Print Email Facebook Twitter Climate-induced conflict? The role of meteorological drought indicators for communal conflict prediction in North-Western Kenya Title Climate-induced conflict? The role of meteorological drought indicators for communal conflict prediction in North-Western Kenya Author Gasten, Caroline (TU Delft Civil Engineering & Geosciences; TU Delft Water Management) Contributor Uijlenhoet, R. (mentor) Pande, S. (graduation committee) Cortes Arevalo, V.J. (graduation committee) Sperna Weiland, F. (graduation committee) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Corporate name Delft University of Technology Programme Civil Engineering Date 2023-08-29 Abstract Recent Conflict Early Warning Systems have found little evidence of predictive power of drought indicators for conflict prediction. However, this may result from the context-specificity of the drought-conflict relationship, as stressed in the more recent climate-conflict literature.The present thesis assesses the local role of meteorological drought indicators for communal conflict prediction in North-Western Kenya, as a region where the narrative of resource-scarcity driven conflicts exists.A local-scale literature review on conflict dynamics followed by a fixed-effects logistic regression modelling approach stress the importance of the spatial dimension when analysing drought-conflict relationships. The role of cross-border transhumance in linking climate variability to conflict occurrence is stressed by the lower confidence intervals and more significant effects when moving the regression analysis from the spatial delimitation of administrative units to the agency level of ethnic groups.Differences in between ethnic groups in the obtained patterns of conflict behaviour in response to drought or water abundance are explained by their migratory behaviour along with a differentiated account of their relative drought vulnerability.The lack of any considerable role of drought in the subsequently built quasi-replication of the WPS Global Early Warning Tool, is therefore assigned to the mismatch of administrative units as the spatialunit of analysis in a pastoralist area, where herders frequently move their cattle to the other side of the border.It is advocated for an ethnic-group centered approach to predicting conflict, which relaxes assumptions on spatial containment of conflict events. However, whether this alternative model specification leadsto a greater role of drought indicators in conflict prediction and better overall predictions, needs to be assessed in future work. Subject drought indicatorsconflict predictionKenyaTurkanaMarsabitWest Pokottranshumancepastoralismcommunal conflict To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9cc9f346-451a-473c-8bc0-c00709ef9f1b Coordinates 2.73,35.95 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2023 Caroline Gasten Files PDF MasterThesis_CarolineGasten.pdf 11.7 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:9cc9f346-451a-473c-8bc0-c00709ef9f1b/datastream/OBJ/view