ATTACHMENT_35_-_FABS_Conflict_Analysis.pdf

Conflict Sensitivity for CARPE FABS

CARPE work focuses in the Congo Basin, an area with many sources actual and potential conflict, and the new Forest and Biodiversity Support (FABS) activity will have a key role to play in ensuring CARPE’s work does not exacerbate, and where possible reduces, conflict in the region. This document outlines the key drivers of conflict in the region, and the particular conflicts that relate to CARPE’s interventions, before identifying a number of areas in which FABS should incorporate conflict sensitive principles into its design.

Drivers and underlying dynamics of conflict

Parts of the Congo Basin have been, and continue to be, in conflict over many years. There are multiple drivers of conflict but we highlight three that relate to CARPE’s objectives:

● High value of natural assets. The region contains extraordinary renewable and non-renewable natural resources including minerals, timber, petroleum and valuable fauna. Multiple actors have been involved in extracting and trading these goods under situations of weak policy and governance frameworks. The struggle for these assets can threaten protected areas (oil exploration in Virunga), cause deforestation (charcoal) and deplete species populations (forest elephants, gorillas).

● Failure to define clear tenure rights to lands and forests, with ambiguous status for customary rights. This failure leaves communities vulnerable to migration and land grabs, creating uncertainty about ownership and benefit. It also makes sustainable investment difficult as investors may not have the security of knowing who may hold land claims or feel that they have rights to land and resources allocated as concessions.

● Weak platforms for conflict resolution. Local governments have few economic resources and skills to engage stakeholders in conflict resolution. Conflicts have been “resolved” by military action, which often exacerbates rather than mitigates the conflict. Civilian authorities are unable to control military and police units who often operate with impunity and stir up resentment.

Potential conflicts related to CARPE programming

Over the years, CARPE has been involved in a range of activities with potential to result in or contribute to dynamics that lead to conflict. One of CARPE’s focuses is on policy and regulatory reforms in the natural resources sectors. Such structural change can create "winners and losers" and can shift the balance of power in ways that precipitates or alleviates conflict over resource access.

Protected areas can be the focus of conflict especially if there is a perception that communities’ right of access to natural resources is unfairly restricted by setting up strict protection zones that are off-limits to local populations. CARPE has supported strengthening of the ecoguard force within the protected area agencies that may inevitably come into a degree of conflict with local people, where these people are engaged in illegal activities such bushmeat poaching or illegal mining within a protected area. Ecoguards must be well trained to handle poachers, even when arrested, in a responsible and humane way, with respect for human rights. In addition, a sufficiently strong system must be in place to manage and oversee the ecoguards to ensure that they themselves do not get involved in poaching or other crimes themselves. Conflicts between protected areas and local communities can be exacerbated if ecoguards are seen as stopping local people from poaching but meanwhile poaching themselves.

CARPE has supported numerous small and medium scale community livelihood activities, based largely on agricultural interventions. Where these are not carried out with due attention to fair and transparent beneficiary selection, there is a risk that they could exacerbate conflicts between groups seen as more favored or unfavored by the intervention. CARPE activities focusing on the establishment of community forest concessions, under the 2014 Community Forestry Decree in DRC, are likely to be particular prone to conflict. If the governance structures responsible for these community concessions are not set up to be transparent, inclusive and representative of the communities that live there, there is a significant risk of misunderstandings, elite capture, corruption and resulting conflicts.

In areas with a combination of pastoralists and agriculturalists (e.g. Garamba-Chinko) or settlers coming into an area from elsewhere—e.g. farmers from N Kivu coming in to Ituri and growing cocoa—there is considerable potential for conflict to arise. In some places these migrations have already erupted into real conflict. Land use planning can go a long way to alleviate these dynamics if carried-out in an inclusive and participatory fashion, but the real risk is in the oversight of implementation of resulting land use plans.

CARPE has increasingly been supporting civil society organizations at national or local levels to hold government accountable and support the administrative oversight of natural resource-related regulations and laws. This approach, aimed at ensuring not only that governments put in place appropriate policies for sustainable forest management, but also that they actually keep to these policies themselves, is likely to become increasingly important, yet increasingly likely to lead to conflict, in an environment of deteriorating legitimacy of governments, particularly in DRC.

Environmental defenders are now more than ever at risk across the world and supporting these groups and their aims has the potential to precipitate conflict.

Building conflict sensitivity into FABS interventions

FABS will have a number of important roles to play within CARPE in ensuring that it addresses and does not exacerbate conflicts in the Congo Basin. While FABS is not expected to carry out community-based interventions directly, it will bring to bear resources and technical assistance to enable a favorable environment for the success of such activities, including support for policy and regulatory platforms and frameworks, and the engagement of local and national NGOs and the private sector. FABS will therefore have a key role to play in ensuring that CARPE interventions are conflict sensitive.

FABS emphasis on data generation, management, analysis and sharing will create the type of transparency that lends itself to dialogue over resource management decisions. While FABS can not be expected to extend these services very widely itself, these principles can be selectively applied so that they alleviate the greatest possible conflicts and demonstrate the potential for conflict prevention through informed dialogue grounded in evidence. A number of areas in which FABS will incorporate conflict sensitivity are outlined below.

Conflict sensitivity in community based activities Where the FABS activity itself supports the implementation of field activities involving local communities through grants-under contract or other financing mechanisms, it will ensure that the design of such activities is conflict sensitive. Where appropriate, FABS will ensure conflict dynamics are incorporated into the design of studies and assessments to be carried out under this activity. All grants must include conflict sensitivity in the design of the intervention itself, ensure transparent and equitable selection of beneficiaries, location of operations and offices, and in staffing.

FABS will have to ensure that partners are selected under the grants program in a conflict sensitive manner, so that the selection of partners itself does not engender conflict for example by seeming to favor a certain ethnic group or region. Beyond that, FABS will have to ensure that selected partners themselves have, or are helped to develop, the capacity to ensure their own operations are conflict sensitive.

Beneficiary selection The contractor will ensure that, for all work supported by this activity, beneficiary selection will be carried out in an open and transparent way. For example, in the selection of local grantees, it will be critical that FABS ensures that grantees represent their constituencies in a clear, transparent and inclusive fashion, and will themselves select beneficiaries of their own field activities in a transparent and equitable way.

FABS must ensure that standards are in place for communicating with communities, conducting free prior and informed consent (FPIC), ensuring conflict resolution mechanism are in place, and developing transparent and equitable governance systems to make sure that all of the community based activities, and activities which have an impact on communities, are carried out in a conflict sensitive manner.

Target areas under CARPE are firstly determined by biodiversity and sustainable landscapes concerns. However, within that context, FABS will need to be sure that beneficiary selection (including target areas) is done in an open and transparent manner. For example, CARPE might identify a particular area as having a high level of poaching, and target this area for community engagement. This might seem like favoritism to communities that are in lower priority areas, but FABS will have to, at least, make sure that reasons for selection of target areas are clear and transparent.

Engaging with government FABS, as other USAID activities in the DRC, will engage with government agencies in DRC with caution, particularly at the national level, because of the low level of legitimacy which the national government currently enjoys. This low level of legitimacy might encourage conflict around, for example, forest management interventions by the government that are seen as allowing for elite capture and are not fair and equitable to local communities. The emphasis of work that FABS does carry out with the government at a policy and regulatory level should therefore focus on ensuring that strong and transparent safeguard mechanisms are put in place.

CARPE’s policy engagement has already focused on ensuring that laws, policies and regulations include appropriate social safeguards, the inclusion of women, indigenous people and other disadvantaged groups, and provisions for FPIC when introducing new interventions with particular communities. FABS’s policy efforts should build on this work, and continue to ensure that conflict sensitivity is incorporated to the maximum degree possible. Mechanisms for conflict resolution such as public fora should be incorporated where appropriate.

FABS may support civil society organizations at national or local levels to hold government accountable for developing and implementing appropriate policies. There may be risks of backlash against this tactic, particularly with decreasing government legitimacy in the DRC. At this stage it is hard to know what form such backlash might take. The FABS contractor should ensure that sufficient consultations are made among local partners involved with such advocacy work to understand the risks, and develop mitigation strategies.

Development of Conflict Sensitivity Guidelines FABS may, if requested, assist USAID to develop design and implementation guidelines to ensure that all CARPE’s activities are conflict sensitive. Such guidelines may include conflict sensitivity in designing community based livelihood activities, and developing the governance structures that are key for forest management. FABS may also play a role in developing standards of conduct for ecoguards and protected area management, and such systems should place conflict sensitivity at the heart of such standards.

FABS staffing FABS will ensure that core staff have experience in assessing the potential of proposed activities to worsen conflict, and in ensuring that activity design is conflict sensitive.