The Climate-Governance-Conflict Nexus

Abstract

What is climate change’s effect, when interacted with government effectiveness, on armed conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa? This paper examines the interaction between climate stressors and governance capacity, and their compounding effects on conflict frequency and intensity, by theorizing climate change as a vulnerability amplifier. It expands upon current threat multiplier literature and disentangles the specific pathways through which climate change interacts with national characteristics and the mechanisms, such as government capacity, that mediate these interactions. This paper contends that climate disasters paralyze inefficient and inert systems that lack systematic, responsive institutions to shock events. Drawing from the ACLED and EM-DAT databases, the study aggregates climate disaster and conflict data at the country-year level through GIS-based location matching. This paper highlights that climate change’s amplifying effects on conflict frequency and intensity are more pronounced at lower levels of state capacity and diminish as state capacity increases.