Environmental diplomacy as a tool to enhance the prospects of human security in the Nile Basin initiative
Abstract
The greatest threats to security for many people in the world today have a domestic connotation especially poverty, in equity of resources and other ~reats that transcend international borders. Identifying these new threats and other state and individual vulnerabilities and providing the skills and the resources to analyze and address them has become the central objective of efforts towards rethinking security.
This study set out to analyze the concept of environmental diplomacy as a tool to enhance the prospects of the achievement of human security whose main referent is the individual and not the state as is the norm with national security. The role played by the Nile Basin initiative among the Nile riparian states through its environmental diplomacy approaches was keenly analyzed.
The core objectives of this study were to examine the correlation between environmental diplomacy and human security and to examine the relationship between human security and the equitable resource distribution within the Nile basin with a keen interest on the Nile basin initiative. Based on the findings the study recommends that advancing a common policy on enhanced regional trade and investment, environmental and economic policy, climate change and energy resource distribution, designing indices to facilitate the measurement and assessment of sustainable natural resource management and equitable utilization of the Nile Basin resources indeed will go along way into fostering and nurturing the gains towards the attainment of human security in the Basin through peaceful diplomatic methods with environmental diplomacy playing a key role towards this goal.
Publisher
University of Nairobi, Kenya