Environmental Conflict and Collaboration

As a global problem with varying and differentiated local impacts, climate change challenges how we conventionally think about scale and problem solving, as well as how we live our lives and what we hold dear.

Our program asks how a problem that is caused globally, but addressed locally, might change how individuals perceive and enact citizenship. What are the ways climate change is challenging what citizenship means? How it is debated? How is it practiced and lived in everyday life at multiple scales?

This project is part of the Maxwell Tenth Decade Project.

Social scientists are paying increased attention to human adaptation to climate change, attempting to understand how, where and when climate change adaptation is occurring (or not), and the challenges involved.

In this project, a diverse group of scholars discuss how different disciplines are approaching and studying climate adaptation and host a workshop aimed to enhance critical conversations about climate change adaptation across academic disciplines, thereby engaging with different perspectives that can foster integrative analyses and further collaborations.

A comparative study of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, this project explores on how the IUCN, as an international organization builds nature protection programs in states with different capacities. Further, it explores how conflicts around nature protection priorities and approaches are promoted or addressed by IUCN at various scales—from local to international.

Data collection includes face-to-face, email and phone interviews. Results show the IUCN has been playing a key role in addressing the natural resource conflicts within nations and beyond (transboundary).

Struggles over the right to water have emerged as a focal point for political mobilization in a range of locations around the world. Although formalized in the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comment No. 15 of 2002, political actions now focus on realizing this possibility in specific contexts.

The Right to Water conference at Syracuse University in 2010 generated significant insights into how to understand, recognize and apply a human right to water in differing geographical contexts. A post‐conference publication, "The Right to Water: Politics, Governance, and Social Struggles", was published to take these debates and contributions forward as a critical resource for future research and action.