institutional innovation, development and environmental management: an ‘administrative trap’...

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 9 , 2 9 4 7 (1989)

Institutional innovation, development and environmental management: an ‘administrative trap’ revisited. Part I.

RANDALL BAKER

Indiana University

SUMMARY

In the first section of this two-part study the author considers the relationship between administrative structure and the persistence of broad ecological problems. This is set in the context of the issues leading to, and identified at, the Stockholm Conference on the Environment in 1972. It is evident that, despite all the interest and effort, the main parameters of environmental well-being show that the situation remains at least as bad. The case is made that there is a considerable dysfunction between the nature of ecological problems and the ‘problem-solving’ structures within the public arena. This dysfunction is here termed the ‘administrative trap’. This section concludes by reviewing three areas in which administrative innovation resulted very largely from the Stockholm initiative: Global Conferences and their attendant Global Institutions; Ministries of the Environment; and ‘reforms’ in the legislative apparatus.

All [the members of the Club of Rome] are united, however, by their overriding conviction that the major problems facing mankind are of such complexity and are so interrelated that traditional institutions and policies are no longer able to cope with them-nor even come to grips with their full content (Meadows, 1971, pp. 9-10).

PERSPECTIVE

Over 10 years ago, in an Ecologist article entitled ‘The administrative trap’ (Baker, 1976), I explored the relationship between broad ecological problems and the structure of the public administrative systems attempting to cope with them. Without wishing to repeat the content of that paper here it would be useful to summarize its main contentions. Many of the environmental problems achieving major status then, as now, were of a broad-ranging and sometimes global type with a high level of interactive complexity including both physical and social elements. The decision-making and implementation characteristics of the public sector were seen as sectoral (functionally oriented in a narrow sense), vertically organized with little horizontal linkage and frequently lacking in a capacity to provide the necessary social analysis of problems with strongly physical manifestations (Figure 1). Such structures, it was argued, would tend to disaggregate ecological problems, recognize and treat symptoms as problems, and generally remain inadequate to the task of dealing with broad ecological issues (Figure 2). Dr William J. Siffin has

Professor Baker is in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA.

027 1-2075/89/010029-19$09.50 0 1989 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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POLICY GOALS

LEGISLATION POPULAR

ENDORSEMENT

STRATEGIC AND

ENABLING

IMPLEMENTATION

f-------HORIZONTAL LINKAGE WEAK ----- i - INNOVATIONS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION

A MINJSTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT B PLANS AND PROGRAMMES C POLICY, LEGISLATION AND LOBBYING D FOREIGN AID PROJECTS E UNACTION F REGIONS AND PROBLEM AREAS

Figure 1. A typical sectoral model of administration.

described this in a personal communication (March 1987) in the following terms: ‘The “problem” actually becomes what is specified in the solution-seeking effort, no matter what wondrous words and computations preceded the action.’

Since many of the poorer developing countries, which frequently suffer most acutely and directly from environmental decline, rely heavily on aid and loans for their capital or ‘development’ budgets, the relationship between the local administrations and the aid donors and lenders was seen as critical in understanding this aspect of change. In general the aid projects resulted from requests put forward from, and through, the disaggregated structure, and this tended to reinforce and perpetuate the problem. This phenomenon I termed the ‘administrative trap’.

In that study the case used was that of rangeland deterioration, which is a fairly typical broad ecological problem involving soil erosion, desertification and water resources among other things. I did not identify the ‘case study’ and, indeed, it was not specific to any one country. What was interesting, as it turned out, was the number of people who wrote to me subsequently claiming to have identified

Institutional Innovation and Environmental Management 3 1

LARGELY .-.-. BOUNDARY OF ECOLOGICAL PROBLEM . A &

P NEGLECTED __ SECTORAL BOUNDARY (DEFINED BY AOMlNlSTRATlVE DIVISIONS)

Figure 2. The administrative trap: a sectoral approach to ecological problems.

'country x ' . That at least was a reassurance that the argument related to a widespread phenomenon and, to some extent, validated the hypothesis.

In this paper the intent is to look at the intervening years and examine the ways in which innovations in the administrative dimension have been attempted, how successful they have been and to what extent the problem remains. The starting point would be to examine how far the ecological problem remains as a measure of how successful the period since Stockholm (1972) has been in dealing with the issues crystallized at that time. In the years following Stockholm there was a veritable tidal wave of international activity to focus attention on the global environmental issues highlighted by several international conferences under the auspices of the United Nations: Population (1974), Food (1974), Habitat (Shelter) (1976), Desertification (1977), Water (1977), Science and Technology for Develop- ment (1979) and Energy (1981). Literally thousands of papers have been written, dozens of institutions created and millions of dollars expended in studies, salaries and projects. Yet, if we return to desertification, with which the original paper was concerned, Harold Dregne wrote in 1985: 'The process of desertification is

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accelerating in the rangelands of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South America and is continuing as before in North Africa and West Asia’ (Dregne, 1985). Science, quoting the 1987 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reported: ‘Not a single country has put into operation a national plan to halt soil degradation . . . of the six regional projects proposed by the Nairobi conference [on desertificationl-nly two are being implemented’ (Science, 1987, p. 963). Mustapha Tolba, executive head of UNEP, the body charged with implementing the anti-desertification Plan of Action, stated: ‘Despite all efforts, however, there is no doubt that the process of desertification is accelerating, with millions of hectares of arable land being lost each year’ (Tolba, 1982), p. 22; my emphasis). The Economist summarized the position as follows:

Six million hectares, an area equal almost to the size of Ireland, turns to desert every year. Ten million hectares, an area almost as big as Kentucky, of tropical forests is cut down every year. Each year, too, soil erosion often caused by deforestation, diminishes the world stock of agricultural land by 20 million hectares, an area about half the size of Japan (Economist, 28 March, 1987).

It could simply be that the environmental problem is too big, too misunderstood or that it is too early to judge results. However, the same Science article goes on to say: ‘Ten years later, the causes of desertification remain unaddressed . . . the tools to bring it to an end lie around us unused’. The contention of this article is that the administrative dimension still remains inadequate to the nature of the problem. UNESCO, in a study on Trends in Research and the Application of Science and Technology for Arid Zone Development (UNESCO, 1979) clearly demonstrated that the scientific or technical limitation was not the constraint. Instead, two main structural problems which emerged were: the way that broad problems were inadequately perceived by the authorities, and the conflict between environmental management and the urgent necessity for accelerated growth. A sharp contrast was also noted between the growing integration of scientific research along system lines and the apparatus which exists in the public sector to implement the findings of this integrated research.

Reviewing the progress since Stockholm, a Conference on Environmental Resources and Management Priorities for the 1980s emphasized one of UNESCO’s points: ‘A major concern before and during the conference was the chronic gap between the scientific community and the policy makers concerning environmental problems’ (Johnels, 1983). Also speaking at the same conference, Maurice Strong, in some ways the architect of Stockholm, stated: ‘the limits we are beginning to confront today are not primarily physical. They are limits of political and social will and of adequate institutional means to assure careful use of Earth’s resources’ (Johnels, 1983; my emphasis). Finally, at the same conference R. D. Munro, formerly of the United Nations Environment Program, stated:

Governments and international organisations have been much less successful in converting the new scientific knowledge and insights into plans for action [to be distinguished from the global Plans of Action produced by the UN conferences]. They have been even less successful

Institutional Innovation and Environmental Management 33

in translating the knowledge and plans into effective national and international policies and programs of action (Munro, 1983).

It seems fair, at least, to say that the administrative trap persists, though now I would not portray it in quite the simplistic, structural way that I did over ten years ago. It is not solely a matter of organization, but organization is still a major factor. It is also necessary to address the intensified, broader pressures, particularly on governments in less developed countries (LDCs) to resist-r at least delay- effective action with regard to environmental management and the sustainable use and development of their natural resources. At the same time I retreat from the even more simplistic ‘conspiracy theory’ arguments of the wilder end of Dependency theory-would that it were that simple. However, the economic climate since Stockholm has made it considerably more difficult for countries in many parts of the developing world to address the broad ecological issues due to strong pressures to increase exports (usually agricultural), feed the population tomorrow, implement structural readjustment, cope with the incubus of debt, sort out the balance of payments problem and, in some cases, deal with issues of immediate political (and sometimes physical) survival in the short term.

ADMINISTRATION IN THE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

The administrative structures of the LDCs were generally inherited intact from the former colonial powers, and are typically organized vertically into sectoral, or functional, ministries and departments (Agriculture, Education, Health, etc.). This works reasonably well until the system encounters a problem of a very broad and highly integrated nature-such as desertification. Then it tackles only the parts which are identifiable to each ministry and then each ministry tackles the symptom as a problem in, and of, itself. A classic example of this is the ‘development’ of water resources in semi-arid areas which may lead to overgrazing or the spread of river blindness, schistosomiasis and other water-borne diseases.

However, the structure of the administrative system in the LDCs is critical (structural readjustment notwithstanding) because the state is much more interventionist in many LDCs for a variety of reasons including the small size of the private sector, the small amount of private savings, and because of the powerful role of aid in funding the capital budgets of many poor countries. Consequently the state apparatus, pirticularly in the 1960s and 1970s, became increasingly involved directly in production and distribution in addition to the more conventional infrastructural activities. Its broad trusteeship role became interwoven with direct action in the area of ‘economic growth and development’.

During the period since the heady days of the 1960s many of the poorer LDCs have been subject to intense pressure from the world system: commodity prices fell, energy prices rose astronomically, interest payments on debts became a drain on capital resources and the perpetual balance of payments crises, reschedulings and conditionalities focused attention in two areas. The first of these was running faster to stand still (the ‘White Queen’ phenomenon) and the other was the inability to look much beyond tomorrow. Neither of these is conducive to the longer-term perspective of environmental management. In a situation of cutback

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the conservation budget is often the first to go in an LDC, simply because it does not give a rapid and visible return to the balance of payments. Until the Seoul meeting of the World BanWIMF in 1985, the established precedence of the IMF- with its balance-of-payments outlook-over the World Bank with its longer-term development outlook, made the shortened perspective of the LDCs an unavoidable inevitability.

In such a ‘crisis’ atmosphere, only the crisis aspects of environmental management receive due attention. When people die in droves-especially on television-there is usually a powerful response. But it tends to deal with the symptoms, and the disease will recur unless treated. This is ironic because what the administrations of many of the poorer LDCs are doing for economic growth is perceived by them as survival. That is, getting through the economic world crisis, coping with recession and debts and still struggling to invest for the future. In such an atmosphere ‘environmental management’ has a hollow and distant sound, and we should not be surprised at a lack of response. Eckholm has described how the deterioration of the African environment (possibly the most serious case) has coincided with a decline in economic growth which has accentuated, rather than relieved, the problem (Eckholm, 1982, p. 14). Indeed, one may peruse the UNEP progress reports endlessly for evidence of real management progress at the national level. This is not too far removed from the situation in the United States following the Global 2000 report during the Carter regime. Since then the steady accumulation of foreign debt, worsening balance of payments, and declining competitiveness all created a crisis atmosphere in the US, which the Reagan government has used to retreat from the environmental arena. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, this was a serious misjudgment of popularly perceived priorities. Whatever the administration’s perception of urgent requirements, the destruction of the environment remains a priority issue with the public (Christian Science Monitor, 15 January, 1987, p. 19).

At the policy and structure level in most LDCs the environmental problem remains overshadowed and, largely, simply unaddressed. Aid, for all its commitments to environmental assessment of projects, cannot really enter the arena of environmental policy at the national level and tends, as we shall see later, to reinforce the position in situ. LDCs, in general, do not see themselves as having the luxury of alternatives such as exist in the richer countries. At Stockholm in 1972 many of the ‘liberal-minded’ delegates were shocked to hear, for instance from India, that environmental problems are the luxury of the rich. ‘Let us get rich and then we shall start to worry’ was the thrust of their argument. UNEP described the attitude of the rich states and the environmental lobby at that time as ‘naive and idealistic. They simply could not conceive of anyone not doing these things’ (UNEP, 1982). However, the attempt to get rich often left the land, and many of the poorest people on it, as badly off, or worse off, than before. In the pursuit of ‘growth and development’ in the LDCs, the OECD has noted:

there is evidence of a trend to site some primary industries in developing countries to take advantage of lower labor costs and other production costs . . . it is of interest to note that it seems to be particularly strong in respect of certain traditional and heavily polluting industries such as


steel, aluminium, asbestos and certain toxic chemicals (OECD, 1982a, p. 65).

Perhaps a good example of this would be the copper smelters just across the Mexican border taking advantage of that country’s more lax environmental controls. Ironically these are not only American-owned but export their pollution back to the United States via the atmosphere. In the same country, Mexico, pesticides which are banned in the United States are marketed aggressively, and then shipped back to the USA on imported fruit (Wall Street Journal, Thursday, 28 March, 1987).

A final point concerns technical arguments. Governments in LDCs have an array of techniques for assessing the financial costs and returns on a project. The appraisal of environmental costs and benefits, on the other hand, has been notoriously difficult to measure and quantify, especially in terms of the costs of environmental losses. It is also perceived by governments in LDCs as a factor which introduces a delay into the urgent need for physical development now. This ‘methodological problem’ was recognized by the United Nations Environment Program in 1982 when it reported:

From a perception of a primarily ecological and physical dimension, focused on sectoral approaches . . . the approach has broadened [in the international, rather than national arena?] to a consideration of the systematic character of environmental management . . . and to the integration of environmental concerns into research and policy. . . . One of the methodological difficulties is that many environmental values and effects cannot be expressed in monetary terms. . . . This change in environmental thinking has caused a shift in emphasis from an almost purely technical approach to a broader societal one, considering developmental goals from the point of view of values and ethics, rather than from the point of view of quantifiable economic growth (UNEP, 1982, p. 52).

At the research and international organization level it may appear to be like this, but there is precious little evidence of the real policy shifts or methodological change at the national level where laws are passed and budgets convert policy into action. UNEP went on to say, somewhat contradicting the above: ‘At the theoretical level, progress has been relatively positive in defining the scope of the problems and developing appropriate tools to deal with them. However, the real problems are in implementation’ (UNEP, 1982, p. 55). The broad environmental arguments are ignored or overlooked in their qualitative or emotional forms, and remain largely the externalized consequences of conventional ‘economic’ thinking and project appraisal. More precisely this was defined in a Staff Report of the Senate Committee on Science and Technology:

A major and continuing constraint [in incorporating the environmental factor] is the lack of rigorous and unambiguous methods to [a] identify the risks, costs and benefits involved in a particular policy option; (b)

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measure the identified costs, risks and benefits; and (c) attach specific values to the risks, costs and benefits so that they can be compared (US House of Representatives, 1981, p. 180).

The methodology of cost-benefit analysis not only reflects existing priorities; it perpetuates them until the methodology is rethought so that it is more based on the welfare, rather than a financial costh-eturns basis, and internalizes many of the externalized environmental costs and consequences. The Economist noted this fact in March 1987, when it pointed out the necessity for:

Showing, contrary to the popular prejudice, that many environment- protecting [sic] projects also make economic sense. A [World] Bank review calculates that reforestation brings in a discounted return to total cost of 10-30 percent; measures to prevent water supplies being diverted by soil erosion have a comparable return of 15-21 percent (Economist, 28 March, 1987).

To sum up this introduction it seems fair to conclude:

(1) The environmental problem in many LDCs is either getting worse or is no

(2) The tools, knowledge and techniques exist to remedy the problems. (3) There is now a growing recognition of the inability of national administra-

tions in LDCs to deal with this because of their need to respond to intensified growth pressures and because of their structural incapacity to handle topics as broad and long-term as this.

better than when the Stockholm conference was held in 1972.

In the remainder of the paper various institutional initiatives, mainly since Stockholm, will be reviewed.

INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSION

The global conferences

The global-issues conferences, starting with Stockholm, grew out of a recognition that there was a need to tackle issues which were larger than the constraints of national policy in isolation.

The bomb, the pollution of the sea, radiation poisoning and the wholesale contamination of water supplies, coupled with Dennis Meadows’s quantification of the Earth’s incapacity to support boundless growth in Limits to Growth (Meadows, 1971) all seemed to come together. The United Nations provided the forum for this global consciousness at a time when idealism was a strong currency.

The aim of these international meetings was not just to raise awareness, but to produce coordinated action by the member states to alleviate, or solve, the issue under discussion. The fact that the delegates represented governments and, at Stockholm at least, at a fairly high level, was seen as encouraging. Indeed, one of the main achievements of such gatherings as Stockholm is that it raised issues to a high level not just of recognition, but of legitimization. This relates to the point


made previously, by Siffin, that the structure of the solution-seeking effort would be unlikely to define a problem or issue at this scale of resolution. However, certain trends became distinguishable at these meetings:

(1) The delegates, representing administrations, made fairly sure that their national position papers presented their actions in the best possible light, rarely looking at the public management system per se.

(2) The UN host went to great lengths not to raise embarrassing questions relating to the sovereign policy rights of the delegates-there was no real critique of what was presented. Similarly the consultant papers presented at the meetings were scrupulous in their efforts either to offend no one or to abstract the technical aspects totally from any policy context.

(3) There was rarely, if ever, any explicit discussion of policy and management issues for the public sector, and certainly no criticism of existing policy except on non-environmental issues such as Palestine and South Africa.

(4) A bold rhetorical declaration was produced, framed invariably in the language of a constitution laying out broad aims.

(5) This was followed by a Plan of Action to which member states agreed at the conference. There was rarely any precise statement about funding the plan, but usually a special fund of some sort was established and the search for money began, often with lamentable results.

(6) There was no clear pathway by which the brave words would be converted into bold deeds at the national level. Indeed there was basically an act of faith that the delegates would go back and write all this into national policy.

(7) To ensure follow-up, at least at the international level, there was an overwhelming temptation to create an institution. The aim was laudable, for the institution would act as trustee of the declaration, promoter of the Plan of Action and general support service for national initiatives. Institutions are considered separately later.

There is no doubt that the conferences were extremely important in raising broad consciousness, often through the activities of the groups outside, rather than inside, the hall. This awareness function was especially true where the meeting was chaired by someone from outside ‘the system’, such as Maurice Strong at Stockholm. But it is a well-known phenomenon that institutionalizing a problem may as well serve as a means of cloaking inactivity or giving an illusion of action, as it may lead to action itself (a phenomenon known in Britain as the ‘Royal Commission syndrome’). Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the United Nations during most of these conferences, summarized their real impact when he said ‘it is often easier to call a conference, or even fund a new agency, than to confront a problem directly’ (Myers and Myers, 1983, p. 22). The conferences, however, manifested the existing spirit of concern, raising it to the level of the public agenda, and it may well have been that spirit, rather than anything concrete which happened at the conferences, which produced results. The incorporation of environmental factors by USAID into its projects in the early 1970s was the result of effective lobbying, not of any declaration. It is significant that the occurrence of these conferences has taken a sharp decline in the 1980s, though it is difficult to say whether this is a consequence of recession or disillusionment. There is certainly no decline in popular feeling

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about environmental issues. Recently in Europe a poll showed that, in the Community countries, 60 per cent of the people consider measures to improve the environment more important than measures to control prices (EEC Commission, 1983). From the perspective of this paper it is more critical to consider the institutional outcome of these conferences than to consider the workings of the conferences themselves.

Global environmental institutions

The institutional outcome of Stockholm was the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) based in Nairobi, Kenya. It was designed to be the ‘environmental conscience of the United Nations system’ and one writer characterized it as follows:

UNEP works as a catalyst and a coordinator. It is designed primarily to serve other [UN] agencies by providing guidance, stimulus and funds. It is an information-giving, early-warning agency which is not set up to take action nor to engage in technical assistance, but to provide leverage. Herein lies a key problem. The non-operational nature of UNEP removes it from the activities it commissions and reduces the control it has over them. It is a situation which has led one observer to characterize UNEP as a toothless tiger trying to wield authority from a distance (Miller, 1979, p. 23).

So, originally it was to be a catalyst within the UN system financing initiatives, wholly or in part, from the Environment Fund which was set up at Stockholm. But in reality the outcome was rather different, as a former UNEP administrator observed:

UNEP gradually became too narrowly conceived and perceived as consisting only of those activities financed . . . by the Environment Fund. . . . The Governing Council did not establish itself in the first decade as an authoritative, integrative body providing . . . general policy guidance for the direction and coordination of environmental programs within the UN system. Governing Council sessions . . . became increasingly preoccupied with administrative and budgetary questions rather than with major substantive problems and policy issues, and with questions of Environment Fund management rather than with environmental management. One consequence, and also eventually a cause, was a decline in the number of ministers, senior environmental policy advisers and experts in many national delegations, especially those from developed countries [who provided the funding] (Munro, 1982, p. 48).

The work of UNEP was frustrated by a severe lack of funds, especially from the rich countries which, to some extent, were looking for results before they would put money into the system. Without money, UNEP argued, there would be no results. Taking the case of desertification control, which is within the purview of UNEP,


the Nairobi conference estimated investments of $4.5 billion were needed each year to halt desertification by the year 2000. Only $600 million is being spent by the developed countries. A special account set up by the Nairobi conference for donors to make voluntary contributions to support desert control has attracted $50,000, and the 30-nation Consultative Group formed to develop and fund anti- desertification projects has received proposals for projects worth $528 million, but has raised only $26 million to fund them (Science, 27 February, 1987, p. 963).

At the same time the internal operation of UNEP has not inspired confidence. Maurice Strong, its first head, worked on the solid principle that success would come from the close involvement of states, which made him less than popular as a super-bureaucrat. The current director’s approach is more scientific, technical and withdrawn. Experience suggests that only a close involvement with the national policy and budget levels (Figure 3), will produce any serious change; some truths, it seems, are not held to be quite as ‘self-evident’ as they should be. There is a general confusion over the role of UNEP, for within the UN system many of the agencies

DEVELOPMENT I (Sourn: UNEP 1981)

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT

ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Figure 3. The role of the environmental input into the development process (source: UNEP, 1981).

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have already created their own overlapping environmental branches. On the specific issue of desertification, which so severely affects some of the world’s poorest countries and people, an Inter-Agency Working Group was set up. Of the results of this group, the distinguished arid-zone scientist Harold Dregne has written: ‘the formulation and execution of a plan to coordinate UN agency activities . . . has not been accomplished. . . . It [the IAWG] should be abolished’, and, with regard to the Desertification Branch set up within UNEP Dregne comments: ‘the failure of the Desertification Branch to provide the leadership needed to mount an effective world effort has been most damaging’ (Dregne, 1985, p. 31).

To the outsider, UNEP’s internal structure provides a picture of confusion:

The internal management is constantly changing, perhaps reflecting the broad and ill-defined nature of the task. Five organisational charts have been drafted [1972-19791. . . . None of them, according to top management, accurately reflecting UNEP’s dynamic nature (Miller, 1979, p. 26).

Recently (1984) the UN General Assembly decided to establish an Independent World Commission on Environment and Development to act as a direct link between the Independent Commission and the UN member governments. Its functions are listed as:

[to] propose long-term strategies to the year 2000 and beyond for achieving sustainable development; recommending ways in which concern for the environment may be translated into greater cooperation among developing nations . . . ; consider ways and means by which the international community can deal more effectively with environmental concerns; help define shared perceptions of long-term environmental issues and of the efforts needed to deal successfully with protection and improvement of the environment and to put forward an agenda for the coming decades (Fourere, 1984, p. 32. See section entitled Recent Developments in Part I1 of this paper, for a brief resume of the Commission’s proposals.)

After a while the mind begins to reel with the welter of acronyms and institutions, all presumably soaking up valuable trained manpower in pursuit of Waldheim’s earlier hypothesis. It seems fairly evident that the modus operandi between these international organizations and the national policy level where action really occurs has yet to be worked out, or even seriously addressed. Institutional proliferation still prevails and proliferation will solve nothing. In national terms these organizations operate in something of a communications and policy vacuum. It may simply be that UNEP, and its successors, regrettably came on the world scene around the same time as OPEC and the beginning of the world recession, so that LDC governments do not feel they can be very receptive to the work of these global organizations until more immediate problems are resolved. Much the same argument, after all, has been used to explain the decline in aid to Africa during the recession when it most desperately needs more, not fewer, resources (Baker, 1987).


Ministries of the environment

For those who subscribed to the ‘administrative trap’ argument about the inability of rigid sectoral structures to deal with highly integrated problems, the creation of a ‘super-ministry’ of the environment might have seemed like a logical administrative response. Since Stockholm these units have blossomed; there were 10 in 1972,60 in 1974 and now there are over 100 environmental ministries and departments in different countries (Table 1). Their effectiveness is severely constrained by a number of administrative considerations:

(1) A ministry is like any other ministry unless it has some powerful statutory instrument which gives it power over others. In effect it is lined up alongside the other sectoral ministries and there is no real reason why they should pay any attention to this newcomer which will be seen as a threat, an interloper and a nuisance.

Table 1. Institutions for environmental management, 1986 Country Public sector department

Venezuela Zaire Uganda Kenya Burkina Faso Singapore Norway Luxembourg Ireland France Finland Denmark Austria Canada Oman Great Britain Niger Morocco Gambia Indonesia Jordan Malaysia Greece Australia Suriname Honduras Zimbabwe Tanzania Mali Philippines Guinea-Bissau Sudan Ghana

Ministry of the Environment Department of the Environment Ministry of Environmental Protection Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources Ministry of Environment and Tourism Ministry of the Environment Minist.ry of Environment Ministry of the Environment Ministry of the Environment Ministry of the Environment Ministry of the Environment Ministry of the Environment Ministry of Health and Environment Department of the Environment Ministry of Environment Department of the Environment Ministry of Hydrology and Environment Ministry of Housing, Development and Environment Ministry of Water Resources and Environment Ministry of Population and the Environment Ministry of Municipal, Rural and Environmental Affairs Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment Ministry of Physical Planning, Housing and Environment Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy Ministry of Natural Resources Ministry of Natural Resources Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism Ministry of Natural Resources and Animal Husbandry Ministry of Natural Resources Ministry of Natural Resources and Industry Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources Secretary for Lands and Natural Resources

~ ~~

This table shows ministries and departments at a high level in the public sector (33) and contrasts with the frequently cited figure of over 100 institutions. Only 22 of these significantly placed units are in developing countries. Units below this level may not be expected to have a very significant policy input.

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(2) Much of the environmental legislation already belongs to other ministries and there is no clear reason why any new ministry should have control over the legislation or, indeed, have anything whatsoever to do with it.

(3) Is this new ministry going to have skilled manpower in every sector to regulate the environmental consideration, and will this not be enormous duplication?

(4) What is the organizational linkage by which this ministry communicates with other ministries? Simply creating a Ministry of the Environment does not change the weakness of the existing horizontal linkages.

(5) What is the role of this Ministry-policeman, policy-maker, project inspector? The potential for inter-ministerial infighting is enormous.

(6) What is the relationship between the ministry and the planning process including sectoral planning departments, the central planning office and the aid units?

In many cases the role of the Ministry of the Environment suffers from the same forces which render UNEP less effective than it was hoped to be. No one knows what they are really supposed to do, and they seem to want a finger in every pie. Worst of all they can hold up ‘real development’ by their insistence on environmental impact considerations. UNEP itself wrote in 1982 about the fate of these units:

Many countries have created environmental sectoriats, ranging in scope from the national level down to the sectoral planning sections. However, it is not clear how effective these are in influencing the much stronger and longer-established economic planning sections (UNEP, 1982, p. 53).

In the absence of any clearly stated national policy and legislation regarding the relationship between environment and development , it is very difficult to see how these units will function at all. Smaller units in the sectoral planning sections might be just as effective. Even more effective would be a unit within the central planning function. But without clear policy and law they may be created

in order to satisfy the minimum requirements of bilateral and multilateral donors, [so that] they [give] only pro forma attention to environmental impact assesment. Environmental units in government [are] often only window dressing . . . placed at low bureaucratic levels, poorly-funded and understaffed. The powerful economic planning units ignore environmental concerns and [regard] the internalising of damage costs and degradation as difficult, time-consuming and not useful (Carpenter and Dixon, 1985, p. 8).

The OECD summed up this type of institutional initiative 10 years after Stockholm by saying: ‘Too often the environmental agencies carry little weight in national and political life and lack financial resources and trained staff (OECD, 1982b, p. 102). Either the ministry has to have some all-embracing legislation to enact or it has to be placed-like Finance and Planning-over the sectoral domain.


The aid dimension

Aid is not strictly concerned with institutional considerations, and neither is it formally involved in policy considerations within the recipient countries. However, those who give aid have their own policies and priorities, and these can impact very considerably on what a recipient country selects as a programme, a project or a method of appraisal. There is much murky ground in the argument about whether the donors push or react over, for instance, large dam construction. However, where donors and lenders are dominant in the capitalization of development, especially in the poorest LDCs, their considerations are bound to be critical. Even if the recipient country does not have an environmental policy, the donor may insist on an environmental impact study before the money is approved. The USAID organization has been doing this since 1970 to a greater or lesser degree. However, environmental appraisal of individual projects (and it is as projects that virtually all of the aid comes) by different donors and lenders, all with different criteria, does not constitute a national environmental policy or list of priorities. It represents the conditionality of the loan.

Unfortunately it may well be the case that the project is in an advanced state of design before the various funders are approached-and there is often more than one per project. In this case the environmental component becomes an ‘add-on’ rather than becoming part of the whole identification and appraisal process (not unlike much of the early environmental engineering work which was usually done after the project was designed so that it would comply with the law). Countries are then anxious about who is to pay for this assessment, and wonder if it is going to be charged to the aid allocation, loan, etc.

Experience shows that offers of help by aid agencies to ensure environmental soundness in projects are generally welcomed by recipient governments if they avoid excessive interference with the government’s development priorities and do not threaten to slow down their development process (Stein and Johnson, 1979, p. xiii).

Ten multilateral development institutions have already adopted a joint ‘Declara- tion of Environmental Policies and Procedures relating to Economic Develop- ment’. Among other commitments they agreed to:

endeavour to institute procedures for the systematic examination of the environmental impact of all their development activities under consideration for financing; to enter into cooperative negotiations with governments and other agencies to ensure the integration of appropriate measures in the design and implementation of economic development activities (UNDP, 1980).

The African Development Bank proposes ‘to incorporate in action plans at the national level the development of policies, strategies, institutions and programs for the protection of the environment’ (UNEP, 1981, p. 68). However, before we conclude that the mission of the aid and multilateral agencies is to be the salvation of the Third World environment, it is worth noting the often token resources given to this aspect of project appraisal in the donodlending agencies themselves. The

44 R. Baker

African Development Bank had only two environmentalists on its staff at the time, and in 1981 the World Bank’s Office of Environmental Assessment had a professional staff of three for 25&300 projects per annum. The bank now claims to have 150 of its 3000 staff working full-time on environmental questions, but ‘it lacks an environmental department; and the links between its small environmental office-which has no economists-and its policy-makers are weak’ (Economist, 28 March, 1987). [See section on Recent Developments in Part I1 for changes announced in May 1987.1 In October of 1986 the US Congress required the United States Agency for International Development to tighten its environmental requirements and look at such implications in the case of all multilateral aid projects-subjecting them to special monitoring if necessary. This means that the USAID could, conceivably, seek to block activities by the World Bank, among others, not least because of the size of the US contribution to that institution. Indeed, action by Senator Robert Kasten (R. Wis.) resulted in the excision of $450 million from the much-criticized Polonoreste project the World Bank was funding in Brazil. On 16 March 1987 the USAID reported that nine Third World development projects with a combined cost of more than $2 billion have been abandoned or delayed because they pose threats to the environment (WaU Street Journal, 16 March, 1987). These included the Narmada River Scheme (India), the Cauvery River Scheme (India), the Haitian Tree-Planting Scheme, a gold and silver-ore reprocessing scheme in the Dominican Republic, Nepal’s Babai River dam, Guyana’s Tumaturmari hydroelectric scheme, and two water projects in Colombia and Niger. Dregne’s view of the aid situation is more severe:

Aid agencies seldom will commit funds for the long-term projects required for range improvement. . . . Improving degraded rangelands and controlling soil erosion on cultivated lands are long-term projects that require continuing commitments that most donor agencies are unwilling to make. Just as with farmers, aid agencies invest in short- term projects that are expected to be immediately beneficial (Dregne, 1985, pp. 20, 31).

There has been, unfortunately, up to now, a lot of tokenism about the environment in loans and grants. OECD stated in 1982 that ‘in the view of environmental experts it is often their own colleagues in their own departments who fail to appreciate the importance of ecological considerations’ (OECD, 1982b, p. 107). The growing importance of these considerations in aid is encouraging, but it does not substitute for a clear policy and programme at the national level:

An ever-greener Congress could soon begin to demand that responsible environmental policies by recipient countries become a condition of loans being made; and that funding for projects in countries which fail to measure up to America’s strict rules on environmental protection should be blocked. If that happens, a number of now-routine industrial projects would be outlawed (Economist, 28 March, 1987).

The legislative framework

Laws are intended to stop people performing wilful actions which are against the agreed consensus of the common good. In that sense they are negative; telling you


what you might not do. This presupposes the existence somewhere of a statement of what is positive and good-a policy for sound management. The law alone is not a development device, and is no substitute for policy. Laws, of course, are needed; but it is the context in which they exist which is important to the theme of this paper. They give teeth to the administrative units responsible for environmental protection and control, but can turn out to be either oppressive or ineffective, depending on the context in which they are formulated.

Most LDCs have some environmental laws on the books. Frequently these are sectoralized and administered by several government departments-the Water Act, the Forest Act, soil conservation legislation for instance. This does not constitute a cohesive environmental policy. In many of the poorer countries the destruction of the environment is part of the disease of poverty. Thus the people may not be engaged in wilful asset-stripping or profit-taking, but rather be stripping forests or overgrazing rangelands in a search for survival. The important question here, regarding legislation, is whether or not the people degrading the natural resources have any alternative. I have examined this case, which I call ‘Protecting the environment against the poor’, elsewhere (Baker, 1984).

If people are overusing, or inappropriately using, land in a search for survival it does not make a great deal of sense to pass laws to prevent them unless the authorities have a viable alternative for their subsistance on hand. Such legislation is purely oppressive, polarizing and unlikely to produce results other than political unrest. In Kenya there are over a dozen items of what might loosely be termed ‘environmental legislation’ on the books, but there has been no conviction under most of these acts for over a decade. In general the police understand the problems of implementing the law better than the people who make the laws there, and the prospect of a constable trying to prevent the Maasai from grazing protected areas raises the immediate spectre of martyrdom (Kinyanjui and Baker, 1980).

It has often been said that in the poorer countries the misuse of the environment is part of the whole phenomenon of poverty, and that one cannot attack the one without a comprehensive plan for the other. If people have no access to land outside protected areas, no prospect of jobs in other sectors and no social security system, it is unlikely that they will resist the temptations of forest clearance or increasing the herds. Rich individuals stripping the forests for the export of charcoal to the Middle East, or for the export of tropical hardwoods, is a different matter. OECD noted this phenomenon in 1982 when it reported:

Although many countries have passed laws and regulations to protect the environment and natural resources, and to control pollution, no illusions should be nursed on this score. The legislation is rarely enforced for lack of sufficient technical and administrative resources and sometimes because of powerful groups which derive incomes from the rapid exploitation [of the environment], and are able to modify or bypass the conservation measures (OECD, 1982b, p. 102).

If limits and regulations are to mean anything, they must follow measurable standards which have to relate to such complicated factors as whether one averages or maximizes land use in semi-arid regions with droughts and the unreliability of rainfall, and the question of the role of livestock in a partly commercialized economy. Setting these limits is an extremely difficult task, methodologically

46 R. Baker

speaking, and then one is still left with the problem of monitoring. All this requires skills and field staff, which are frequently lacking in the countries which are degrading most seriously. Having regulations which are moribund is worse than having no regulations at all, since the law is seen to be ineffective.

To this we need to add the fact that an overabundance of environmental laws, frequently copied wholesale from developed countries, is seen by the policy-makers as yet another obstacle to ‘real development’, a deterrent to outside investment and yet another procedure to delay and increase the cost of capital investment (Carpenter and Dixon, 1985, p. 8). The law, in short, is not a management instrument, it is a device to protect against abuse where alternatives exist.

CONCLUSION

The first part of this paper has criticized the structure and division of responsibility in public administration for preventing an adequate response to the problems of environmental decline. In developing countries pressures for economic survival conflict with long-term plans for conservation. Such contradictions compound the problem of administrative effectiveness. The second part of the paper will evaluate other areas of administrative innovation, and consider the potential for changes in policies and institutions 25 years after the Stockholm Conference. Basic principles of policy formation, methodology and administrative organization will be set out to help public administration make some impact on environmental problems.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to recognize the generous assistance of Professor William J. Siffin, Distinguished Professor Lynton Caldwell, and Susan A. Hobbs, all of Indiana University.

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