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Environmental Security in East Asia: Defining a Common Agenda
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Abstract
In Chapter 2, Lorraine Elliott proposes a framework for theorizing about the relationship between environmental scarcities and regional (in)security in the region. Environmental decline, resource depletion and unsustainable development complicate the security challenges facing Pacific Asian states in a post-Cold War world. A traditional security framework, concerned primarily with territorial integrity and the potential for inter-state tension and conflict, is, according to Elliott, inadequate and inappropriate as a conceptual and policy tool for understanding and defining appropriate foreign policy responses to environmental security. This is particularly true because Pacific Asian conceptions of security have always perceived economic development, political stability and social welfare as important as¡Xor even more important than¡Xmilitary power in securing national interests. As Elliott points out, extensive regional interest in the conceptual and policy implications of this changing security agenda has been evidenced most prominently in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum's attention to "comprehensive security," and in the attention paid to these issues in the Track Two Council for Security Cooperation Asia Pacific. Elliott proposes a security framework that accounts for insights offered by both liberal and human-security paradigms.
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Following this discussion, Elliott continues with an analysis of environmental change in Pacific Asia in the context of her security framework. Environmental change in the region is no longer (if it ever was) a national or sub-national problem. Many of the problems are now so widespread as to be justifiably defined as common, shared or regional concerns. In such cases, the imperatives for regional cooperation as a foreign policy strategy blur the distinction between national and international environmental policy. Further, many of these problems are transboundary in either causes or consequences, thus ensuring that environmental security policy is bound up with the foreign policies of individual states in the region. With this in mind, Elliott assesses a possible repertoire of environmental security policies, premised on the proposition that a non-traditional security problem like the environment requires non-traditional responses. Elliott argues that the conditions for stability and peace in Pacific Asia rest on preventive security responses that address the social and economic drivers of environmental decline.
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As Chapter 2 highlights, environmental changes and resource scarcities in Pacific Asia pose challenges for the security of the region's states and peoples. Over the last two decades, governments inside and outside the region have started to view adverse environmental changes as threats to their national security.