Drought, Resilience, and Support for Violence: Household Survey Evidence from DR Congo

Abstract

The effects of climate variability and change on security are debated. While this topic has received considerable attention in both policy circles and academia, the microlevel pathways and conditions under which climatic shocks increase conflict risks are poorly understood. We suggest that household resilience provides one key to understanding these relationships. Using novel household survey data from two conflict-affected regions in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, we study variation in the support for violence related to reported exposure to drought and resilience metrics. Using comprehensive multifaceted objective and subjective indicators of resilience, we find that less resilient respondents who report having experienced drought and associated losses are more likely to be supportive of the use of political violence. In contrast, our findings suggest that there is no general association between reporting drought exposure and support for violence.

Security implications of climate change: A decade of scientific progress

“…However, recent years have seen a rapid growth in survey-based analysis of individuals’ perceptions and actions during times of heightened environmental stress (e.g. Detges, 2017; Vestby, 2019; von Uexkull, d’Errico & Jackson, 2020). Another actor-based approach has been to focus on ethnic groups combining spatial data on settlement patterns with remote sensing-derived climate and socio-economic information (von Uexkull et al, 2016).…”

Gender in the Climate-Conflict Nexus: “Forgotten” Variables, Alternative Securities, and Hidden Power Dimensions

“…In other words, gender should inform the sort of conflict and security that is considered when examining the security implications of climate change. Climate-conflict research has diversified its focus in recent years (Koubi, 2019), which is no longer limited to civil war, but also includes social unrest (Koren et al, 2021), peaceful protests (Ide et al, 2021), and support for the use of violence (von Uexkull et al, 2020). This is considering that protests and radical positions can pave the way for more intense forms of (violent) conflict.…”

Resilience and Conflict: Evidence from Mali

“…The Resilience Capacity Index (RCI) is estimated with the Structural Equation Model (SEM) combining the four calculated pillars and two food security indicators (the Food Consumption Score (FCS) and the Food Consumption Expenditure (FE)). RIMA has been widely employed in conflict-specific resilience analysis (see [9,36] in the context of several impact evaluations of resilience projects (e.g., [37,38]); it is also widely adopted as a quantitative measure of Resilience capacity was measured using the FAO Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) methodology [35]. Variables were created considering the following four pillars: (i) productive and non-productive assets (AST); (ii) access to essential services (ABS); (iii) social safety nets (SSNs); and (iv) the adaptive capacity (AC).…”

“…The Resilience Capacity Index (RCI) is estimated with the Structural Equation Model (SEM) combining the four calculated pillars and two food security indicators (the Food Consumption Score (FCS) and the Food Consumption Expenditure (FE)). RIMA has been widely employed in conflict-specific resilience analysis (see [9,36] in the context of several impact evaluations of resilience projects (e.g., [37,38]); it is also widely adopted as a quantitative measure of resilience. Therefore, the results from this study can be easily compared with earlier work in the humanitarian context.…”

“…The other two critical variables of the analysis are those related to the conflict. For "exposure to the conflict", while there are many ways to measure exposure to conflict, this paper builds on previous work [36,39] to detect the "immediate and self-reported response" to violence and conflict by inquiring if and to what extent the household had been exposed to or had witnessed violence. Usually, participation in violence has been investigated through survey experiments or questions about the broad support for violence.…”