Poverty-Environment discussion -Reply

["David W. Reed" <David.Reed@wwfus.org>]

COMMENTS ON *POVERTY AND ENVIRONMENT: PRIORITIES FOR RESEARCH AND POLICY: AN OVERVIEW STUDY

David Reed
Macroeconomics Program Office (MPO)
WWF
Washington, D.C.


The strength of the IDS Overview Study is its development of the ‘environmental entitlements perspective’ on the micro, and occasionally meso, levels.  This study refines the logic and analytical underpinnings of IDS’ ongoing work on environmental entitlements and it continues IDS’ tradition of a multi-disciplinary approach seeking to integrate economic, political, social, and ecological dimensions into its analysis and prescriptions.  

My sense is that the study loses coherence and much of its relevance once it tries to extrapolate an essentially micro-level analysis of environmental entitlements to a far broader plane normally occupied by macroeconomics and macro-policies.  This displaced extrapolation occurs on two levels.   First, it seeks to define an *orthodox position* linking poverty and the environment in terms they use to construct their own ‘environmental entitlements’ perspective.  This leads, as many other reviewers have observed, to the construction of an *orthodoxy* that doesn’t really exist except, perhaps, in the minds of the authors.  Second, this extrapolation from the micro to the macro level places the *environmental entitlements* approach as an alternative to an extremely diverse, if not divergent, array of analytical perspectives and strategic prescriptions.  This misguided extrapolation is truly unfortunate because it weakens the great value of using their entitlements approach on a micro level.  It also distorts virtually all subsequent discussions on linkages between poverty and the environment and leads them to suggest inappropriate policy responses. 

I would suggest that if there is an *orthodoxy* to be examined it is the analytical perspectives advanced by neoclassical economics which have driven agricultural modernization, not to mention the *Washington consensus* more generally, for the past several decades.  The largely one-dimensional, seldom-nuanced approach has placed emphasis on achieving economies of scale, technification of production, and gearing production to export markets to raise incomes and generate employment in the agricultural sector.  The benefits of the neoclassical approach lie in increasing aggregate productivity of the sector although the assumption that these productivity gains would translate into environmental investments and improvements have not been consistently confirmed.  The draw backs of this approach reside, of course,  in the accompanying concentration of land, displacement of rural communities, marginalization of millions of landless and land-poor, and accompanying environmental degradation.  In contrast to the neoclassical perspective, I believe one finds what can be called a social relations or political economy perspective.  While emphasizing agricultural intensification, that approach also calls for more fundamental reforms in land tenure policy, reinvestment of surpluses back into the agricultural sector, changes in governance and rural institutions, among other points.  I believe the IDS’ entitlements approach fits nicely into the social relations or political economy perspective but on a micro, not meso or macro levels. However, by trying to occupy the entire space of  *new thinking* and *new approach* in contrast to their defined orthodox position, they lose proper measure of their potential contribution to the multi-disciplinary perspective of which they are an important part.

A second underlying problem with their analytical framework is that it has not, or perhaps cannot, deal adequately with the fundamental differences between the poverty-environmental degradation dynamic in rural and urban areas.  Yes, their paper does have separate sections on the two contexts but unfortunately their generalizations and policy recommendations are fundamentally based in the rural dynamics.  Causality, market failures, policy failures, institutional functions and development, forms of governance, the role of civil society, and many other factors are fundamentally different when addressing the poverty-environment nexus in urban and rural areas.  Their analysis and prescriptions have not come to terms with these very different realities.  This is particularly significant because within 2 to 5 years, over 50% of the world’s poor will live in urban, not rural, areas. Moreover, their analytical perspective offers little guidance as to how to link the dynamics between rural and urban poverty and environmental degradation.

Finally, I cannot help but comment on the main lesson drawn from their research which reads as follows, *The most strident conclusion drawn from new thinking on both poverty and environment is the need to move away from macro scale approaches and policies and towards a greater appreciation of people in places.*  I wonder if the authors would like to reconsider this conclusion in light of events unfolding in Indonesia, Malaysia, and many other developing countries caught in the financial contagion.  I would agree with their conclusion if they had invoked the need to complement macro scale approaches and policies with their micro level analysis.  But to suggest replacing macro perspectives and approaches with the local entitlements perspective is truly unfortunate.  Their perspective overlooks the continued impact that deficient macro policies continue to exert at the local levels and it negates the urgent need to formulate different macro level policies which will address the needs of the poor and encourage proper management of the natural resource base.  

The inherent problems of misplacing their micro-level insights to an overarching analytical and strategic perspective find their way into the paper’s concluding remarks and recommendations.  Again, rather than recognizing the complementarity between fundamentally improved macro policies and their micro level work, they suggest substituting the latter for the former, an approach that lacks credibility.  The redeeming part of their efforts to formulate recommendations is their insistence on proposing multi-faceted responses, that is, responses that include economic, political, social, and ecological components.  This is the great strength of their micro-level analytical work, as noted at the beginning of my comment, and it is on that level, building to their strengths, that they should continue to focus their efforts. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this message are solely those of the author; they do not necessary reflect the views of the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) or the European Commission (EC).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------