Environmental Security and Disaster Management in South Asia ...

DRAFT: NOT FOR ATTRIBUTION PAPER PREPARED FOR DISCUSSION AT NBR-BEI WORKSHOP ON “NON-TRADITIONAL SECURITY CHALLENGES IN SOUTH ASIA: 2025” November 21-22, 2009, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Environmental Security and Disaster Management in South Asia: Initial Thoughts on Implications for the United States Stacy D. VanDeveer

Stacy D. VanDeveer is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire. His research interests include international environmental policymaking and its domestic impacts, the connections between environmental and security issues, and the role expertise in policy making. He has received fellowships from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He has received research funding from the US National Science Foundation, the European Union, and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA), among others. In addition to authoring and co-authoring over fifty articles, book chapters, working papers and reports, he co-edited several books, including Changing Climates in North American Politics (MIT Press, 2009); Comparative Environmental Politics (MIT Press, forthcoming); Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics (Ashgate, 2009); EU Enlargement and the Environment (Routledge, 2005); and Saving The Seas (Maryland Sea Grant Press, College Park, MD, 1997). In 2007-2008 he was On-site Director of the UNH London Program at Regents College and he is currently Director of the MA Program in Political Science at UNH.

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Implications for the United States Stacy D. VanDeveer

Introduction Because this paper is written without advantage of responding to a thematic paper, this initial response paper draft is organized (as requested) into rather general sections on (i) the implications for the United States of Non-Traditional Security (NTS) concerns related to environmental security and disaster management in South Asia and (ii) looking toward 2025. Rather than briefly outlining an empirical case or focusing on a small set of issues, the first “implications section” briefly outlines a framework through which US policymakers’ priority concerns, as related to NTS, may be viewed by workshop participants. The second, shorter section draws a few implications for 2025 from the initial framework and background information. This draft paper is (self) consciously US-centric, as this is how I have interpreted my author guidelines. Implications for the United States The US as a Status Quo Power with Global Interests: The first point with which to start is that the existing US global power position, and its security and economic interests in the South Asian region, tend to yield a US preference for regional stability and the maintenance of the US position in the region. In other words, NonSecurity Traditional (NTS) challenges are most likely to be seen as priority issues for US policymakers when they are perceived to threaten regional stability or the US power position in the region. This general expectation and the framework that flows from it stems, as Pirages notes, from the traditional realist thinking that often dominates US foreign and security policymaking in South Asia. Such a view yields a small number of situations or general categories of greatest concern to US policymakers: Threats of International Conflict: US security analysts, such as those affiliated with the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and its associated intelligence bodies or analysts within the military academies and academic institutions have focused analysis most often on NTS issues with the highest potential for inciting international military conflicts, border incursions and non-violent inter-state conflicts which can impede US policy goals. So, for example, concerns about international water management institutions between India and its neighbors are often mentioned. Threats to State Stability and Social Order: State failures to manage large scale humanitarian disasters have the potential to undermine state legitimacy, enhance social cleavages and engender greater social conflict. Extensive US government research analysis since the 1990s demonstrates that failed states have rarely served to advance US security or economic interests. Increased Hostility to key US military and economic facilities and interests: Where NTS challenges are perceived to impact existing or planned US military facilities and infrastructure or centers of US economic interests and investments, they will receive greater policymaker attention in Washington. Concerns about “Threat Multiplication”: Given the extensive list of concerns and challenges for US policymakers now associate with Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, it remains unlikely that NTS issues on their own are likely to rise to the top tier of issues in the near or medium term. The partial exception to this rule is likely to be any trend or development which is seen to multiply or enhance existing threats and/or social cleavages in the region. PROPRIETARY: NO DISTRIBUTION WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF ASIAN RESEARCH



For example, declines in agricultural productivity in part of the region, reductions in freshwater water availability and/or a possible increase in draught and storm frequency or intensity would have implications for US security and economic interests when such developments are perceived to impact the three points above (international conflict risk, state stability and order, or hostility to the US). Risks of Climate Geopolitics and Climate Populism: By now it is well known that the US is the single largest national contributor to climate change, historically. The country also has a lengthening history of uncooperative behavior at the international level, around climate change mitigation issues, and a poor domestic record at curbing its annual emissions growth. In other words, US economic growth, policies and lifestyles have contributed substantially to global climate change and its many negative implications. Nor has the US, to date, been forthcoming with financial support for international climate change adaption. These facts yield an inescapable conclusion that US policies and the US society has externalized (globalized) much of the costs of US fossil fuel use and material consumption onto much of the developing world, where a substantial fraction of the costs of climate change will be accrued without many of the short and long term benefits associated with economic growth in the OECD countries. This situation increases the risks that the US can/will be blamed for causing the accelerating list of environmental changes and their related social and economic costs associated with global climate change. From a US policymaking perspective, this yields at least two forms of political risks: Issue Linkage Demands: As the ramification of climate change accumulate and accelerate, policymakers in effected states will see increased incentives to link their needs for mitigation and adaption assistance – and their desire for side-payments of various kinds – to US policy priorities in order to gain leverage in relations with the US. In other words, even if US security policy in the region remains focused on anti-terrorism efforts and regional stability for some time (and economic policy remains focused on liberalized trade), increased negative impacts of climate change across the region may result in a greater willingness on the part of some regional actors to link environmental and human security issues (and assistance for disaster management and preparedness) to issues of greater concern to US policymakers. Domestic (anti-American) Climate Change Populism: If climate change ramifications accelerate and become widely perceived to, in some large part, the fault of the United States domestic political actors in the region (those in democracies and those in non-democracies) are likely to see increased incentives to enhance and utilize anger at the US. Such movements have the potential to make international cooperation with US policymakers more difficult or to increase hostility to US interests in the region more broadly. Looking toward 2025 Looking into the future is always worrying for a status quo power, but possessing military and economic power tends to yield the baseline policy goal of maintaining ones power position. All evidence suggests that South Asia, like the rest of the globe, will play host to a larger human population, with greater economic inequality, within changing global, regional and local climates and weather patterns. Long standing disaster threats (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and draughts) are likely to either persist or worsen as growing populations and PROPRIETARY: NO DISTRIBUTION WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF ASIAN RESEARCH



economies seek greater public sector capacity to manage environmental security and disaster risks. If such capacities remain highly asymmetrical in the region (or such inequities worsen), the region’s states may be tempted to try to harden their borders to problems on the other side. For US policymakers, ongoing global environmental change holds a growing risk that the US will be blamed for negative/catastrophic impacts of climate change, and/or seen as in increasingly wealthy government and society that remains indifferent to the harms its actions cause in the region. If South Asian political and economic leaders leverage some of the dynamics outlined above, greater US attention might be focused on building regional institutions and domestic state capacities. So, for example, the addition of US financial resources might afford opportunities to enhance SAARC effectiveness by combining internationally accepted poverty alleviation goals with climate change mitigation and adaptation needs. More specifically, driving investment toward renewable and lower carbon energy development and toward the infrastructure needed to transport, trade and utilize such power offer illustrative opportunities, but many more no doubt exist. Regional institutions can enhance, but not replace, state public and private sector capacity. A long history of development assistance and its analysis demonstrated that international institutions – global and regional – can help to build and improve public sector governance capacities (Sagar, 2000; Sagar and VanDeveer, 2005; VanDeveer & Sagar, 2005; Carmin & VanDeveer, 2005). They cannot, however, substitute for dysfunctional state and local institutions. This view suggests that US engagement in regional institution building should focus, in large part, on enhancing capacities in the region’s states and in its private sector to meet challenges such as infectious diseases, migration, climatic and weather related disasters (as well as earthquake and tsunami preparedness). As Pirages argues, Realist international relations generally offer few paths toward more ecologically sustainable politics and societies. However, this does not mean that either US or South Asian leaders are likely to part with it (easily or soon), or that are not wise to use it to their advantage. If US policymakers persist with a generally realist focus on security concerns in the region, with some accompanying liberal internationalist goals, South Asian leaders are likely to see increasing incentives to link issues of long-standing or growing importance to their societies to those of greatest importance to US policymakers and private sector leaders. Herein lay opportunities to build shared interests and institutions.

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