Dr. Mishkat Al-Moumin on the Importance of Women & the Environment to Sustainable Peace

Summary: “I believe if you acknowledge women as primary users of environmental resources, if you draft the policy with women [at] the table, offering you their unique perspective and unique feedback, you’re going to have a more stable policy. A policy that gets implemented,” says Mishkat Al-Moumin, scholar in residence at the Environmental Law Institute, in this week’s Friday Podcast, and second in a series of interviews recorded at the First International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. Al-Moumin served as Iraq’s first Minister of Environment in the Iraqi Interim Government in 2004. She had previously served as one of the first female professors at Baghdad University’s College of Law. “That might sound like kind of an easy summary. But in reality, being accepted at the law school was really not that easy,” she says. Navigating personal and professional challenges as both a woman and a single mother in Iraq led Al-Moumin to understand the importance of recognizing the linkages between women and the environment. While she ran the Ministry of Environment with a budget of just 7 million dollars, Al-Moumin continued advocating for women’s inclusion and participation. “The ministry had the second lowest budget throughout the cabinet,” she says. And they were tackling massive environmental challenges, from the extreme degradation of marshlands to the pollution from years of war. Juggling these issues taught Al-Moumin about conflict in a very personal way. In 2004, she survived an attack on her life, in which four of her personal bodyguards were killed. Shortly thereafter, she applied and was accepted to Harvard University’s Kennedy School, where she was able to examine her on-the-ground experiences through a broader lens. Her research continues to focus on the conflict-environment-law nexus, with a particular focus on the Middle Eastern context. “If environmental policies are designed in a way that deprives certain people from access to an environmental resource, then a conflict will arise,” says Al-Moumin. In Iraq, conflicts are viewed as having either a religious or ethnic lens. The environmental dimension is generally ignored, she says. This is compounded by the fact that most Middle Eastern policy prohibits certain actions without accounting for how particular resources will be managed. In Iraq, for example, timber is prohibited from being cut down without a legal framework for sustainable harvesting. This causes a struggle for everyday citizens, as they are likely to be shut out of certain resources. Women are particularly impacted, as the laws are written by men and tend to ignore women’s roles in natural resource use and collection. In general, Al-Moumin says, Middle Eastern policy tends to look to history for answers to present-day challenges. Laws from the Ottoman Empire still persist, she says. But meeting the challenges of tomorrow requires forward thinking—and greater empowerment of every citizen, regardless of gender. “It’s the government’s job to solicit people’s opinions and open up venues for them to participate. Otherwise, you know,” says Al-Moumin, “that disconnect will continue forever and violence will be the answer [every] time we have a problem.”