Examination of Witnesses (Questions 95-99)
DR CAMILLA
TOULMIN AND
MR BILL
VORLEY
30 MARCH 2006
Q95 Chairman: Good morning.
It is good to see you here. We understand that you are a policy
research body with a wide variety of funders, from national governments
and multilateral organisations to businesses. Could you outline
briefly what you do, as an organisation?
Dr Toulmin: We
are a policy research institute, set up in 1971, non-governmental;
we do a mixture of research and action, linked to a range of policy
domains, both within a series of developing countries and within
a number of developed countries and globally. We choose areas
of research on which to work where we and our partners feel that
we can make a shift in the way in which policy is designed or
the way in which certain practices are carried out. We are not
an academic research institute, we are focused very much on seeing
how research in a particular field can help achieve a shift in
thinking and a shift in the way that policy is designed.
Q96 Chairman: What is
the important link between environment and development, in your
view?
Dr Toulmin: We see environment,
taken in its broadest sense, as being absolutely critical to any
kind of development. Environment is basically those resources
on which all human life depends, it is the soils, vegetation,
air, climate, water, so those resources are key, both for us in
the developed world but even more so for those in the developing
world.
Q97 Chairman: In your
memorandum you express serious concerns that progress towards
all the Development Goals is being hindered by underinvestment
in environmental assets. How big a driver do you think the MDGs
are for DFID and for other bodies?
Dr Toulmin: I think the MDGs have
become a hugely important driver for all development activity
at global and at international level. That has been a good thing,
in lots of ways, in that they have allowed development agencies
to focus their mind on a clear set of targets, rather than what
happened before, which was very much a kind of voguish shift of
thinking from one year to the next, so it has provided these long-term
Goals around which the development agencies can focus. I think
the drawback of the MDGs is that they tend to focus on a specific
set of goals that are relatively easy to quantify, in things like
health, water and education, whereas the environment MDG, MDG7,
frankly, is a bit of a ragbag of various things, some of which
actually are very difficult to quantify. I think this comes back
to the point that environment means different things to different
people, and as a consequence we do not have a very clear set of
goals and indicators on which we can focus.
Q98 Chairman: Are you
familiar with DFID's definition of sustainable development and,
if you are, do you think a lot of it is satisfactory, or adequate?
Dr Toulmin: I think that all of
us find definitions of sustainable development unsatisfactory
and inadequate in some ways, but they do provide an arena in which
we can argue about the relative importance of short and long term,
of environment versus broader development.
Q99 Chairman: Perhaps
I can rephrase the question and ask you whether or not you think
that, as far as the UK Government is concerned, there has been
a retreat from that famous Bruntland definition back in the seventies,
that DFID is going to retreat from that very stiff challenge,
in terms of the definition, they are looking for softer definitions
these days?
Dr Toulmin: I think what one tends
to see is that the UK Government is very good at the rhetoric
and flagging up the importance of environmental issues, they are
very good at producing nice documents. I think what is less clear
is the extent to which that apparent commitment, in terms of strategy
and policy, then gets translated into implementation. So far as
we see it, in large part that is the result of this kind of trap,
if you like, which a lot of development agencies—of which
DFID is emblematic—face, which is that they have got a commitment
to spend an increasingly large proportion of GDP on development
aid while at the same time having fewer and fewer people in the
personnel establishment to do that, and this strong focus on the
MDGs. That is pushing the whole aid machine towards the provision
of direct budgetary support, government-to-government transfers
of funding, which then makes it a lot more difficult to do the
sensible, environmentally-related stuff, which happens, very often,
very much at a more local level. We see the dilemma that DFID
faces as being to do with having a strong apparent commitment
to environment but not having the structure, being faced with
aid architecture, if you like, which actually makes it very difficult
for that to be carried through in practice.
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