Previous      Next        Contents

UNRISD News Number 20

Spring/Summer 1999

ESSENTIAL MATTER

Promoting People-Centred Sustainable Development

An important policy development of the 1990s has been the attempt on the part of international organizations, governments and NGOs to design and implement programmes and projects that promote "sustainable development". While there are widely differing views on how to "[meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs",¹ it is generally accepted that sustainable development implies a better integration of economic, environmental and social goals. In particular, it promotes a pattern of economic growth that does not result in widespread environmental degradation or social exclusion. In practice, however, the tendency has often been to equate sustainable development much more narrowly with environmental protection or "eco-efficiency". Conservation and rehabilitation of natural resources have become ways to either stretch the limits of economic growth, by using natural resources more efficiently, or protect nature by creating national parks and reserves. The idea of meeting the needs of people, which is central to the concept of sustainable development, seems secondary.

In recent years, some organizations appear to have rediscovered the link between conservation and human welfare. The United Nations Development Programme has actively promoted the concept of "sustainable human development", and the Social Summit reminded us that we should be "preserving the essential bases of people-centred sustainable development".² Terms like "participation", "integrated conservation and development" and "community-based resource management" have become widely used by the international development community. Numerous environmental policies, programmes and projects now claim to be sensitive to the needs of local people. But how has this people-centred approach fared in practice? Have people really been brought back into the equation? Have the social and political dimensions of sustainable development achieved the same status as those associated with economic growth and environmental protection?

In preparation for Copenhagen Plus Five, UNRISD will be looking into these questions, synthesizing its own research and commissioning additional papers from specialists around the world. In the field of natural resource management and conservation, findings from two UNRISD projects undertaken since the Social Summit³ suggest that a wide gap still separates the rhetoric and reality of people-centred approaches. The following aspects are of particular concern.

Human welfare
People are unlikely to support environmental projects and programmes if they are perceived to threaten their livelihoods and rights. Yet projects often do precisely this by restricting people's access to land, forest products and water resources. Although many projects now include explicit "social" components, such as small income-generating activities, these often prove unsustainable once the external agency supporting the initiative withdraws. Such interventions do little to promote human welfare or alter the way people use or manage natural resources. When projects fail to address both environmental and human welfare concerns, people's livelihoods and rights may be threatened. Moreover, those affected may well oppose the project concerned and take action to undermine its objectives.

Whose problem?
Many environmental projects assume that both the problems to be addressed and the solutions to those problems are "obvious", when in fact they may be obvious only to some. What is defined as an environmental "problem" is itself a social construct. Perceptions about what constitutes forest degradation or biodiversity loss involve value judgements, which often vary from one social group to another. Such differences imply that certain environmental interventions must be based on a negotiated consensus involving various stakeholders.

Variations exist not only in how people perceive environmental problems, but also in what are considered appropriate resource management practices. Not long ago, certain "indigenous" practices—such as some forms of shifting agriculture or the use of certain crop varieties in peasant farming systems—were regarded as "backward" by most scientists and planners. It is now recognized that some such practices are relatively sustainable and efficient in the agro-ecological and socio-economic settings in which they are found.

Participation
Another aspect of sustainable development that has proved extremely difficult to promote in practice is the participation of local resource users and disadvantaged groups in decision-making processes. Participation often amounts to little more than token consultation between project personnel and local stakeholders. This may simply serve to legitimize a project or programme that has been designed in a top-down manner. Participation in project design and implementation is necessary not only to gauge the views of resource users about a particular problem and how it should be addressed, but also to engage them as activists. Well-organized communities or disadvantaged groups may be in a better position to protect their forests and water resources from threats posed by logging or mining companies, and to ensure that the benefits and costs associated with projects are distributed more equitably. This empowering aspect of participation, however, is often overlooked by project planners.

Social relations at the local level
Promoting participation can be an extremely delicate exercise given the complex social relations that may exist between different groups in a "community", as well as between "locals" and "outsiders". However, cultural norms, property rights and other social and power relations are often ignored in project design and implementation. Such institutional aspects influence the way natural resources are used by men and women or different ethnic and income groups, as well as how resources are distributed. Projects, programmes and strategies designed in a top-down or uniform manner may well have unanticipated outcomes due to the way different stakeholders intervene in and respond to their implementation. For example, attempts to decentralize natural resource management and conservation have sometimes backfired due to problems of capacity at the local level, or because local elites have diverted or abused resources intended for conservation. Local social reality often contrasts sharply with the image of harmonious "communities" which many development and conservation planners seem to have. Communities can be very heterogeneous, hierarchical and conflictive. Actually applying community-based or participatory approaches and methods in such contexts can prove extremely difficult and demand from project planners and practitioners skills, cultural sensitivities, financial resources and time frames they may not possess.

The broader institutional context
Finally, social relations involve not only actors or groups at the local level, but also their interactions with institutions at state, national and international levels. Many sustainable development interventions and strategies, however, have focused too narrowly on the local level. Initiatives associated with community-based natural resource management have brought obvious benefits—mobilizing resources for projects with environmental and human welfare dimensions, and expanding the pool of civil society organizations working for development and conservation. But they have often ignored the broader institutional context. Macro-economic policies, market trends, political elites and national bureaucracies also influence what happens at the local level, often placing severe constraints on what can be achieved.

The nature of local level projects is also heavily influenced by donor conditionality. Are the constant changes in development concepts and approaches helping or hindering the efforts of national and local development organizations? Development planners and practitioners may spend as much time adapting plans and projects to the latest guidelines and priorities of multilateral and bilateral agencies as they do implementing them. Some international organizations and governments are once again rethinking goals and concepts associated with "targeting the poorest of the poor", "sustainable livelihoods", and "rights-based development". Let us hope that this is a constructive development in an ongoing process of learning how best to promote people-centred sustainable development, rather than another short-lived fad and more rhetoric. Any approach that ignores fundamental institutional and political determinants of sustainable development is doomed to fail.

1 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.

2 Commitment 6 of the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development.

3 Social and Political Dimensions of Environmental Protection Programmes and Projects, and The Social and Environmental Impact of National Parks and Protected Areas.

Previous      Next        Contents