Poverty and the Environment

["Peter Matlon" <peter.matlon@undp.org>]

My understanding is that the primary objective of this stage of the
dialogue is to identify key emerging issues and knowledge gaps that
require
further research. It is not merely to voice agreement or disagreement on
the framework or points of view put forward in the IDS paper. Moreover,
the knowledge gaps should not simply be identified because they are
interesting, but because they are important for the formulation of
development policy and/or design of interventions.

As I step back to try get some perspective on the range of possible
poverty X environment interactions that have policy significance, it
seems to me that there are five sets of generic questions on which
better information is needed for more effective development action in
rural areas (this comment excludes urban areas, although some of the
points apply equally to urban and rural settings). These sets of
questions include:

1.  What is the association between the spatial distribution of poor
rural populations and favorable/unfavorable environments based on
natural endowments of soils, topography and climate? Is it true or not
that a disproportionate share of the rural poor are located in
unfavorable environments? Under what situations does this hold? What are
the exceptions? In answering these questions it is important to
distinguish among different types of unfavorable environments; and to
distinguish between those unfavorable elements that are static  and
those that are dynamic. One should also examine both income and
non-income measures of poverty; and average levels as well as
distributions of each poverty measure. It is particularly important to
avoid generalizations, because what is most interesting and useful is to
identify and then try to understand exceptions to the general patterns. 

2.  What are the most important causal factors underlying the
associations identified in question set 1 above? That is, under what
circumstances (what combination of factors) do natural resource base
limitations cause: (1) average incomes and non-income welfare measures
to fall to or below poverty levels, and (2) more skewed (more unequal)
welfare indicators? What is the relative importance of demographic,
institutional, market, infrastructural, policy and technical factors in
these causal
relationships? Where unfavorable environments have not led to greater
poverty incidence, why? What are the common characteristics of household
and community livelihood systems that achieve high and broadly shared
welfare in the face of inherently limited natural resources? 

3.  What factors enable households and communities to adapt to
environments that become unfavorable over time either due to demographic
change (declining land/labor ratios), declining resource base
productivity (e.g. soil degradation, climate change, increasing
pest/disease incidence), or other change factors? What are the common
strategic elements utilized by those households and communities that
successfully adapt to a changing environment? (e.g. factor substitution?
livelihoods diversification? asset conversion?) And how do these
adaptation
strategies vary across different types of households, communities, and
agro-ecoregions? How do they vary across different types of unfavorable
environments? How do institutional factors condition adaptation
strategies at various scales? What is the role of social capital in
explaining successful and unsuccessful cases of adaptation? 

4.  When and under what circumstances does "successful" adaptation lead
to improvements in average labor productivity (and thus income), and not
only in improved yields per unit area? In what circumstances does
adaptation improve or worsen income (and broader welfare) distribution? 

5.  What are the key exogenous factors that can create opportunities or
incentives to promote successful adaptation that is broadly equitable?
And how can these exogenous factors be supported through policies, human
capacity building, technical assistance or technology development and
transfer?

It is clear that finding definitive answers to all of these questions
would be no easy or short-term task. It would require analyses at
several levels, and combining cross-sectional and time series analyses
of broad secondary data with a sufficient number of well selected
in-depth case studies. What is important for the next stage in the
process is to achieve some level of agreement as to which of these
question sets should be addressed as priorities, how, when and by whom.

Peter Matlon

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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).
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