IIED is an international policy research institute,
working for sustainable and equitable global development. Set
up in 1971, just before the first UN Earth Summit, IIED was a
major contributor to the Brundtland Commission of 1987, the Rio
Earth Summit of 1992, and WSSD in 2002 in Johannesburg. IIED works
through a wide range of long-standing relationships with partners
in the developing world—and notably with local research
groups—thereby ensuring that our policy advice and advocacy
at national and international levels is well informed by local
realities. IIED's work broadly falls into four areas: natural
resources, urban, markets and governance—all of which emphasise
the links between environment and poverty reduction.
DFID has, over the last decade, offered international
leadership in intellectual and policy terms for integrating environment
and development. Particularly well appreciated DFID contributions
include:
— Promoting the sustainable livelihoods
framework, which has improved understanding of the many assets
(including environmental assets) on which poverty reduction depends.
— Key documents and seminars on the
links between poverty and the environment offered at the 2002
WSSD, which have subsequently influenced most other donors.
— Supporting, and twice chairing,
the OECD ENVIRONET as a way to improve environmental harmonisation
among donors on eg strategic environmental assessment.
— Catalysing the more informal Poverty
Environment Partnership as a means to share learning between donors
and identify best practice on eg environmental fiscal reform.
— Designing and implementing a comprehensive
"environmental screening" procedure for DFID activities,
which addresses environmental potentials as well as negative impacts—and
which other donors have copied (eg Irish and Belgian aid).
— Promoting a post-Kyoto regime that
ensures a fair deal for developing countries, addresses both mitigation
and adaptation to climate change; offering clear information;
and supporting engagement by their stakeholders in international
negotiations.
— Announcing research strategies in
climate change, environment/natural resources and sustainable
agriculture that will include significant involvement of Southern
groups; and a science and innovation strategy that will also help
to build capacity.
However, DFID's leadership has been less evident
in responding to the environmental aspects of poverty in specific
low-income countries (LICs). There are a few effective DFID environmental
projects, eg in Kenya, India and China. But these are in a minority
amongst other kinds of activity. Moreover, there has been no comprehensive
review of DFID environmental activity—either as part of
its recent environment policy review or as a recommendation from
it. Without such facts, IIED can only observe that:
— There has been no coherent, deliberate
approach to ensuring good environmental information, analysis,
prioritisation and planning in country-driven approaches.
— If environment does not "come
up" in discussions on country plans, it is not pursued further—even
if it might have been identified as a priority by local people
in the Participatory Poverty Assessments usually performed for
country-based planning. (This point is well documented by DFID
studies).
— Existence of environmental activities
tend to correlate with DFID environmental adviser presence in-country
or interest of the country office head.
The Recent Publication of "DFID's approach to
the environment" (2006) is extremely welcome in view of the
imbalance between DFID's intellectual/policy leadership and practical
support to LICs. This policy paper commits to greater attention
to three key needs. IIED supports these three levels as a useful
framework, but emphasises that more needs to be done to make them
operational and to engage the geographical and multilateral divisions
of DFID. Observations of gaps and recommendations follow for each
of these three areas:
1. Addressing the underlying institutional
reasons for environmental problems in LICs
IIED welcomes this emphasis because it offers
potential synergies with the cross-DFID priority of improving
LIC governance. However, DFID staff need more guidance to understand
how the underlying (institutional) causes of both poverty and
environmental degradation are similar, and how to design DFID
governance programmes to address both. Much more is needed if
the institutional base for managing the environment in every LIC
is to be adequate:
— supporting civil society to articulate
environmental concerns, to claim rights and to actively manage
the environment;
— building basic environment information
capabilities that reach to the heart of LICs' own poverty monitoring
and development planning processes; and
— strengthening the capacity of environmental
authorities to make their case to treasuries, and then to deliver
effective environmental management.
2. A commitment to supporting environmental management
where this can be shown to contribute directly to poverty reduction
IIED welcomes this commitment because it is
reveals an understanding that environmental management is a foundation
for lasting development. It is neither appropriate nor efficient
for DFID to address all the environmental issues facing LICs.
Rather, DFID should concentrate on the major environmental deprivations
and hazards suffered by the poor, and/or the best environmental
potentials for improving livelihoods and economic growth.
Whilst DFID has contributed usefully to a number
of international processes that identify the generic case
to invest in the environment for poverty reduction (eg the multi-donor
Poverty Environment Partnership), the challenge now is making
full and specific investment cases at the country level. However,
neither the PRS planning process, nor DFID's own country assistance
strategies include adequate diagnostics or consultations which
would enable specific environmental priorities to be identified.
This will also require particular attention to investigating drivers
for and against the "resource curse" at macro level,
and "poverty traps"' at micro level.
Finally, to give confidence to DFID country heads
to invest more in the environment, it would be helpful to draw
together the lessons from DFID's varied environmental projects—which
have worked; which have not; what the costs and benefits have
been; and what has contributed to success or failure?
3. Managing environmental risks associated
with development assistance
IIED welcomes acknowledgement of the environmental
risks associated with development assistance. However, DFID's
Approach to the environment gives no details of how risk
management is to be achieved. The current "environmental
screening note" procedure is fine on paper, but is separate
from other procedures, is very often applied too late in the day
with inadequate technical consideration of both environmental
threats and (especially) opportunities. It has tended to be applied
to projects rather than to broader programmes or policies. Thus
it has become little more than one bureaucratic step, and one
which has been "pushed" by DFID environment advisers
with little other "power base"—serving to reinforce
"negative" impressions of the environment, ie as a block
to development plans, rather than an asset for development. A
more integrated approach to the environment is needed throughout
the activity cycle.
More should be done to consult with local environmental
expertise and stakeholders. Further environmental risks arise
when DFID neither listens to, nor responds to local groups that
both suffer from and understand environmental problems—thereby
risking the reversibility of poverty reduction programmes. Although
in-country procedures often exist to integrate local people's
perspectives into "country-driven" planning—such
as Participatory Poverty Assessments—DFID's promotion of,
support to and use of these procedures should be strengthened.In
addition, DFID's management board does not, as far as we can ascertain,
maintain an environmental risk profile or horizon-scanning exercise
to inform long-term development (although recent inclusion of
environmental scenarios in horizon-scanning processes for the
White Paper is a very welcome innovation).
Several constraints limit the potential of DFID's
Environment Approach—many of them deriving from the current
"development model" pursued by DFID:
DFID's Environment Approach is unlikely to be achieve
more than any "bolt-on" exercise unless key DFID policy
and structural issues are addressed:
— A larger DFID budget and limited
range of aid delivery instruments. The fact that DFID's budget
is growing rapidly tends to favour big, simple, "efficient"
development processes and relationships with central authorities
in LICs. Budget support is the epitome of this trend. Environmental
assets, environmental deprivations, environmental governance and
environmental management play no central part in such processes
or the development models they aim to support. Indeed, at national
level the specificity, complexity, uncertainty and diffuse responsibilities
for environment are very difficult to reconcile with such models.
Local stakeholders (key for integrating environment into development)
and research groups (key for handling environmental uncertainties)
tend to have been marginalized by budget support approaches. DFID's
extra funds need to be accompanied by extra responsibility to
tackle the wider impacts of bigger expenditure. As a minimum,
more needs to be done to lay out the "theory of change"
that underlies budget support, to assess its sensitivity to environmental
issues, and thus to incorporate environment in budget support
planning and monitoring.
— A static or reduced overall DFID
staff complement, and disproportionate reduction in environmental
and natural resources skills. The reduced staff exacerbates
the problems inherent in "big, simple models" and creates
internal incentives for "efficiency" that are greater
than those for equity or diversity. IIED is pleased that the HQ
complement of environment advisers has been maintained (although
some policy teams eg the Urban Rural Change Team have been disbanded
before their conclusions have been fully internalised). In contrast,
there have been significant and apparently ill-planned reductions
in environmental advice in geographical offices. This may be due
to a lack of oversight of the cumulative effects of all country
office heads facing few incentives to employ anybody but economists,
governance advisers and administrators. This would be less of
a problem if DFID environmental advice were being replaced by
eg agreements with other donors in-country to take responsibility
for (cross-donor) environmental advice, or if DFID country offices
were better linked with in-country sources of environmental expertise
such as local universities and NGOs. There are signs that DFID
is now below critical mass in environmental advice—its advisers
are amongst the best, and efforts should be made to retain them
and place them in strategic positions. This should be complemented
(but not substituted for) by reinstatement of the in-house environment
training modules for non-environment staff.
Other major DFID-wide directions could be more
promising for the environment—if there were more active
promotion and implementation of its Environment approach:
— Donor harmonisation: On the
one hand, efforts to implement the OECD Paris agenda on aid effectiveness
are promising if they result in a more coherent and prominent
cross-donor approach to (a) taking responsibility for environmental
integration; (b) coordinating environmental activities in-country;
and (c) the environmental reporting requirements of country authorities.
For example, the donor group on environment in Tanzania, coordinated
by Denmark, is working fairly well. On the other hand, efforts
at donor harmonisation can take up so much time and political
capital that attention shifts even further away from the environmental
stakeholders who are already marginalized so much in country-driven
approaches.
In both the policy and research strategy, a narrow
emphasis on farming technology is inadequate and inconsistent
with the importance of demand-side constraints and with the other
natural resource activities on which farmers depend. There is
little emphasis on technology for soil and water management, on
other means to sustain the environmental asset base of agriculture,
and on approaches to minimise the energy intensity of farming
technology. Finally, there is inadequate commitment to more inclusive
science and technology, including building on traditional knowledge
which has proven so effective at working with natural processes—rather
than against them. Here, DFID's support to the current International
Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development
is to be welcomed, as it will attempt to bring together `scientific'
and traditional knowledge from almost a hundred countries.
IIED welcomes this inquiry by the Environmental
Audit Sub-Committee and hopes that it will offer timely information
and compelling ideas that will influence the current International
Development White Paper process. Ultimately, development is not
merely a function of improved supply of finance to central governments.
Development is achieved through the accumulation and management
of a portfolio of assets—including environmental assets—in
ways which improve both their productivity and the equitable sharing
of associated costs and benefits. The evidence from national MDG
reporting is that MDG7 (`Achieve environmental sustainability')
is highly off-track, and that progress towards many other MDGs
is hindered by under- investment in environmental assets. DFID
needs to benchmark—and then regularly review and report—on
its investment in MDG7 according to the three categories in its
Environment approach.
