Water, Cooperation and Peace in the Middle East
Publisher: American University School of International Service
Author(s): Christina Kehoe, Courtney Owen, Moses Jackson, Heather Speight, Joanna Fischer, Charles Christian, Erin Rosner
Date: 2013
Topics: Basic Services, Conflict Prevention, Cooperation, Gender, Renewable Resources
Countries: Israel, Palestine
Water, Cooperation, and Peace presents a multidisciplinary study of environmental peacebuilding. The paper’s primary objective is to assess the peacebuilding significance of a cooperative Israeli-Palesti-nian wastewater management initiative between the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (AIES), an Israeli-based environmental organization, and the Palestinian Wastewater Engineers Group (PWEG), a Palestinian-run organization working in the water and solid waste sector. While the study’s analytical framework is grounded in environmental peacebuilding theory, it is methodologically diverse. Peacebuilding significance is analyzed through a variety of lenses – including conflict analysis, economic well-being, discourse analysis, gender perspectives, network analysis, and environmental sustainability. Qualitative data is culled from participant field interviews with project beneficiaries, governmental actors, and NGOs. The methodological range allows for a multi-layered critique of the AIES/PWEG project. Our research reveals that the wastewater management initiative is building peace on a small scale, laying the groundwork for future peacebuilding, and creating opportunities for peacebuilding to continue. The initiative is not, however, thoroughly cultivating these opportunities. Israeli-Palestinian cooperation is not being explicitly promoted among project beneficiaries. While this has both positive and negative implications, it translates to a lack of wider public awareness, meaning that shared conceptualizations of peace are neither being encouraged within project communities nor shared with policy makers. At the organizational level, however, the AIES/PWEG partnership serves as an important model for how Israeli-Palestinian cooperation can occur.