ENVIRONMENT & SUSTAINABILITY
See, also,
Anders Ekbom. Jan Bojö. Poverty and Environment: Evidence of Links and
Integration into the. Country Assistance Strategy Process. ... Environment Group, Africa Region, World Bank.
Washington, DC, 1999
Cavendish: Empirical Regularities in the
Poverty-Environment Relationship of African Rural Households, WPS
99-21, Center
for the Studies of African Economies. Working Paper, 1999
Leif Ohlsson: Livelihood
Conflicts: Linking poverty and environment. as causes
of conflict, Environmental Policy Unit.
Sida, Stockholm, Sweden, 2000
Rural
Poverty and environment
Poverty
might be thought to lead to environmental degradation - survival is
most important, and with no other options, people will destroy their
capital to survive. (prevalent view in last part of 20th C. - e.g.
Brundtland, Our Common Future, 1987). Environmental degradation
especially likely in the face of high population pressure and landless
people. In which case, prevention of environmental degradation means
reducing population pressures and eliminating poverty, through
encouraging labour-intensive growth.
However, a closer look at the evidence and ground level responses
often reveals a very different picture. Frequently major environmental
degradation results from meso or macro level policy/soci-political
factors (forest clearance, new settlement policies, major dam building
etc.) "In other words, making the
poor the scapegoat for environmental deterioration merely lets off the
hook the commercial and state behaviours responsible for the really big
changes that result in switches in the dynamics of the interaction of
people with local environments." (Ellis, p.119). He cites
Broad, 1994, who in a study of the Philippines found that, in this case
(deterioration of crop land and water, associated with heavy commercial
logging of the watershed):
- the survival capabilities of the poor are directly threatened by
environmental degradation;
- the poor, especially (even only) if long-term residents, regard
themselves as having a permanent stake in their environment, and are
keen to protect it;
- in a politicised and organised civil society (the Philippines)
they can and do do something about this - protesting and taking civil
action.
"Highly visible
environmental changes (deforestation in Asia Amazon) have almost
nothing to do with rural poverty in developing countries, and a lot to
do with power struggles over valuable resources (tropical timber, oil,
valuable metals) between the large players in national and
international business and government. ...There are plenty of individual case
studies that offer the opposite evidence of poor people augmenting
their environments in order to maintain and enhance their future
survival capabilities." [see Ellis, p 121].
In short, Ellis concludes, the poor
have particularly strong incentives to diversify incomes because of
seasonality, risk and associated reasons (and hence reduce
their dependence on and degradation of the environment); yet they may the least able to do so due
to poverty in the assets needed to secure diversification options." (Ellis,
p 122).
Economic
factors and conservation
The continual search for
sustainable livelihoods would be expected to encourage households to
adopt conservation practices if at all possible - why wouldn't they? "In ordinary circumstances farmers do not
farm in ways which cause their yields to decline in successive years." Ellis,
referring to Netting, 1993, p 123.
However, if circumstances are such
that the opportunity cost of available labour to the household is high,
then non-routine conservation activities might be foregone in favour of
higher earnings to be had from (e.g.) distant off farm work.
Inflexibility in, e.g. gender division of work may also impede
otherwise sensible conservation practices.
Circumstances may also reduce the apparent value of conservation:
extreme poverty may put sheer survival ahead of conservation;
insecure land tenure might mean that the benefits of conservation do
not flow to those responsible for the conservation (the 'tragedy of the
commons' argument); highly uncertain future returns (associated with
civil breakdown); falling farm prices and expectation of low future
returns; highly unstable, and thus uncertain, future output and input
prices (or availabilities) and hence high risk of returns to
conservation. "It is not true
that the poor are intrinsically prone to despoil and degrade
their natural environments. It is much more common to
encounter poor farmers carrying out resource conservation
measures, such as ridging, terracing, rotations, mixed cropping,
tree planting, and so on, than the reverse. ..(However,) small farmers
are not always good custodians of the environment, either." Ellis,
p123/4. The major reasons for the lack of environmental care
typically turn out to be connected with a lack of a stake in the future
quality of the resource - land or natural environment.
Sustainability,
Livelihoods & Diversity
What does sustainability mean? Is it an objective,
if so for what? At what scale is it supposed to happen? Is it an
objectively defined condition or state, or a subjectively judged
aspiration?
- the capacity of a system
to reproduce
itself more or less indefinitely - to maintain or increase its
contribution to human welfare and well-being
- including resilience -the capacity to
recuperate from natural or human perturbations
- beyond these aphorisms, the
idea becomes more problematic: but can be tied back to the livelihoods
framework:
- preservation or (better)
enhancement of the asset base - but what levels of substitution are to
be allowed? And at what scale - local, regional, national, global?
- derived from ecological
considerations: ability to withstand stress (continual
relatively small and predictable forces having large cumulative
effects) and shocks:
unpredictable and large disturbances.
- In this case, diversity is
generally a good thing -increasing resilience, though individual
activities (species) may well prove un-resilient
- Human history and
experience seems to show that Shocks (large and unpredicted
disruptions) tend to be more damaging than stress to livelihoods, and
are as disruptive to apparently sustainable livelihoods as to those
highly sensitive to continual stress - so there is a major need for
safety nets to protect from such shocks.
- [However, this assertion
seems to depend on the capacity of human systems to evolve
progressively in adapting to continued stress - and not become subject
to the 'boiling frog syndrome' - put a frog in cold water and gradually
heat the water up, and the frog will fail to get out before it is too
late, in contrast to dropping the frog into already boiling water
- a shock which prompts immediate and life preserving action.]
"Subjective
definitions of sustainable development on the large scale are
susceptible to such wide variation in prioritisation and emphasis,
according to changing popular views on a wide range of development
topics, that they become practically vacuous for policy purposes." (Ellis,
p 127)
See, also, Dan Bromley, 2004, "The
Poverty of Sustainability: rescuing economics from platitudes", plenary
paper at the 25th Conference of International Agricultural Economists
(Durban, SA) - thought-provoking critique of both the popular concepts
of sustainability and of the conventional economics paradigm, from a
leading thinker on social systems.
Resource
Management Institutions and Livelihoods.
Institutions: the rules and social codes (written,
formal or unwritten customs and habits) governing access to resources
(assets). Private, individual (household) ownership (the
conventional market model), especially of land, is the exception
rather than the rule: "Access to land
for crop cultivation and grazing must be seen as a process, evolving in
social context, and one that involves re-negotiation between interested
parties concerning rights of access, and reinterpretation of previous,
current and future access patterns" (Ellis, p 132, referring to
Berry, 1997)
"In practice, a highly
complex array of tenancy arrangements abounds (e.g. in
the Javanese rural economy), including share cropping,
sub-tenancy, pawning, labour contracts, and many other land access
devices. These practices create a high degree of flexibility of land
access on the small scale by rural dwellers, but they also obscure
underlying patterns of land ownership, and they are prone to give a
false impression of the asset status of the rural poor." (Ellis,
p 132). ..Unwritten interchange of
resources, services and goods typifies rural livelihoods in rural
sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. ..(which) are seldom fixed ..
modified or abandoned when they no longer fulfill the livelihood role
which resulted in their adoption in the first place." (Ellis, p
132/3). The conventional economic view that private ownership, and a
formal land market in tenancy agreements, is the only 'climax' state of
the evolution of these practices, or that this is the only system which
guarantees efficient and effective resource allocation and
preservation, is denied by both observation and experience - many other
land tenure and access arrangements can and do work well.
Any land access institution has to be socially acceptable, otherwise it
will not work. Private ownership (or fixed tenancies) can:
- result in freezing land access and removing the critical
flexibility and adaptation potential;
- lead to costly and time-consuming dispute, and consequent
uncertainty
- exclude important groups and increase their vulnerability
(especially women)
- favour the rich at the expense of the poor
- lead to expensive administration and legal title systems, beyond
the capacity of poor regions or countries.
Place and Hazell (1993) examine the
effects of indigenous land right arrangements in Ghana, Kenya and
Rwanda, and conclude that these have no measurable effect on the uptake
of new technologies, and infer that the (popular) policy prescription
for land market reform and land titling are misplaced. Similarly,
common property is not always, even generally, subject to the tragedy
of the commons - people are more sensible than that, though their local
arrangements (institutions) can be severely disrupted or even destroyed
by outside intervention. It is the
state which allocates forestry concessions, determines the conditions
under which settlers can purchase or register private ownership of
land, promotes or does not promote frontier settlement, and encourages
or discourages devolved decision making capabilities at local levels."
(Ellis, p 135).
Conclusions:
Here (environment and livelihoods), as elsewhere, there are multiple processes at work
giving rise to many different tendencies and outcomes. (Ellis, p
135). But, there are some general conclusions:
- Sustainability of particular ecosystems (or particular sectors)
DOES NOT EQUAL sustainable livelihoods - complimentarities and
substitutions are important aspects of more inclusive systems;
- Diversity is an important feature of sustainable systems,
especially in conditions of high risks and uncertainties;
- The poor are no more likely to despoil their environments than
anyone else.
- Private property is not a general solution, and (especially in
sub-Saharan Africa) is widely discredited - [though the Zimbabwean case
shows that re-patriation of colonial land is not always a progressive
solution either].
- The particular contexts and circumstances matter - ignorance of
these will lead to the wrong policies and adaptations.
- "It is unclear, in the end,
what additional depth of understanding is provided by the idea of
sustainability over and above such concepts as: stability, resilience,
sensitivity, security and adaptability." "It is manifestly not
the case that sustainability of each successively larger and more
complex system depends on the prior sustainability of all its component
sub-systems."
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