What are the rights roots of poverty? How can rights help to secure livelihoods? The starting premise underpinning the four South Asian studies presented here is that livelihood security is an essential component of human security, and that security of rights to natural resources is fundamental to livelihood security for rural people who depend on those resources. Livelihood security is one of the first steps on the path leading out of poverty and conflict. The objective of this study was to test the existence of links between the concept of environmental security, the impact of rights regimes governing natural resources in South Asia, and the degree to which rights to natural resources?or the lack of them?are a factor in generating and mitigating conflict.
At the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, ?security? was defined in the context of the nation state, and emphasised securing borders from relatively easily identifiable, external military threats. By the early 1980s, attention re-focused on the non-military aspects of security and began to be broadened to encompass the environmental aspects of security, including quality of life, within a state. The mid-1990s saw a shift in the debate over the links between environment and security, from the idea of nation-state security from interstate conflict to a society-centred focus on human insecurity as a trigger for civil strife. A commentator making the connection between human insecurity and nation state security noted that when a state?s borders are secure, its citizens are not necessarily protected from the impacts of environmental degradation and that the resulting human insecurity can lead to instability at the state level. One examination of conflict suggests that environmental degradation triggers conflict if social fault lines can be manipulated in the struggle for power, and that violence often results from the combination of a weak state, environmental discrimination and a pre-existing history of conflict. This proposition is borne out by the four country studies that follow. The late 20th century debate over the links between environment and security produced a substantial body of theoretical work and case studies, most of them from a developed world perspective. Considerable research focused on conflict as a result of competition for scarce environmental resources and on the characteristics of competing groups. The research making the links between environment and security has been thoroughly critiqued and there is now theoretical and policy consensus that the links do exist. A series of case studies on environment, security and sustainable development in South Asia, involving all of the countries taking part in this study and published in 2003, broadened the environment/security debate beyond the original focus on resource scarcity and degradation, linking security directly to livelihoods. Drawing lessons from the case studies, the 2003 review concluded that the key to understanding the link between environment and security is not variables like scarcity or war, but more distantly related issues of institutions, institutional failure, and governance. Equally important from a policy perspective is the conclusion that the ultimate effect of human insecurity and environmental degradation tends to be political instability, which in turn sows the seeds for insecurity at the nation state level. The four country studies presented here support the conclusions of the 2003 study. They indicate that for the natural resource-dependent poor, ?scarcity? of resources?the trigger for conflict posited in the environment and security literature in the 1980s-1990s?is as likely to be a result of institutional failure as of actual resource degradation.
