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

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

Gasten, Caroline (TU Delft Civil Engineering & Geosciences; TU Delft Water Management)

Uijlenhoet, R. (mentor)
Pande, S. (graduation committee)
Cortes Arevalo, V.J. (graduation committee)
Sperna Weiland, F. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Civil Engineering

2023-08-29

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.

drought indicators
conflict prediction
Kenya
Turkana
Marsabit
West Pokot
transhumance
pastoralism
communal conflict

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Student theses

master thesis

© 2023 Caroline Gasten