Environmental issues are of mounting importance in international politics.
The present worldwide great concern with climate warming is a stark manifestation of this development. Ultimately coping with environmental problems is a struggle against nature.
Successful abatement requires some sort of intervention in an ecological system. In order to, say, slow down or eliminate climate warming, stop the depletion of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, or avoid damage of groundwater resources, instrumental technology has to be developed and applied. If policy makers do not have access to the necessary technical means to struggle with nature successfully, their political intentions and declarations to stop environmental degradation are futile.However, ecological conflict may also represent a struggle of man against man. Environmental problems are to a large extent anthropogenic. They are created by important human activities like industrial production, agriculture, mining, transportation or the heating of buildings. Ecological damage in one country is often caused by activities and emissions in another country. For example, “acid rain” in Scandinavia has to a high degree been the result of emissions of sulphur in, for example, Poland and Britain. Environmental issues typically contain an important distributive element pertaining to both positive and negative values. Pollution is a negative side effect when positive economic and social values are produced. In many cases, environmental issues contain the seed of conflict. The main question addressed in this chapter is whether governments and other international actors perform in a special way when they participate in the resolution of ecological conflicts. Does ecological conflict resolution have any typical and special features differing from conflicts in other issue areas?
This chapter proposes that the resolution of ecological clashes tends to have a distinctive character because environmental issues have special features conditioning how international actors perform in a conflict. The principal aim is to assess what the conditioning factors of ecological conflicts are (Sjostedt, 1993).
The ultimate objective is to clarify how special properties of environmental issues and ecological conflicts affect conflict resolution. Issue characteristics do not only have an impact on the motivation and preferences of conflicting parties. Other issue features than perceived values may also influence how conflicting parties perform and interact in international negotiation or other forms of conflict resolution. In some cases, the difficulty of simply understanding an environmental issue may call for the participation of scientists in the process. This development gives a somewhat different character to the process of conflict resolution than traditional diplomatic interaction (Kjellen, 2007). For example, the construction of consensual knowledge becomes more important in an inter-scientist dialogue.Negotiation on environmental issues has a number of typical or special properties that have been highlighted in the literature. One example is the tendency of environmental issues to attract the attention of NGOs and other transnational actors as well as the public opinion (Susskind et al., 2002). The approach of this chapter is to analyze and assess how such general characteristics of environmental issues may, firstly, color ecological conflicts and, secondly, constrain the performance of international actors in this type of context. The ultimate question addressed here is whether environmental issues have characteristics constraining how nations choose to fight or talk in an ecological conflict.