Climate, peace and security programming in the Arab States: Considerations for integrated programming in Jordan, Yemen, Iraq and Somalia

The link between climate change and peace and security is becoming increasingly evident as the world grapples with the consequences of a warming planet. Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities and conflicts, and acts as a catalyst for new ones, as competition for dwindling resources, such as water and land intensify. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events displace communities, straining host communities’ resources, leading to potential social unrest. Additionally, climate-induced food and water scarcity can speak conflict over access to these essential resources. Furthermore, climate change can amplify existing social and economic inequalities, which can contribute to instability and unrest. Understanding the climate, peace, and security linkages, and developing integrated policies and programmes across this nexus, is critical to ensuring global peace and security, and addressing humanitarian needs while supporting sustainable development. This brief - based on the outcomes of a stakeholder workshop held in Cairo in March 2023 - outlines several best practices and lessons learned for the design, implementation, and evaluation of integrated programming that builds resilience to both climate change and security risks

The lives of women in a land reclamation project: Gender, class, culture and place in Egyptian land and water management

This article links feminist political ecology with the academic debate about commoning by focusing on the gendered distribution of common pool resources, in particular land and water. The research is set in the context of a coastal land reclamation project in Egypt’s Nile Delta, in a region where conflicts over resources such as arable land and fresh water are intensifying. Drawing on recent literature on commoning, we analyse the conditions under which different groups of resource users are constrained or enabled to act together. The article presents three case studies of women who represent different groups using land and water resources along the same irrigation canal. Through the concepts of intersectionality, performativity, and gendered subjectivity, this article explores how these women negotiate access to land and water resources to sustain viable livelihoods. The case studies unpack how the intersection of gender, class, culture, and place produces gendered subject positions in everyday resource access, and how this intersectionality either facilitates or constrains commoning. We argue that commoning practices are culturally and spatially specific and shaped by pre-existing resource access. Such access is often unequally structured along categories of class and gender in land reclamation and irrigation projects

Envisioning a future for young Balinese : the move towards sustainability in secondary education

Sustainability has become a debate of international significance; it addresses how human development clashes with the finality of many resources on this planet and may threaten the well-being of future generations and ecosystems. The debate thus touches on the question of how humans interact with their environment - a prime concern of the discipline of geography. Behaving in line with sustainability involves changes in human self-conduct. Such change seems to require at least some awareness of and education about development and environmental processes. In fact, the importance of integrating sustainability in the domain of education has become a prominent one. Young people are often described as key players in implementing sustainability. Thus, international sustainability strategies view educating children and teenagers about sustainability as a prerequisite for future sustainable behaviour. In 2005 the United Nations [UN] Decade of Education for Sustainable Development commenced. In this context, scholars and educators discuss how to educate about sustainability. The UN suggests conveying an image of 'global cooperation' toward sustainable development in education whilst ensuring 'local relevance'. Yet, what ' local relevance' means and how it can be attained remains unclear. I argue that in efforts to implement sustainability education, both local debates of sustainability and local contexts of education should be examined. Otherwise, international sustainability education efforts may universalise ideas that are superficially portrayed as 'global' but that neglect local particularities. I take up the issue of sustainability education in Bali. On the Indonesian island, debates have emerged that propose ways to move forward amidst increasing environmental destruction and pollution as well as political and cultural change. These discussions sketch a 'Balinese way' of developing sustainably. I focus on how knowledge and debates around sustainability are engaged in secondary education in Bali's capital city Denpasar. Informed by poststructural theory, my thesis is that in order to locally implement sustainability in education, processes and institutional arrangements of power, governing, discourse and knowledge need to be assessed. Sustainability education is portrayed as a ' global cause', but it is the institutions and discourses articulated in local places that shape how sustainability can be implemented locally. In Bali, sustainability meets an educational climate shaped by curricular and political change nationally, regionally and locally. How sustainability is being integrated in this environment is one subject of this research. I examine how high school students in Bali learn about environment and sustainability. How is sustainability framed in Balinese teaching practice? How is sustainability knowledge engaged in teaching and learning at high schools in Denpasar? The research explores the roles created for students in sustainability education and the practices of self conduct these roles effect. Rather than providing a manual for implementing sustainability education, this work focuses on the conceptual issues around the project of marrying sustainability and education. I show that sustainable development cannot be treated as a neutral policy framework that is easily integrated into existing educational systems around the globe. My argument draws on theoretical discussions around discourse, power, govemmentality and subjectivity. I contend that sustainability and education operate as discourses that generate power in multiple ways. Both operate as governmentalities that employ different types of subjectivation. As sustainability 'meets' education, this involves the combination of two separate discursive and institutional contexts. How they 'fit together' depends on how both sustainability and education are institutionalised in local contexts. I also draw on theoretical debates in environmental education, participation, and action research. I discuss how geographical action research can be employed to research and foster discourse formation, and to explain and create subject positions in sustainability education. Empirically, I engaged an action research methodology. If young people are key stakeholders in sustainability, then it is critical that they take an active stance in the very debate of sustainability. This is not always the case in sustainability education. During nine months of fieldwork, I researched Balinese debates around sustainability, and Balinese approaches to sustainability education at secondary schools. Additionally, I conducted an interactive workshop program with several groups of high school students in Denpasar and Sanur. In these workshops, I experimented with educational practices to involve students in the formation of youth-based sustainability knowledges and debates. I researched what knowledges, themes, ideas and languages of sustainability, future and environment emerged in the interactive teaching approach of my action research. I was particularly interested how far a participatory research project in sustainability education would evoke agency among students to act towards more sustainable futures and would open spaces for new languages, roles and practices. Based on my research experience, I argue that understanding how discourse and power operate around sustainability education in place is instrumental to addressing sustainability in 'locally relevant' ways