Climate-induced conflict? The role of meteorological drought indicators for communal conflict prediction in North-Western Kenya

Master thesis (2023)

Authors

C.S. Gasten Civil Engineering & Geosciences

Contributors

R. Uijlenhoet Water Resources - CEG (mentor)
S. Pande Water Resources - CEG (graduation committee member)
V.J. Cortes Arevalo Policy Analysis - TPM (graduation committee member)
F. Sperna Weiland Deltares (graduation committee member)
Faculty
Civil Engineering & Geosciences, Civil Engineering & Geosciences
Copyright: © 2023 Caroline Gasten
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

29-08-2023

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Civil Engineering & Geosciences

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 spatial
unit 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 leads
to a greater role of drought indicators in conflict prediction and better overall predictions, needs to be assessed in future work.