Toward a Typology of Environmental Cooperation in Postconflict Settings: The Case of Jordan and Israel

Abstract

Mismatches between natural systems and political boundaries often hamper environmental management and conservation efforts. As the number of transboundary environmental cooperation (TEC) initiatives increases, it becomes imperative to establish a systematic scale for analyzing such initiatives. In this article, we advance a TEC typology and apply it to the Israeli–Jordanian case. The typology includes categories of TEC initiatives and their placement on a transaction cost ladder. This typology allows for analyses of the organizational scale, societal influence, and duration of TEC initiatives. A total of sixty TEC initiatives were analyzed in an iterative process. TEC initiatives between Israel and Jordan were found largely to bear low transaction costs. The suggested typology provides an assessment tool to a large number of initiatives and a baseline for further in-depth investigation of the causal relations between environmental cooperation, peace, and conflict and may be applied to conflictual contexts at various stages.