ABSTRACT: This work is concerned with the tactic of using environmental cooperation as a conflict transformation instrument. This is an optimistic approach which suggests that environmental cooperation is an independent variable that may positively influence politics due to it retaining strong peacebuilding potentials. This article shows how ideas about the relationship between environment, ecology and conflicts has evolved and changed over time and discusses seven theoretical and methodological problems of the approach. The problems and weaknesses of the idea to use environmental cooperation as a conflict transformation instrument, discussed in the text, moderate the optimism originally connected with the approach. It seems that the transformative peacebuilding potential of environmental cooperation remains, at least, unclear.
Keywords: environmental cooperation, conflict transformation instruments, environmental peacebuilding, cooperation