Mountain resources and conflict instigating issues - Ethiopia

Degradation of natural resources is more a result of social conflicts, which have not been recognized, than of bio-physical conditions and actions on the environment, and hence there is a low rate of success in most of the projects set up to arrest environmental degradation. Unless it is recognized to what extent environmental degradation is a result of conflicts over resources utilities, the community will keep battling with the wrong issues and fail to make progress on the environmental resource management front. According to Carpenter and Kennedy (1988) environmental disputes are considered as a sub-sector of public disputes which come in all shape and sizes. These disputes could be between communities, or between community and decision makers or planners, or within a community. The underlying factor is that environmental conflicts are normally based on human needs and at the local level they tend to be over the allocation, distribution and management of natural resources. Goldblatt (1995) indicated how the conflicts that ensued in Kogelberg (South Africa), over a future dam, which threatened a special biodiversity park, reflected a clash of interests between one sector of the community and another. Conflicts are also recorded to have occurred between the ‘would be’ beneficiaries of the land and the government planners, since the communities were not in agreement with the resource management rules laid down by government. This further emphasized the intrinsic value of the land as seen by Goldblatt (1995), as well as the lack of proper negotiations over natural resources.