NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT_Resource use conflicts and conflict management

Natural Use Conflicts refers to disagreements and disputes over access to, control and use of natural resources. Conflicts often emerge because people have different uses for resources and want to manage them in different ways.Also occur when people pursue goals that clash or are incompatible. They happen whether people want them or not.

Types of Natural Resource Use Conflict

• Data conflict: This type of conflict arises when information is lacking, differently interpreted or withheld by one party from the other party. 

• Interest conflict: Occurs when there is perceived variance in interests related to utilization of the natural resources.

• Value conflict: This type erupts when people have different ways of life, deeply rooted goals or varying criteria on how to evaluate behaviors.

• Relationship conflict: This type prospers in environments of strong emotions, stereotypes, poor communication and historic negative patterns.

• Structural conflict: This arises from structural inequalities in control, ownership, power, authority or geographic separation.

CAUSES FOR NATURAL RESOURCES USE CONFLICT

1. Growing competition over natural resources: Factors responsible for this are; demographic change (e.g. population growth, migration and urbanization); market pressures (e.g. increased commercialization, intensification and privatization of local economies, economic reforms)

Environmental changes (e.g. floods, recurrent droughts, altered river flows, changes in wildlife migration).

2. Structural causes of conflict; These could be described as the way in which society is organized or structured. Natural resource conflicts are often underpinned by this structure. E.g. Customary law and state law  Customary law and State law are organized differently; one is local and the other national. State law is usually stronger.

3. Socio-economic change causes

When society and the economy undergo change, the interests and needs of natural resource users also change. Example introduction of new technologies, Commercialization of common property resources e.g wildlife, land, forests, fish, Migration.

4.Natural resource management policies, programmes and projects

Policies, programmes and projects can serve as sources of conflict, even though their intention is to reduce conflicts or improve livelihoods. Reasons include: Policies imposed without local participation, Poor stakeholder identification and consultation, Uncoordinated planning, Inadequate or poor information sharing, Inadequate monitoring and evaluation of programmes, Lack of effective mechanisms for conflict management.

CONFLICT MANAGEMENT APPROACHES /METHODS

Conflict management is the practice of identifying and handling conflicts in a sensible, fair and efficient manner that prevents them from escalating out of control and becoming violent.

Conflict management  involves a process of helping parties to reframe their conflict, shifting their perception of the conflict or their ways of dealing with it.

• Conflict can have constructive and positive outcomes, depending on the way people handle it.
• Conflict can help to clarify the policies, institutions and processes that regulate access to resources.
• No approach for managing natural resource conflicts works in all situations.
• Deciding on the most appropriate and legitimate means of addressing the conflict will depend on the situation.
• Methods for conflict management are illustrated in a continuum of conflict management approaches.

These approaches range from conflict avoidance at one extreme to physical violence at the other.
Moving from left to right in the diagram, the approaches become progressively more directive and coercive in terms of decision-making.

• Negotiation is a bargaining relationship among the opposing parties. Negotiations are voluntary and require that all parties willing to consider the others’ interests and needs.

• Mediation is the process whereby an acceptable third party who has limited or no authoritative decision-making power assists the principle parties in a conflict to resolve their dispute through promoting conciliation and facilitating negotiations. Mediation leaves the decision-making power primarily in the hands of the conflict parties. They enter into a voluntary agreement, which they themselves, and not the mediator, implement.

• Arbitration is a process whereby the parties submit the issues at stake to a mutually agreeable third party, who will make the decision for them. Arbitration is an informal and private procedure.
• Adjudication, relying on a judge or administrator to make a binding decision. Disputants usually hire lawyers to act as their advocates, and cases are argued in front of judges or other officials from provincial authorities or technical ministries with adjudicative authority in resource disputes. The disadvantage of this is that the decision is premised on one party being right and one wrong. The advantage is that the results of the process are binding and enforceable because the judge is socially sanctioned to make the decision.
• Coercion: threatening or using force to impose one’s will.
• Avoidance: acting in ways that prevent a conflict from becoming publicly acknowledged.

Conflict management  moves outside the law becomes extralegal when it does not rely on socially required or acceptable processes. Extralegal approaches involve processes of coercion to persuade or force “opponents” into compliance or submission.

Non-violent directive action occurs when one conflict party forces the other(s) to make concessions by refusing to cooperate or by committing undesirable acts.  This may be possible when the conflict parties rely on each other for their well-being and livelihoods.