The School of Law, through the Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC), is implementing a Project entitled: “Charcoal Conflict in Climate Change’s Decarbonisation Dilemmas: Knots of Livelihood, Nutrition, Communities, Gender, Migration and Energy in East Africa”. This four year Project (2023-2027) has been funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry and it is being implemented in collaboration with the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC) at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and St. Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT), in Mwanza, Tanzania. The overall goal of the project is to understand how global climate change mitigation policies (decarbonisation) condition charcoal politics and socio-economic dynamics in energy-stressed countries down to local levels, and how to manage these conflicts. Greening initiatives in countries such as Uganda and Tanzania are often supported by government, private actors or donors. However, top-down approaches risk exacerbating existing power relations and marginalizing vulnerable communities, limiting the viability of centralized and ‘Global North centred’ mitigation and energy solutions. This project adds to existing research by focusing on the following outcomes: Identifying local processes of transition in Uganda and Tanzania to capture the impact of changes on livelihoods, gender roles, migration, nutrition, health and social stability; mapping legal and political frameworks in energy policies, forestry management and development strategies to identify gaps as well as viable pathways to scale up; locating the analysis of local transitions in the context of global climate change policies; identifying potentially destabilizing effects of donor-driven initiatives and carbon compensation; identifying transitional models and cataloguing strategies for addressing decarbonisation dilemmas.
The project is supporting one PhD in Uganda and one PhD in Tanzania with a full scholarship. Following a highly competitive and rigorous selection process, Mr. Emmanuel Kaweesi emerged as the successful candidate to pursue an LLD on the Ugandan side. The Ugandan PhD will explore legal and policy frameworks on charcoal and decarbonization dilemmas and their impact on social and economic rights in Uganda and Tanzania. The Tanzanian PhD will explore social conflict in the charcoal to clean energy transition.
