeconomic inequalities and colonial legacies (cf. Iñiguez de Heredia 2018). Indeed, as pointed out by Arsel (2011), environmental peacebuilding rarely discusses the role of multinational corporations, unequal global terms of trade, consumption patterns in affluent countries, and Global North-supported counterinsurgency and occupation efforts. Ironically, it therefore removes core drivers of worldwide environmental destruction from the equation, in particular, global capitalism (Bliesemann de Guevara et al. 2023). When external interveners are mentioned, they are often represented as “neutral intermediaries” (Dresse et al. 2019:107) that play overall beneficial roles in peacebuilding processes. These framings reflect the technomoral imaginary’s central belief in the possibilities and necessity of social engineering, leading to depoliticization (Selby 2003, Aggestam and Sundell-Eklund 2014, Ide 2020).

Although environmental peacebuilding ascribes the causes of insecurity and underdevelopment to deficiencies that are distinctly “local,” it often emphasizes their global security and environmental ramifications (e.g., Brussett 2015, UNEP et al. 2015). As Swain et al. (2023:2) state in a comment on environment and security, “Security is almost impossible to localize in a globalized world. The new complex and diffuse threats to security have made the world mutually vulnerable, irrespective of big or small, rich or poor, East or West, North or South.” This framing echoes core problematizations of the security-development apparatus, which feed into justifications of external intervention (Buur et al. 2007, Duffield 2007, Stern and Öjendal 2010). As shown by Duffield (2007, 2014), these problematizations and corresponding forms of problem-solving are built into a vast apparatus created by Northern countries and international institutions with the aim of stabilizing poor and conflict-affected regions in the South. We suggest that environmental peacebuilding further integrates sites in the Global South into this apparatus, deepening its governance of natural resources and the environment, in addition to territory and populations.

THE EMERGING SCIENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL PEACEBUILDING

A part of the rapidly proliferating literature on environmental peacebuilding aspires to put the field on a more robust scientific footing. Robustness is interpreted here in positivist terms, emphasizing objectivity, linear causality, verification, the accumulation of knowledge, prediction, and modeling. Thus, this emerging scholarship aims to improve and refine the causal models of environmental peacebuilding and to verify these models empirically in order to reinforce the field’s evidence base. Realizing these ambitions has proven challenging, not least because of the high level of idiosyncrasy of individual cases; the difficulties to link changes in conflict dynamics to specific interventions; and the often-observed mismatch between intended and actual outcomes. We have identified four ways in which scholars try to cope with these challenges: (1) highlighting context-dependency; (2) adding missing variables; (3) pointing to environmental peacebuilding’s weak evidence base; and (4) improving conceptualizations of environmental peacebuilding and its outcomes.

Emphasizing context-dependency

The efforts in recent scholarship to identify clear-cut causal mechanisms of environmental peacebuilding neatly illustrate how the field works through technoscientific objectification. These efforts lead to the production of particular objectified notions as either the building blocks of causal models (e.g., win-win cooperation, state legitimacy) or as their outcomes (e.g., peace). In framing these concepts as variables, they are reduced to bounded objects that allow for establishing causal relationships between on the one hand, various modalities of environmental (mis-)management and on the other hand, different degrees of (environmental) peace or conflict. Despite positing neat causal models, many critical environmental peacebuilding scholars acknowledge that real-life conflict situations do not always conform to them and that the effects of environmental peacebuilding interventions often deviate from what was expected (e.g., Dresse et al. 2019, Ide 2019, Johnson et al. 2021, Krampe et al. 2021). For instance, Krampe and colleagues (2021) cautiously suggest that the three causal mechanisms of environmental peacebuilding that they have identified may in many cases not materialize. These mechanisms include (1) the contact hypothesis, or the idea that interaction between hostile groups can reduce bias and build trust; (2) the diffusion of transnational environmental and good governance norms, which would strengthen civil society; and (3) state service provision, which would reinforce state-society relations by enhancing state legitimacy. While turning a blind eye to the Eurocentric nature of some of these mechanisms (e.g., the assumption that transnational norms are inherently better than local ones or that state authority is always preferable to non-state authority), the authors do acknowledge that they often have limited or even counterproductive effects. For instance, they emphasize that the positive “cascading effects” of the diffusion of transnational norms do not always occur because norm diffusion by international peacebuilders can have “unintended outcomes” (Krampe et al. 2021).

Other environmental peacebuilding scholars make similar disclaimers regarding the causal models they propose (e.g., Dresse et al. 2019, Ide 2019, Johnson et al. 2021). Yet these disclaimers generally do not lead them to doubt the models in question or to abandon the ambition of identifying universal causal models. Instead, they evoke context-dependency as a seemingly logical explanation for why environmental peacebuilding may not always be successful or might have unintended consequences (Ide 2019, Johnson et al. 2021). Some scholars try to account for the impact of context more systematically, by identifying “scope conditions” (e.g., Ide 2018), yet such conditions can generally not account for all of the observed variation.

Adding missing variables

A second way in which scholars try to cope with the observed inaccuracy of the identified causal models is to emphasize that they are incomplete, requiring the addition of missing variables. Noticing the frequent absence of engagement with power in environmental peacebuilding scholarship and practice, Davis and colleagues (2023), for instance, propose to re-center power relations and inequities. For them, power must be positively transformed to reach a putative “virtuous cycle”’ of “positive peace” and “environmental sustainability,” the ideal end-state of environmental peacebuilding (Davis et al. 2023). In this way, they reduce the concept of power to a key missing “variable” to be inserted into a predetermined teleological model, turning it into a governable object that interacts with other objects like billiard balls. In so doing, paradoxically, they reinforce the field’s tendency for depoliticization. Similar observations apply to the concept of gender, which some have proposed to integrate “as an analytical category into environmental and conflict research” (Fröhlich and Gioli 2015:137). Arguably, this risks transforming it into yet another object that can be accounted for in terms of its functionality in relation to fostering environmental sustainability, peace, and development.

Pointing to weak evidence

To explain discrepancies between theorizations and actual workings of environmental peacebuilding, scholars further emphasize that the field’s current evidence base is weak and incomplete (Ide 2019, Johnson et al. 2021). They ascribe these putative gaps in evidence to a number of factors: (1) a lack of specification of the causal mechanisms that link shifts in natural resources governance to changes in conflict dynamics; (2) the frequent absence of a clearly identified and conceptualized end-state of environmental peacebuilding (specifically “peace” and its various dimensions); and (3) overall limited systematic comparison and accumulation of knowledge (Conca and Beevers 2018, Dresse et al. 2019, Johnson et al. 2021). To address these inconsistencies and shortcomings, scholars often call for applying more rigorous scholarly procedures, such as systematic comparison and better operationalization of key concepts. Ironically, the same scholars who advocate for a stronger evidence base for environmental peacebuilding often continue to use project and practitioner-generated data of dubious academic standards to substantiate their claims (e.g., Krampe et al. 2021). A substantial part of the environmental peacebuilding literature, in particular, that which touts its successes, is either written by, or based on evidence provided by organizations that have a vested interest in demonstrating the positive effects of interventions, such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP; Johnson et al. 2021). Much of this work has a “technocratic and policy-oriented approach” (Krampe et al. 2021), and utilizes project evaluations, rather than independent research. Arguably, the continued reliance on such data stems from confirmation bias arising from the field’s moral imperative to bring peace and development to conflict-affected zones. In this way, it goes unnoticed how stricter adherence to certain rules of knowledge production (producing more evidence) can lead to flouting others (using robust evidence).

Improving conceptualization

A final way in which scholars try to deal with the uneven explanatory power of theorizations in environmental peacebuilding is to acknowledge deficiencies in the concepts it uses, therefore calling for improvement conceptualization. For instance, in order to create a more refined conceptual framework, Johnson et al. (2021) identify a multitude of primary and secondary causal mechanisms through which environmental peacebuilding operates. One of these primary mechanisms is “economic development,” which operates via five submechanisms, all anchored in classic development discourse and practice: (1) promoting livelihoods; (2) increased foreign direct investment; (3) enhanced government revenue; (4) international aid; and (5) tourism. However, the actual effects of these submechanisms on the transformation of conflict dynamics are entirely uncertain, depending on factors such as: whether there are any trickle down effects; how potential benefits are distributed among different groups in the population; how this distribution connects to existing conflict dynamics; and to what extent interventions undermine existing livelihoods options (e.g., Duffy 2002, Millar 2016, Paczynska 2016, Anetor et al. 2020). In sum, these submechanisms are based on the assumption that development inherently brings peace, thereby collapsing the conceptual difference between environmental peacebuilding and development.

Similar conceptual issues arise in relation to the end-goals of environmental peacebuilding, which have been differently defined, conceptualized and operationalized. For instance, Ide (2019) proposes to conceptualize the outcomes of peacebuilding as a “peace continuum,” suggesting a progression from “the absence of violence” to “symbolic rapprochement” to “substantial integration.” Johnson et al. (2021) add “capabilities” to this continuum. Drawing on Matthew et al. (2010), they relate this to individuals’ and communities’ needs “to have the options necessary to end, mitigate, or adapt to threats to their human, environmental, and social rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and actively participate in pursuing these options” (Johnson et al. 2021:3-4). This overly broad definition makes it difficult to grasp what counts as environmental peacebuilding and how it differs from its more established cousin: international development.

We conclude that rather than providing conceptual clarity, the drive to improve operationalization seems to lead to conceptual stretching. By stretching the concepts of “peace” and “peacebuilding,” an ever wider array of social phenomena and processes are categorized as environmental peacebuilding. Such stretching helps to maintain the belief that it is possible to identify with exactitude the causal mechanisms that generate peace, and that this knowledge can be harnessed by experts to transform conflict dynamics through changes in natural resources management.

In sum, although recent scholarship on environmental peacebuilding has tried to shore up its scientific foundation, these efforts have been unable to overcome the self-referential and teleological nature of knowledge production in the field. A key explanation for this, we suggest, lies in the power of environmental peacebuilding’s technomoral imaginary. This imaginary naturalizes deeply political constructs such as “resource scarcity” and “weak governance,” reflecting their resonance with Eurocentric beliefs about how societies work and should be ordered. It is the failure to problematize this imaginary, we contend, that leads to the obscuring of the broader power-knowledge effects of environmental peacebuilding.

ENVIRONMENTAL PEACEBUILDING’S TECHNOMORAL IMAGINARY AT WORK IN THE DRC

For Jasanoff, sociotechnical imaginaries are not the preserve of scientists: they can be created and held by varied social groups sharing the same vision of social progress. In the case of environmental peacebuilding, the imaginative work of policy makers and practitioners is crucial for enmeshing science and technology “in performing and producing diverse versions of the collective good” (Jasanoff 2015:15). These actors engage in similar modes of problematization and problem-solving as environmental peacebuilding scholarship. As we will show with the example of the Virunga Alliance, this renders them unable to identify and address key drivers of conflict and violence as well as the broader effects of interventions. We do not claim that the Alliance is representative of all environmental peacebuilding projects, which substantially differ in, amongst others, levels of market orientation, foreign involvement, and the degree of top-down management. Yet, we do suggest that its modes of problematization and problem-solving are emblematic of environmental peacebuilding in general.

The Virunga Alliance centers on Virunga National Park, a world heritage site that is a sanctuary for both the endangered mountain gorilla and over a dozen rebel groups. A British-registered NGO, the Virunga Foundation and the Congolese state jointly govern the park through a public-private partnership (Marijnen 2018). To transform the wider Virunga area into an “island of stability,” the Virunga Foundation initiated a public-private initiative called the Virunga Alliance, whose vision for social progress is clearly inscribed in the technomoral imaginary of environmental peacebuilding. Based on the specific problematizations outlined below, the Virunga Alliance “aims to foster peace and prosperity through the responsible economic development of natural resources” (Virunga.org (date unknown)a)

Problematization

The Virunga Foundation presents the insecurity engulfing the park area as primarily the result of armed groups’ hunger for the park’s natural resources, including timber, fish, wildlife, and bushmeat. For the park’s chief warden, the Belgian prince Emmanuel de Merode, the ongoing violence in Virunga can be ascribed to the “enormous financial returns that are being drawn from the illegal extraction of natural resources from the park,” representing “one of the major sources of revenue for the armed militia in the region” (Hall 2018). This analysis echoes rational-choice approaches that claim that an abundance of resources attracts “greedy rebels” by lowering the opportunity cost for rebellion (Collier and Hoeffler 2004). The resulting insecurity is often represented as a transboundary problem. A 2015 report by UNEP and the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, for instance, presents the charcoal trade from Virunga as benefitting “transnational organized crime” (UNEP et al. 2015, Marijnen and Verweijen 2020).

Yet resource abundance is only seen as dangerous because of a range of local lacks and deficiencies. Emphasizing “the enormous economic value” of the park’s resources, its website states that “When these resources are poorly managed, they can lead to extreme cycles of violence” (Virunga.org (date unknown)a). Moreover, “trafficking of the Park’s natural resources is intrinsically linked to the poverty and rule of law challenges in the region” (Virunga.org (date unknown)a). Here we see a range of familiar tropes from the fragile states discourse at work, framing weak states, bad governance, and the absence of the rule of law as the main causes of conflict and disorder (Hagmann and Péclard 2010, Grimm et al. 2014). These tropes chime with deeply rooted colonial representations of the Congo as “backward,” “savage,” and “underdeveloped” (Dunn 2003), which have long served to justify external interventions (Koddenbrock 2012, Budabin and Richey 2021).

Another danger constructed through Virunga’s discourse is “rampant poverty,” which is often linked to “high population densities” (Virunga.org (date unknown)a). In the words of de Merode: “We have an unemployment rate of 70 per cent in our region, and 4 million people live within a day’s walk of the park boundaries. When you have that population size and level of unemployment, combined with the availability of small arms, it’s no surprise that young men choose the militias as a means for survival” (Schiffman 2016). Virunga partly ascribes poverty to “poor agricultural practices” leading to low crop yields (Virunga.org (date unknown)a), echoing colonial discourses that attribute superiority to Northern, supposedly more technologically advanced environmental and agricultural practices (cf. Selby et al. 2022).

For the park’s management, then, war is primarily driven by economic and environmental factors: on the one hand, the abundance of natural resources, which attracts greedy militias, on the other hand, economic deprivation, which pushes economically rational poor people to join armed groups. This vision on the causes of war is linked to a range of objectified problems, including predatory rebels, a corrupt government, destitute and backwards populations, population pressure, and resource abundance. Through these objectifications, Virunga National Park emerges as a “dangerous environment,” which, unless managed rationally, must be expected to create chaos and violence.

Problem-solving

The objectifications and problematizations outlined above feed into a particular approach to problem-solving that emphasizes economic solutions, notably, development and job creation. Employment can stop people at once from joining armed groups and engaging in illegal resource exploitation. In the words of a key actor in the Virunga Alliance, “One person you raise out of poverty is one less person who is likely to go to the bush and join an armed group” (Popescu 2022). Another aim of job creation is to win the hearts and minds of the population in the Virunga area. As De Merode explains: “If you have 100,000 people whose jobs depend on the park, they’re going to want the park to survive” (Tabor 2017).

To bring security and stability to the broader Virunga region, the Alliance aims to create a profitable “green economy.” To that end, it has developed a three-pronged strategy focusing on green energy production, agricultural development, and ecotourism. Through donor financing, it has built three hydro-electric power plants in the park area. The electricity generated by these plants is commercialized by Virunga Energies, a private company wholly owned by the Virunga Foundation. The Alliance believes that access to this electricity will facilitate the creation and survival of small and medium-sized enterprises. To this end, it also fosters entrepreneurship (Marijnen and Schouten 2019) and extends loans to micro-enterprises, which have to be repaid via their energy consumption (Congo Sauti 2020). The second component of the Virunga Alliance aims to promote export-oriented agriculture in collaboration with the Belgian Envirium Life Sciences Group. The Group holds a number of fully owned and co-shared subsidiaries that produce papaine, coffee, shia seed, and cocoa beans in the park area. One of these subsidiaries is Virunga Origins, a social enterprise that runs a factory selling chocolate to European and American supermarkets and webshops. It is managed by Belgian entrepreneurs, who developed and co-own its brand Virunga Origins Chocolat, the recipe for which was made by a famous Belgian chocolatier (Envirium 2021). The third component of the Virunga Alliance is ecotourism, mostly for wealthy tourists from the Global North. To attract these tourists, the Alliance built luxury tourist facilities and invested in developing an elaborate security system that includes escorts by armed rangers, allowing tourists to safely visit the park (Marijnen 2022).

As this overview shows, the Virunga Alliance conceptualizes environmental peacebuilding predominantly in terms of market-based green economic development, based on rational-choice oriented theories of conflict. It specifically aims to harness private sector-driven development with an external orientation, that is, involving foreign capital, foreign consumers, and foreign expertise, to achieve a “green peace” inscribed in an ecomodernist vision of “progress” (Marijnen and Schouten 2019). This vision also emphasizes the transformative potential of green technologies. For instance, to reduce the consumption of charcoal from the park, the Virunga Alliance conducts experiments with electric pressure cookers working on the hydro-electricity provided by Virunga Energies (Uantwerpen.com (date unknown)). The park also encourages donations in cryptocurrency, including to set up small solar farms to empower ranger bases or purchase electric motorbikes for patrols (Virunga.org (date unknown)b). These examples show how green technologies “materialize and make tangible” the social imaginaries of environmental peacebuilding (Jasanoff 2015:18).

Looking beyond the Virunga Alliance’s objectifications

Although popular with donors, scholars have criticized Virunga’s approach to environmental peacebuilding (Verweijen and Marijnen 2018, Marijnen and Schouten 2019, Verweijen 2020, Marijnen 2022). These criticisms lay bare how environmental peacebuilding’s rules of knowledge production lead to obscuring and misrepresenting key drivers of conflict and violence. Critics of Virunga’s theories of change contend that armed conflict in the area is not simply the result of economic and environmental factors, but of a multitude of intersecting multi-level sociopolitical processes. These processes include regional geopolitics; militarized competition between political-military elites; the Congolese state’s modes of governance; and long-standing conflicts around territory, local authority, and identity that often have their origins in the colonial era (Verweijen and Marijnen 2018, Marijnen and Verweijen 2020, Hoffmann 2021). Armed groups are therefore not purely driven by profit and resource hunger; in fact, some of them do not even depend financially on the park’s resources. Moreover, problematizing armed groups as “criminal” ignores their complex social embedding and deprives them of political agency. Crucially, armed groups sometimes provide sought-after governance and protection services (Hoffmann and Vlassenroot 2014, Hoffmann and Verweijen 2019), such as enabling the prohibited exploitation of natural resources in the park, on which thousands of people depend for their livelihoods (Verweijen and Marijnen 2018). Furthermore, some armed groups express grievances that are widely shared by local populations, such as resentment toward the park and its resource restrictions (Verweijen and Marijnen 2018, Verweijen et al. 2020). In fact, many locals view the park as an illegitimate colonial imposition, which has deprived them of their ancestral land. Armed groups tap into these sentiments by expressing resistance toward the park (Verweijen et al. 2020). In essence, then, armed mobilization has deep historical, social, and political causes that are not captured by the prevalent problematizations of poverty and resource hunger. These problematizations also obscure the historical and contemporary role of the park itself in the unfolding dynamics of conflict and violence (Verweijen and Marijnen 2018).

Addressing only some of the drivers of conflict and violence in the area, there are few indications that the Virunga Alliance’s projects have fundamentally improved the security situation in the broader park area. Armed groups continue to occupy large sections of the park, and attacks and violent incidents remain frequent. There are also no signs that the Alliance has made a substantial impact on improving ordinary people’s livelihoods. To start with, the trickle down effects of ecotourism have been very limited (Schiffman 2016), while its benefits have been concentrated in the few small areas where tourism takes place (Verweijen et al. 2020). Ecotourism has also done little to improve people’s security, given that it has diverted the park’s security assets for safeguarding tourists. This has accentuated the inequalities between mostly white, wealthy tourists from the Global North and black local inhabitants (Marijnen 2022). The benefits of hydro-electricity development are unevenly distributed as well, in part because of elite capture. Most of the electricity generated by the power plant in Matebe, one of the two biggest, is sold to well-off customers in the city of Goma via a group of rich businesspeople that obtained a monopoly on its distribution there. Meanwhile, many rural areas surrounding the park remain unconnected, while in the connected areas, the electricity is too expensive for large sections of the population. This pattern of uneven distribution deepens existing socioeconomic inequalities, including between rural and urban areas (Marijnen and Schouten 2019, Verweijen et al. 2020). The limited rural customer base, combined with the inability to secure a distribution deal in the nearest big cities, has also led the electricity output of the second largest station, in Luvira, to be redirected toward bitcoin mining. Unable to sell the electricity locally, de Merode turned to cryptocurrency as part of a broader ecobusiness model aimed at making the park self-sustaining, rather than dependent on donor funds (Popescu 2023). Virunga Energy does provide free public lighting to some areas as well as free electricity to hospitals and schools. Although they appreciate these initiatives, many inhabitants do not perceive them to make a decisive difference for their livelihoods, while the security effects are believed to be highly localized (personal communication, Kiwanja, Rutshuru, and Goma, January 2019). Regarding the agricultural component of the Virunga Alliance, the reported security and livelihoods impacts are also limited. Although some farmers benefit from the associated projects, this appears to be a small group overall (personal communication, April 2024).

Despite the uncertain peacebuilding effects, the sponsors of the Virunga Alliance have labelled it an unmitigated stabilization success story. For instance, a high-level official from the park’s main donor, the European Commission, commented that the Virunga case demonstrates “how we can help stabilize a whole region through what are, at base, environmental projects” (Capacity4dev 2018). The Virunga Alliance itself claims success by presenting economic and public service statistics, such as the number of jobs created and the number of people that have access to free public lighting (Virunga.org (date unknown)a). It remains unclear, however, how these development benefits contribute to the transformation of key drivers of conflict and violence. By equating job creation and electrification with peacebuilding, the Alliance engages in a similar kind of conceptual stretching as environmental peacebuilding scholarship, exemplifying the self-referential and teleological character of knowledge production in the field.

Uncovering the Virunga Alliance’s power-knowledge effects

Although the Virunga Alliance’s contribution to peacebuilding appears limited, its projects have profound power-knowledge effects. Within the Virunga area, they have important political-economic ramifications, such as the privatization of public goods, in this case, electricity. Before Virunga Energies appeared, the distribution of electricity was in the hands of public utilities companies, and there was no single entity in charge of both the generation and the distribution of electricity. Virunga Energies has clearly changed the political economy of electricity provision, including the distribution of profits (Marijnen and Schouten 2019). Another effect of the Virunga Alliance’s projects is that they have accentuated class, racial, and other social differences, inter alia, between rural and urban populations, between those wealthy enough to pay the elevated subscription fee to access Virunga’s electricity and those who cannot afford it, and between tourists from the North and local populations (Marijnen and Schouten 2019, Marijnen 2022).

Aside from these effects in situ, the Virunga Alliance’s projects change the Virunga area’s translocal connections. To start with, they integrate rural areas in eastern DRC more firmly into Global North-dominated circuits of capitalism (see also Marijnen and Schouten 2019). The Alliance promotes export-oriented agriculture and ecotourism aimed at foreign tourists, while also making the park’s revenues partly dependent on bitcoin mining. As a result, local livelihoods become more vulnerable to fluctuations in global commodity prices, flows of Northern tourists, and the global political economy of cryptocurrency. In addition, despite the ambition to become self-financed, the Alliance’s projects remain heavily dependent on funding from Northern development finance institutions and philanthropic organizations, including the European Commission and in the past, the Howard Buffet Foundation (Marijnen 2018). Another important effect of the Virunga Alliance’s environmental peacebuilding endeavor is the intensification of transnational governance over the Virunga area, including security governance. Because of the public-private partnership with the Virunga Foundation, governance of the Virunga area has to a large extent become privatized and transnationalized. Key leadership positions in the park, including the function of chief warden and director of security, are assumed by people hailing from the Global North. Moreover, Northern ex-military personnel are closely involved in training the park guards, whose state-paid salaries are significantly supplemented by the park, and in directing the park’s security operations, including to safeguard the Alliance’s projects (Marijnen 2018, Marijnen and Verweijen 2020, Verweijen 2020). In sum, given its heavy reliance on foreign capital, foreign expertise, and foreign consumers, the Virunga Alliance has deepened the park area’s translocal integration.

The resulting deepening of foreign influence is legitimized through the construction of Virunga as a “dangerous environment,” where allegedly corrupt state officials, resource abundance, population pressure, poverty, and predatory rebels combine to wreck environmental destruction and create security threats with transnational ramifications. The imagery of a “dangerous environment” is further used to attract funding from institutional donors and individuals and to sell Virunga Alliance-enabled products to consumers (Marijnen and Verweijen 2016). For instance, tour operators seize upon the thrill and excitement of visiting a dangerous war zone to attract tourists to Virunga (Marijnen 2022). As a blog of Safaris Unlimited (2020) reads: “There’s still a palpable burble of excitement in my stomach when one of our guests asks about a safari into the land that Joseph Conrad named the Heart of Darkness.” The imagery of danger is also harnessed in efforts to sell Virunga’s chocolate to consumers. In the words of a Danish webshop: “In one of the areas of the world that is and has been hardest hit by both conflict, poverty and disease with Ebola and corona, chocolate production contributes to sustainability, peace and prosperity” (Gammelholm Copenhagen (date unknown)). These examples illustrate how portraying the park as a dangerous environment not only justifies intervention but also serves as a marketing strategy, giving consumers based in the North a sense of contributing to peace and environmental protection simply by purchasing chocolate.

The Virunga Alliance’s green peacebuilding efforts in eastern DRC exemplify how the technomoral imaginary of environmental peacebuilding works. By fostering problematization, problem-solving, and objectification, this imaginary helps establish a self-referential, normative, and teleological system of knowledge production. This system blinds environmental peacebuilders at once to many of the underlying causes of violent conflict and to the broader power-knowledge effects of environmental peacebuilding itself. These effects include conjuring up “dangerous environments,” which, following a global environmental color line, are uniquely located in the Global South. The imaginary of dangerous environments, in turn, justifies integrating peacebuilding intervention sites more firmly into the global security-development apparatus that remains dominated by the Global North (Duffield 2007, 2014). We do not suggest, however, that these broader effects of environmental peacebuilding are intentional. Rather, as Ferguson remarked (1990:20) in relation to the development apparatus, “strategies and plans interact with unacknowledged structures and coincidence to create unintended outcomes.” Furthermore, interventions invariably become part of existing power struggles. Their practices of power may therefore very well be resisted, co-opted, or instrumentalized all along the intervention chain, thus creating a multitude of unenvisaged side-effects (cf. Ferguson 1990, Lewis and Mosse 2006, Li 2007). Although some scholarship traces such unintended effects in relation to individual environmental peacebuilding projects (e.g., Aldrich 2011, Ide 2020), there have been limited efforts to consider these effects systemically and think through how they affect the field as a whole.

Recent attempts to improve environmental peacebuilding’s scientific base have not led to greater reflection on the field’s core epistemic and moral premises. In fact, by elevating a limited set of objectified notions to core building blocks, the recent push to develop universally valid causal models only reinforces the field’s existing epistemic practices. Because these building blocks predominantly address what are framed as “local” problems (such as state weakness and resource scarcity), this push also increases the field’s inherent tendency toward spatiotemporal compartmentalization. Therefore, it further reinforces the field’s Eurocentric gaze and inscription in colonially scripted representations of nature-society relations in the Global South. Although there have been calls for the field to increase dialogue with decolonial approaches (Vélez-Torres et al. 2022, Ide et al. 2023), we observe that current efforts to make environmental peacebuilding more scientific undermine, rather than enhance a move toward epistemological pluralism. Furthermore, the recent calls for increased engagement with big data and frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain (Ide et al. 2021) risk undermining initiatives to engage with plural knowledges. Reflecting a fascination with high-tech solutions to conflict, the forms of knowledge that these technologies promote, such as modeling based on data from early warning systems, will entrench the field more deeply in positivist epistemologies.

It is our contention that environmental peacebuilding can only begin to create space for non-Eurocentric and non-colonial epistemologies and practices through a fundamental reckoning with, and separation from, the discourse and apparatus of security-development. Yet it has not only become an integral part of this apparatus, it is increasingly important for its reproduction and expansion. Almost two decades ago, Escobar (1995) observed that development discourse needs to constantly reinvent itself to mask its own failures. This drive leads to a constant search for new approaches, such as the “participatory turn” or “human development.” The merging of security and development in the 1990s constituted another such reinvention, enabling development to expand into new domains such as “security sector reform” while depoliticizing security interventions as development (Duffield 2007). By locating security and development problems and solutions in the environmental domain, we contend that environmental peacebuilding allows development to once more reinvent itself. Tackling environmental problems, in particular climate change, has become one of the main goals of development writ large. As a result, development funding is increasingly diverted toward climate change adaptation and mitigation (Smith et al. 2011, Persson and Remlin 2014, Donner et al. 2016). Environmental peacebuilding is set to play a crucial role in this shift, as the security-development apparatus swiftly reorients its focus toward addressing the security challenges related to climate change. Environmental peacebuilding thus helps extend a new lifeline to an embattled doctrine. Despite vigorous and constant critique, mainstream development discourse has consistently avoided problematizing deeper issues related to global power relations, including over-consumption in the Global North; the historical responsibility for pollution and climate change; the disastrous effects of extractivism and economic crises; the political economy of arms production and exports; and the destabilizing effects of Global-North led military interventions. These processes and issues unquestionably shape dynamics of conflict and violence in the Global South (Latouche 1993, Escobar 1995).

Instead of maintaining a narrow focus on local lacks and deficiencies, environmental peacebuilding should start focusing on these global issues, in particular in light of the rapid decline of the legitimacy of Northern-led stabilization efforts in the South (Baczko 2021). To achieve this, the field would do well to draw inspiration from and harmonize with decolonial, postdevelopment, and political ecology approaches to the study of conflict, development, and the environment. These approaches have demonstrated greater self-reflexivity regarding the politics of knowledge production and intervention in the Global South. This broader engagement might prompt environmental peacebuilding to zoom out from the myopic focus on “dangerous environments” and start acknowledging and analyzing its own role in constructing these environments in the first place.

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