The Tonle Sap Initiative as Proto-Environmental Peacebuilding

The Tonle Sap Initiative, launched by the Asian Development Bank in the early 2000s, offers an overlooked case of proto-environmental peacebuilding. Developed in Cambodia’s fragile post-conflict context, it combined participatory resource management, multi-level coordination, and shared knowledge systemsKnowledge systems to address structural vulnerabilities in the Tonle Sap basin. Although not framed as peacebuilding, it operationalized mechanisms later formalized in environmental peacebuilding theory and shows that development practice was generating peace-enabling conditions before the field had a name. It illustrates how integrated environmental governance can function as peace infrastructure and broadens the field’s understanding of where environmental peacebuilding emerges and how it takes shape.