Climate Security in the Horn of Africa: Environmental Stress, Governance Failure, and Pastoralist Violence

This policy brief examines the critical nexus between climate-induced environmental stress and escalating intercommunal violence among pastoralist groups in Ethiopia, arguing that environmental change is a primary but non-exclusive driver of insecurity. Its objective is to analyse the specific governance failures that mediate this climate-conflict relationship, moving beyond deterministic narratives. The approach employs a mixed-methods design, integrating spatial analysis of climate data with qualitative fieldwork including interviews and focus group discussions conducted in conflict-prone regions. The core findings demonstrate that recurrent droughts and water insecurity directly undermine pastoralist livelihoods, forcing migration and competition. However, this ecological pressure is catalysed into violence by systemic governance deficits, including the historical marginalisation of pastoralist communities, inequitable distribution of drought response resources, and a development bias favouring sedentary agriculture. The study's central contribution is its empirical identification of these governance failures as the essential mechanism transforming resource competition into conflict. Consequently, the practical implication is that climate security policy must be fundamentally reconfigured to prioritise transparent, inclusive resource governance and the institutional integration of climate adaptation with conflict prevention, addressing the roots of vulnerability to mitigate conflict risk effectively.