Socio-environmental cooperation and conflict? A discursive understanding and its application to the case of Israel and Palestine

Abstract

The existing literature faces difficulties when accounting for the simultaneity of socio-environmental conflict and cooperation. We suggest that this puzzle can be solved by more recent constructivist works, which argue that conflictive or cooperative behavior is driven by discursively constructed interests, identities and situation assessments. Based on a literature review and field interviews, we analyze and compare the dominant water discourses in Israel and Palestine with the discourse dominant among the activists of a water cooperation project between communities from Israel and the West Bank. Our main result is that discourses are indeed crucial for understanding water-related conflict and cooperation. This finding highlights the relevance of constructivist approaches in the study of socio-environmental conflict and cooperation as well as of practices of bottom-up discursive conflict transformation.