Bridging the Worldview Gap in Addressing Climate-induced Conflicts

The policy advice Bridging the Worldview Gap in Addressing Climate-induced Conflicts
gives an answer to the question how the Dutch government and non-governmental
institutional actors can build a better relationship with stakeholders in Africa when they are working on climate change and climate-induced conflicts. Since climate change and climate-induced conflicts are a threat to personal, national
and international security, the field of climate adaptation and climate justice is booming.
Many Dutch institutional actors, like NGOs, such as Hivos and SNV, and research institutes, like Wageningen University and Research, are active in Africa. They work together in consortia. These consortia run projects that last for a couple of years and are aiming at improving the livelihood circumstances of the local people by helping them to become climate resilient. Improving these conditions not only helps the local people but also prevents people from radicalization and reduces the likelihood a conflict erupts (see section 1.3).
The research 'Invoking the Sacred: Towards Alternative Strategies Against Climate
Conflicts' shows that these institutional actors face clashes in worldview and religion1 when they are working together with local partners and local communities. This is due to the fact that they lack a good understanding of each other’s worldview and religion. As a consequence, they can overlook, or unintentionally worsen, conflicts in the region they are working in. They also can unintentionally cause a conflict, as explained in section 2.
Worldview and religion are important factors when it comes to understanding
people's way of thinking, acting and speaking. However, since people are embedded in
their own worldview and religion, it is difficult to understand a totally different worldview and religion. Hence this policy advice starts with explaining the concepts ‘worldview’ and ‘religion’ and shows how the Dutch worldview could differ from the African worldview.
The goal of this policy advice is to describe different strategies on how institutional
actors can take into account one’s own and the African worldview and religion when
designing, implementing, and evaluating a project that focuses on climate change
and climate-induced conflicts in Africa (see section 3). This will help these actors to build better relationships with their African stakeholders when running projects related to climate change.
Six solutions that help to reach the goal are mentioned in section 4. These are
ranked in section 5 and section 6 shows the best practice which is a combination of three solutions: ‘local office with mixed staff + expert in religious studies + working with an informant’.
This best practice is not applicable to all organizations, since they differ in size and
organizational structure. Hence best practices for NGOs and for research institutions are formulated in sections 6.2 and 6.3, respectively.
Section 7 provides a tool to determine which solutions are applicable to the
organization at hand. This section also provides an overview of the time and money these solutions cost.