—  Feature Report

When the Land Runs Dry,
Who Decides Who Stays?

A Mercy Corps report from Uganda and Kenya's most climate-stressed borderlands argues that how communities negotiate over water and pasture may matter more than the rain itself.

In This Issue

In the borderlands where northeastern Uganda meets northwestern Kenya, the rains no longer arrive the way they used to. And when they do come, people fight over what's left.

The Karamoja–Turkana corridor has long been one of Africa's hardest places to govern — a semi-arid stretch of rangelands and dry riverbeds where pastoralist communities have moved with their cattle for generations, following seasonal water and pasture across a border that colonial mapmakers drew through the middle of a single ecological zone.

Now, new findings from Mercy Corps' Climate Change Leaders Advancing for Peace (CCLAP) program add empirical weight to what field practitioners have long suspected: climate change isn't just stressing livelihoods here. It is restructuring the conditions under which violence either happens — or doesn't.

Funded by the Austrian Development Agency and implemented across Uganda's Kotido and Kaabong districts and Kenya's Turkana West, CCLAP is one of the most carefully documented efforts to integrate climate adaptation and conflict prevention into a single framework. Its findings have implications well beyond this corridor.

Finding 01

Climate Change Doesn't Pull the Trigger — But It Loads the Gun

A persistent temptation in policy discourse is to draw a straight line from drought to violence. The evidence doesn't support that — and CCLAP is careful to say so. What climate change does is stress the systems through which communities normally manage competition: governance structures, trust between groups, access to shared water points and grazing corridors.

It's not the heat that starts the fight. It's the breakdown of the arrangements that kept the peace when resources were manageable.

Finding 02

Mediation as Infrastructure, Not Intervention

The program's most practical innovation is treating community mediation not as an emergency response to violence, but as standing governance infrastructure — something that needs to be built and maintained before the crisis, not deployed during it.

CCLAP facilitated Natural Resource Sharing Agreements (NRSAs) across the Uganda-Kenya border, including arrangements for the Turkana-Karamoja grazing corridors. Critically, these went beyond specifying who can graze where — they also ensured access to shared health centers and markets that lie across ethnic and administrative divides.

The report is also candid about limits. The same forum that resolved corridor access failed to settle a localized Ik-Turkana conflict in the Nawontos green belt. The lesson: regional agreements need to be nested within community-specific processes that can address grievances corridor deals leave untouched.

Finding 03

Inclusion Is a Function Problem, Not Just a Values Problem

The report makes a pointed argument: it is not enough to ensure women and youth are "represented" in governance processes. Without real decision-making power, they cannot contribute what they actually know — and the agreements produced tend to reflect whoever already holds power.

This is a functional argument. Women are frequently the primary managers of water and firewood collection, traveling further as resources contract. They have direct, granular knowledge of where resource pressure is intensifying. Excluding that knowledge makes the governance worse. The gendered impacts CCLAP documents — elevated domestic violence during climate shocks, girls' school dropout rates, heightened risks during resource collection — are not separate from the conflict prevention agenda. They are the same issue.

Finding 04

Why Standard Metrics Miss What's Actually Working

The dominant evaluation logic for peacebuilding counts incidents of violence, assuming that if a program is working, the numbers drop. CCLAP's evidence suggests this is a lagging indicator.

Before violent incidents decline, something else changes first: governance quality improves, inter-community trust grows, dispute resolution capacity strengthens. These are the mechanisms through which violence is eventually prevented — and they are invisible to incident-counting frameworks during the window in which most donor evaluations are conducted. For funders, this matters: Results Frameworks that gate continued investment on incident reduction within 24–36 month project cycles may systematically defund the interventions that are working.

Topics

Climate & Conflict Peacebuilding East Africa Natural Resource Governance Pastoralism Gender & Climate