Environmental Management and Development

Chris Barrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134462599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The environment and its management has been, and continues to be a very topical issue. Existing environment and development texts place emphasis is on listing problems, making warnings and voicing advocacy, but by focusing on environmental management, this informative book offers a very different perspective.

Moving on from the usual much-discussed viewpoints, Barrow looks towards practical management and problem-solving techniques. He clarifies the definition, nature and role of environmental management in development and developing countries, beginning with an introduction to the key terms, issues and tools of environmental management, which are linked and developed in later chapters, and concluding by discussing who pays for environmental management and its future in developing countries.

Written by an experienced and well-known author, this clear, user-friendly book, ideal for students of resource management, geography and development studies, makes excellent use of chapter summaries, boxed case studies, annotated further readings and websites, discussion questions and illustrations.

Part I

Theory and approaches

Introduction

Key chapter points

This chapter explores the meaning of ‘development’ and ‘environmental management’ and how they interrelate.

The evolution of interest in development and environmental issues and their management are reviewed.

Environmental management helps steer the transition from environmental exploitation and largely retrospective responses to challenges and possibilities, to stewardship of nature and proactive assessment of threats and opportunities.

In the 1960s the media began to show satellite photographs of the world. This more or less coincided with several large environmental accidents, Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation, recognition by some that frontiers were closing and unused land was limited, and the birth of an environmental movement which was voicing concern about overpopulation, pollution and other development ills. The catchphrase ‘spaceship Earth’ was coined – implying a vulnerable, unique and shared life-support system, with a wayward set of passengers who tend to forget that what one does affects all. On any ship the hope is that it can be safely steered, that the crew know what they are doing, act responsibly, and manage to control the passengers. Like a 1920s ocean liner, ‘spaceship Earth’ has different classes of passengers: relatively few first-class, living in luxury – mainly those of the rich nations but also some in poor countries; more numerous second-class assigned to rather harsh conditions – mainly citizens of the developing countries; and ‘stowage-class’ – the unemployed or underemployed of urban slums, landless rural poor and those marginalised in remote and harsh environments. The task of communicating with all these passengers and managing ‘spaceship Earth’ falls to environmental managers. Like seamanship it is as much an art as a science, involves a diversity of specialists, demands many skills, and at times must deal with wholly unexpected and unfamiliar problems.

Development

Environmental management and development are both difficult to define. The former can be a goal or vision, an attempt to steer a process, the application of a set of tools, a more philosophical exercise seeking to identify and establish new outlooks, and much more. Individual environmental managers may have a problem-solving, sectoral, local, regional or global focus. They may be academics, regional or national decision makers and planners, non-governmental organisation (NGO) staff, company executives, international civil servants, or all sorts of individuals or groups who are environmental stakeholders in some way using natural resources – herders, farmers, fishermen and so on. Development can be a goal or a vision, application of a set of tools, or an attempt to steer a process. Developers are as equally varied a set of groups or individuals as environmental managers. Often the two fields overlap, and in both cases the outlook of the individual very much influences goals and approaches. Both environmental management and development are fields which demand a multidisciplinary view and make it possible for different disciplines, religions, classes, ethnic groups, political outlooks and genders to come together and seek mutually beneficial approaches to important issues. Environmental management and development often move from advocacy to actually trying to achieve goals; and both review current and possible future scenarios to try and identify routes toward better conditions. In the last 40 years or so, both environmental management and development have had to address global issues; sustainable development has become a goal for both. Before the 1960s both environmental management and development were top–down activities, but they now seek popular participation or even empowerment: the environment and people were once to be conquered, today they are to be understood and worked with.

The world today has a rich North and a poor South with pockets of poverty in the former and some very affluent people in the latter. Most of the world’s population aspires to the material lifestyles and consumption patterns apparent in richer nations. Others may be less secular and look forward to non-material ‘development’ in the shape of an increase in contentment, more sense of security, religious or cultural enrichment, or whatever. The former, material, outlook is dominant and with growing populations the question is, will the Earth’s environment support these hopes? The environmental manager is concerned with exploring what can be done to improve people’s lifestyles, given the structure and function of the environment, and then implementing it. Some countries have achieved what they and others see as development, thanks to one or more of the following: agriculture, science, industrial expansion, natural resource exploitation, colonial expansion, trade and intellectual skills. Development is thus widely seen as a goal and an ongoing process, but there is less certainty over its exact meaning or how it functions, or the strategy that is best adopted to pursue it.

Providing a universally acceptable definition of development is impossible, although most would accept that it is a process of change which can accelerate, slow, stagnate or run backwards. Planners, managers, intellectuals and inspired individuals can try to drive development forward in a wide range of ways, such as planning, key speeches, books, fashions, inspirational acts and many other interventions. Definitions reflect the current values of those making them (Adams, 2001: 1; Sachs, 1992: 2). Most adopt an anthropocentric viewpoint, placing humans first, so that development means environment takes second place; however, there are environmentalists who are more ecocentric, i.e. regard environmental care to be at least as important as human needs. The establishment, including scientists, has also started to treat the Gaia Hypothesis more seriously – which means human needs must be weighed against maintaining critical natural processes. Thus, what was deemed development in the past may not be seen to be so today – and, at any given moment in time, individuals, groups and societies differ in their conception of what it is.

Some see development as more a learning or evolutionary process, often with the West assumed to be the currently most advanced stage (Dupâquier and Grebenik, 1983: 247). Geographers and geomorphologists have tried to understand and model landscape development; biologists explore phylogeny and ontogeny; ecologists explore ecosystem development; psychologists and educationalists focus on personality development and learning. Most of these fields have been influenced by the concept of evolution proposed by Darwin in the 1860s, and view development as a process with stages, rules and predictability. A typical Western definition used by those working with developing countries would be: … an ambiguous term for a multidimensional process involving material, social and organisational change, accelerated economic growth, the reduction of absolute poverty and inequality. Chambers (1997) was more succinct; suggesting it was ‘good change’.

Development, it has been suggested, is the economic component of a wider process: modernisation (Brookfield, 1973; Mabogunje, 1980). Modernisation today is generally accepted to be a change toward economic, social and political systems developed in Western Europe and North America between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and, since the 1960s, increasingly around the Pacific Rim. In theory, a group of people could develop in a range of ways, but remain unmodernised, or vice versa. Athanasiou (1997: 19) suggested development was:

what remains after the vapours of progress have boiled away’. Whatever the precise definition, development and modernisation – at the national, regional or local level – may be driven from within, but are linked in varying degree to external forces. Environmental management has, according to a well-used cliché, to ‘act locally and think globally’ – international agreements and transboundary problems (they cross borders) have to be considered.

Efforts to improve human material well being and security have often been poorly managed, and civilisations have seldom lasted for more than a thousand years before human or environmental problems or both have confounded them. Generally, the group in power has decided fashions and desirable goals (these have not always been material things) and they are often out of touch with nature and the rest of society. The idea that humans could and should shape their world to improve well being before death was little voiced before the sixteenth century AD. This was probably because lives were comparatively short and the ability to challenge the environment was limited, so most accepted hardship and disasters as the will of the gods or God; also, religious authorities and states typically frowned on challenges to the status quo. In the West an English statesman and theologian, Thomas More, was one of the first to publish views on how humans might develop in the early sixteenth century, in his book Utopia.

Various religions until recently saw the world as created for humans to use and benefit from. Unfortunately, in the West this tended to prompt exploitation rather than stewardship – greed and a desire for economic growth have driven development, and it has been likened to ‘the ideology of a cancer cell’. One could build on this and regard colonial expansion as the worldwide metastasis, a catastrophic spread to form secondary cancers. From roughly 1650 in Europe the belief took hold that material work could improve humanity, rather than only through religious works; and from the 1750s scientific enquiry and rationalism were harnessed (Uglow, 2002). The results were impressive, and today a Eurocentric, liberal democratic, rational and scientific bias, which is broadly true of environmental concern since the 1960s, runs throughout much of the world’s development activity. The currently dominant Western outlook is mainly anthropocentric, placing human needs (and often profit) before protection of the environment.

There is a hope that humans can control their development, stretch Nature to optimise resource use, and avoid environmental disaster – some would see that as the goal of environmental management. Development is increasingly seen as requiring reduction of intergroup disparity or a ‘social transformation’ through the use of capital, technology and knowledge. Clearly, it is difficult to separate concepts of development from cultural, ethical and religious outlook. Before the twentieth century, Westerners would not have referred to ‘development’; they talked of conquering Nature, ‘civilising’ (moral improvement), and progress. By the mid-nineteenth century Westerners were spreading their laws, encouraging Christian missionary work, and selectively supporting education, politics and governance, the development of communications, technology and especially trade. The expression ‘development’ only appeared in the mid- to late-1940s, at first mainly measured by economic criteria like per capita growth, income and degree of industrialisation. In 1949 United States (US) President Harry Truman referred to it as intervention by ‘liberal democracies’ in the southern hemisphere’s ‘under-developed areas’ which had replaced ‘imperial exploitation’, and probably as part of the containment of communism (Said, 1994). In practice, the USA had been experimenting with development – the State intervening to ‘steer’, rather than relying on laissez-faire progress – since the 1930s or earlier. For example, between 1933 and 1936 the Tennessee Valley Authority included resource management, environmental care and social improvement efforts, and in pursuit of these orchestrated state, federal and private resources. The Marshal Plan after the Second World War can also be seen as a thought-out development programme. In Europe and its colonies there were also efforts at planned development, and some environmental awareness. However, everywhere development was something that was mainly done by economists, either directly by promoting economic growth, or indirectly by commissioning and steering technology, agricultural development and mining. Better management of the environment had a low priority because it promised limited profit and Nature was still generally seen to be unlimited and resilient.

Escobar (1992) argued that development is a mechanism used by richer nations for the management of the poor since the mid-1940s. Starting in the 1950s, but much more after the 1970s, it has been seen to involve social improvement, and is increasingly judged by non-economic benchmarks: literacy rates, child survival, average age at death and suchlike. Alongside this there has been growing concern for environmental quality. Fifty years ago development was measured with economic indices; since the early 1990s multi-factor indices like the Human Development Index or the Amnesty International ‘Freedom Index’ or those of the World Development Institute have been used (UNDP, 1991). Growing concern for environmental quality and interest in pursuing sustainable development has prompted the inclusion of sustainability or environmental indices into development measurement.

Accurate measurement of development is important. Although his writing has been greeted with considerable criticism, Lomborg...