Participation of civil society in decisions to mitigate environmental degradation in post-conflict societies: evidence from Somalia

Abstract

The question of the degree to which participation by civil society contributes to environmental decisions in post-conflict societies has received little attention. This study sheds light on the extent to which degrees of participation contribute to environmental decision-making in the Puntland State of Somalia using questionnaire surveys. We found that active participation has the highest contribution to environmental decisions. Our findings also indicated that the most pressing forms of environmental degradation in Puntland, as perceived by the respondents, are land degradation, drought related to the scarcity of rainfall, and deforestation. This study recommends “environmental cooperation” built into the peace-building process as a clear-cut concept to tackle both environmental degradation and conflicts. At the core of this concept is active participation and collaboration between civil society and the government as a means of mitigating environmental degradation in post-conflict Somalia. This will result in favorable environmental conditions and sustainable peace.

Keywords:

• Somalia
• Puntland
• civil society
• environmental degradation
• post-conflict

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for providing detailed comments that improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Table 3. Step-wise forward regression analysis.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2019.1685957

Notes

1 http://pl.statistics.so/population-of-puntland/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chinese Scholarship Council for financial support [CSC no. 1741159C74]; the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2018M632552]; the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) providing the CAS-Foreign Young Scientist Award [2018FYB0002]; and the Swedish Research Council [Grant no. 2018-00430].