Environment and development: Concepts and practices in transition

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Vol. I I , 401413 (1991)

Environment and development: concepts and practices in transition

ADRIAN ATKINSON

University College, London

SUMMARY This article starts by sketching the shape of the institutions and mechanisms which currently aim to protect the environment in developing countries. The form these have taken is largely based upon the environmental institutions created in the United States in the early 1970s. under the influence of the outburst of environmental concern at that time. The sudden re- emergence of environmental concern at the top of the political agenda in the 1980s is attribu- table in significant measure to the ‘Green Movement’, that has evolved out of the concerns originally expressed in the early 1970s. The new institutions and mechanisms have, however, failed to check environmental deterioration in many developing countries; it is necessary to focus on the macroframework determining development priorities and practices if environmental problems are to be adequately addressed. The root of the problem is not merely institutional, or even macroeconomic, but is primarily cultural, stemming more specifically from the imposition of European cultural values. The environmental crisis is not restricted to developing countries and is unlikely to be solved without considerably more far-reaching initiatives than we have seen so far. According to the literature of the Green Movement, the process of the ‘greening of development’ is far from completed in the creation of current environmental agencies and management mechanisms.

INTRODUCTION

Since the early 1970s, environmental planning and management has joined traditional areas of concern of governments in both industrialized and developing countries, expressing itself in the proliferation of environmental agencies and a distinct set of environmental management mechanisms. In the late 1980s, the pace of concern escalated sharply, new urgency and status being accorded to the stemming of what is perceived in many developing countries to be accelerating environmental deterioration on a very broad front.

The purpose of this article is to assess the current state of play and then to take a look behind these concerns and institutional responses. First, it is necessary to focus on the validity and structure of the concerns in question and to assess whether the responses so far regarded as acceptable are really addressing the issues. Growing out of the environmental concern and Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) analysis of the early 1970s-which essentially contended that unless we undertake a profound restructuring of our social and political system, we will rapidly destroy the biosphere-the ‘Green Movement’ has continued to articulate these concerns

Dr Adrian Atkinson is Course Director in Environmental Planning and Management at the Development Planning Unit, University College London.

027 1-207519 1 /NO40 1-1 3$06.50 0 1991 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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and been responsible for spreading environmental awareness into public perception. It has by now been generally recognized that the roots of current environmental deterioration in fact lie deep within the system of development that has been, and in most respects continues to be, pursued. The article thus ends with a discussion of broader issues of current development theory and its relation to the theories of political ecology, and the prospects for the kinds of change which this suggests as being appropriate and necessary.

THE STATE OF THE ART

As Baker (1989) pointed out in an earlier issue of this journal, by the mid-1980s there were few countries that did not possess either a ministry or department concerning itself with, or at least bearing the title, ‘environment’. These came about following the initial impetus of, and quite generally evolving out of, initiatives in the United States in the early 1970s. Specifically, the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) within the President’s Office-abolished by President Reagan following production of the seminal ‘Global 2000 Report’ (CEQ, 1982 tand legislated for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to be carried out on major development projects. The Environmental Protec- tion Agency (EPA) was then created to administer the EIAs, and evolved to undertake other aspects of environmental monitoring and management. In principle, this put environmental policy at the centre of power and created a framework for integrated environmental management. In practice, the policy mechanism was reliant on continuing Presidential commitment, and the EPA was inherently limited in its scope of activity by the fact that the individual States remained in control of the details of environmental monitoring and control: some States responded with improvements in their own practices, but others did not.

Prior to these developments, the term ‘environment’ already had a varied history that encompassed the quality of (urban) surroundings (Creese, 1966) and the configuration of ecological habitats and their influence on species life, including human societies. However, in its new institutional role the term came to be focused heavily on the control of pollution, the impact of development projects and the use of natural resources: overwhelmingly regulatory and policing functions on the edges of the development process, in no way party to the essential economic decision-making process. Where, exceptionally, as in the case of the UK Department of the Environ- ment, the term was applied to an agency that did include developmental responsibili- ties, the new outlook on environment and the functions which were undertaken around this were not allowed to inform any significant new insights with regard to the nature of the development process. A distinct terminology, and a rather narrow set of legislative and technical mechanisms, have come to be applied as ‘environmental management’ within this setting.

The variety of institutional forms adopted for environmental agencies in the developing countries has not been significantly different from that emerging in the industrialized countries. It simply became a matter of how, most conveniently and without major upset (Baker, 1989, p. 41), to slot these new organizations into the existing spectrum of government agencies. In some cases it was reasoned (Wandesforde-Smith and Moreira, 1985, p. 227) that the agency would operate in a less bureaucratically

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constrained way by being outside the regular ministerial and secretarial system to carry out its essentially regulatory and consciousness-raising functions.

The record of experience of these agencies reveals that, whether inside or more independent of the ministerial system, they have come to exercise at least some power and influence within the legal planning and regulatory framework provided in the industrialized countries. However, in the developing country context, lacking technical and professional expertise coupled with the relative ineffectiveness of the legislative framework, serious questions arose as to the capability of these agencies to make any meaninful impact upon the development process or, more seriously, upon the continuing deterioration of the environment outside the development process; put bluntly by Baker (1989, p. 42): ‘In many cases . . . no one knows what they are really supposed to do, and they seem to want a finger in every pie.’

On the positive side, there is probably no developing country that has not been assisted by one or more of the bilateral or multilateral agencies to produce a more or less detailed national environmental profile, documenting the range of problems which each country faces and, in many cases, including an action plan to remedy and manage these; the World Resources Institute (WRI) has documented over 220 of these (WRI, 1989). In the most successful cases, environmental agencies have achieved some improvements in monitoring pollution and EIAs have been produced for certain key projects; some of the agencies have also mounted environmental education programmes, acting in some respects like campaigning organizations to raise the political profile of environmental issues.

The international agencies have also played their part. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has operated in relation to the United Nations organizations in rather the same spirit as national environmental organizations within individual countries: lacking any substantial resources, it has attempted to encourage the adoption of more environmentally sensitive policies and programmes on the part of national governments and their sister agencies. The multilateral development banks (MDBs) also created environmental divisions ostensibly aimed at regulating the environmental quality of projects and programmes for which funds were loaned. It was here that the relative ineffectiveness of the new environmental agencies became most evident: with tiny staff resources, these divisions were simply not equipped to make any meaningful impact upon the immense financial forces for development which these banks were responsible for disbursing.

The fact was that by the mid-1980s the term ‘environment’ was everywhere visible across the bureaucratic spectrum, and governments and international agencies could respond to simple queries as to what they were doing about the environment by pointing to their agencies and listing the initiatives they had taken. However, the main concerns which had initiated this process of response continued to go largely unaddressed: environmentally damaging developments proceeded unabated and the quality of rural and urban environments was quite generally perceived as continuing to deteriorate. Already in the mid- 1970s, environmental non-government organizations (NGOs) in the United States, which had had such high hopes of the new environmental control mechanisms, were ruefully concluding that (Ingram and Ullery, 1977): ‘The most important result of NEPA may be to legitimize a decision- making process it was meant to change.’ By the late 1980s, substantial evidence of this was translated into a new drive to instil substance into environmental management.

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ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE ‘GREEN MOVEMENT’

Conventional histories of the environmental bureaucracies generally forget that they owe their existence in the first instance to the massive groundswell of environmental concern of the late 1960s and early 1970s, itself an adjunct to the civil and university campus disturbances that came to a head in 1968. With little organizational prep- aration, but accompanied by a substantial outpouring of literature proclaiming the coming global environmental crisis and the limits to growth, environmental concern exploded into the streets of American cities and the media of the industrialized world as a whole. NEPA-and also the World Bank’s hiring of its first Environmental Adviser-was a direct response to this, and the United Nations Environment Confer- ence in Stockholm in 1972, coming at the end of this manifestation, projected these concerns and analyses into the activities of the international agencies and lodged them amongst concerned citizens of the developing world.

The environmental lobby or movement-in recent years rechristened the Green Movement-has becoming a highly structured and key player in the evolution of environmental concern and its translation into practical environmental management. It is a complex organism about which there are many misconceptions, the most important of which need to be corrected before proceeding. First, it should be noted that within the movement there are various quite different perceptions of the problems we face and what should be done about them. Perhaps the most important divide is between those organizations almost purely interested in preserving wildlife and ecosystems by whatever means, and those which are concerned to address the underly- ing social and economic causes and consequences of perceived environmental degradation. On each side there are then more conservative and more radical organizations, the latter having been born in the concern of the early 1970s, and most of the former having evolved out of older conservation organizations. With growing public concern for environmental problems, the only tiny radical groups-such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace-have gained in legitimacy and substance, and there has been a marked radicalization of the originally more conservative groups. In addition, we have seen the formation and growth of Green political parties right across the industrialized world and extending into the developing world.

A second misconception is that the Green Movement is purely a phenomenon of the industrialized countries. It is true to say that the landscape of NGOs in the developing world is different from that which we find in the industrialized countries- is, indeed, different from one country to another (this is, of course, also true of the industrialized world). The point is that, on the whole, environmental NGOs in developing countries that are not purely concerned with nature conservation are sensitive to the very different social, economic and, indeed, political circumstances they face in their concern to address indigenous environmental problems. In developing countries there tend to be closer links between development NGOs, environmental NGOs and those concerned specifically with the issues of women and minority groups.

So the Green Movement does not appear altogether in the same guise in developing countries as in industrialized countries. However, there can be no doubt of a strong growth in NGO around environmental issues, as evidenced by the increase between 1983 and 1987 from 80 to over 200 entries for South and South East Asia alone in the Malaysian Friends of the Earth (Sahabat Alam Malaysia: SAM) environmental NGO directory (Sam, 1987). Some of these NGOs have actually been formed as


fronts for government projects (GONGOs), and others are vehicles for mounting donor programmes (DONGOs) (Brown and Korten, 1989), but the existence of these should not detract from the real strength of indigenous organization in a situation of vastly diminished resources relative to their sister organizations in the industrialized world. Some of these groups rival the professional and organizational capabili- ties of the foremost environmental NGOs in the industrialized world, and the level of co-ordination facilitated by such organizations as SAM and the African NGO Environmental Network is very impressive: the conferring of the Alternative Nobel Prize upon SAM was well justified.

At this point we should remind ourselves that ‘environmental problems’ do not simply present themselves to the unaided observer, but are socially created intellectual constructs. To put it another way, many a past civilization has foundered upon its own abuse of the environment, upon which it was metabolically dependent, and there is no a priori reason why our civilization should not do the same. The sudden emergence of environmental issues at the top of the international political agenda in the late 1980s is no simple reaction to overt problems, nor is it itself problem-free. ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al., 1972) and related analyses of the early 1970s did not have the immediate effect of shocking the political process into accepting the need, as expressed by the august Club of Rome, to abandon economic growth and to radically reshape social and political reality. But it started a process of rethink- ing the development process, which has been gradually running its course.

Whereas environmental problems have recurred back through history-for instance, even major chemical accidents, such as Seveso and Bhopal, were a regular occurrence long before the advent of the environmental movement (Weir, 1988, App. C r t h e Limits to Growth scenario provided a new context within which to conceptua- lize these problems: rather than random acts of fate, environmental problems could all be construed as components of a systematically flawed development paradigm. With each new dramatic environmental event, and by constantly reconfiguring old news (warnings concerning the ‘greenhouse effect’ have been expressed from time to time since its discovery in the late 19th century), the Green Movement gradually succeeded in raising the political profile of the environment within the framework suggested by the Limits to Growth analysis. This was dramatically assisted by the increasing attention paid by the television media in the industrialized countries to environmental issues, as understood by the movement, moving beyond simple presen- tations of natural destruction to more complex analyses of the links between social and economic practices and the overt and insidious degradation of the environment (TVE, 1986).

This process of deepening influence of the environmentalist message expressed itself well in the shift in emphasis with regard to priorities in the structure of world development, as expressed by the two ‘progressive’ international commission reports of the 1980s. The Brandt Commission Report (Independent Commission on Interna- tional Development Issues, 1980), whilst mindful of enviromental issues, nevertheless treated them peripherally; the Brundtland Commission (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), on the other hand, brought the concept of ‘sustainable development’ into the centre of the development debate.

By the late 1980s the weight of some of the environmental NGOs, in terms of the funds they were receiving and hence the professionalism which they could bring to bear, had become considerable, and they were able to mount some very high-profile

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campaigns. The Ecologist magazine, which had, with its ‘Blueprint for Survival’, featured as one of the stars of the environmental outburst of the early 1970s, had for many years been highly critical of conventional approaches to the ‘development’ of the developing world, and more specifically of the World Bank. It was now joined in this campaign by a number of the more conservative American environmental NGOs, a most notable manifestation of this being the publication by the Sierra Club (1986) of a trenchant attack on the MDBs under the title Bankrolling Disasters, which it distributed freely in large numbers.

Whilst these organizations might take some of the credit for the substantial augmen- tation of environmental considerations in the procedures of the MDBs, the kinds of policies which they tended to promote in developing countries could not be seen in a wholly unambivalent light. The emphasis on saving nature from development could and did lead to the establishment and enforcement of nature reserves, which excluded even traditional peoples from the land from which they gained their liveli- hood. The notion which these organizations devised, of buying off the debts of the Amazonian countries in exchange for management deals with regard to the preservation of areas of rainforest, could be construed with substantial validity by the governments and NGOs of those countries as little more than imperialism in a new guise. In short, their narrow understanding of, and focus upon, preservation of nature was leading to some very naive and crude social and political interventions.

But then, this could be construed as par for the course in a world being transformed in the context of a battle of high ideological constructs. Notwithstanding the rather high failure rate of development projects, even in terms of their own narrow economic criteria, not to mention the heavy tolls of social dislocation and questionable environmental change, there have nevertheless been very large numbers of interventions by development agencies that have been deemed by donors and recipients alike to be successful, and there is a certain consensus that judges the development process as a whole to be effective (Cassen et al., 1986). Nevertheless, seen from the point of view of the individual project or programme, the literature on aid and development finds it necessary to stress the importance of the macroeconomic, and more broadly the general macro-context, to have a crucial effect on ‘success’, judged on whatever terms, and it is therefore necessary to look a little more closely at the nature of these wider issues.

ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

The general context to which notions of effectiveness and success relate back is, of course, the notion that the whole world is in process of ‘modernization’. Notwith- standing increasingly fundamental questioning of this notion in recent years, to which I will be referring at greater length below, throughout most of this century there has been a consensus on the necessity for all societies to ‘modernize’, and the fierce arguments around problems of development have been concerned not with whether, but simply with how this should be achieved and the ways in which this was being inhibited. The main positions concerned whether ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ was the most effective route to development; the notion of the ‘Third World’ originally arose out of an idea that there might be an alternative route more appropriate for societies emerging from colonialism and not yet substantially involved in the process (Toye, 1987, p. 6; Harris, 1987, p. 7). Then in the 1960s arose the school of ‘under-


development’ theorists, asserting that the Third World was being kept in a state of underdevelopment and poverty by the ostensible ‘developmental’ mechanisms of the world capitalist system.

The bilateral and multilateral development agencies and MDBs, whilst avoiding engagement in the latter debates, were nevertheless sensitive to the accusations, and in the 1960s and 1970s applied themselves to the creation of infrastructure and alleviation of poverty that capitalism would manifestly not, of itself, achieve. It could be argued that, in time, the dual mechanisms of private capitalist investment and aid interventions would lead to self-sustaining economic development along the path already taken by the industrialized nations, and the emergence during this period of a number of ‘newly industrializing nations’ (NICs) appeared to substantiate this idea.

In the 1980s, however, these arguments fell apart. The rightward shift in politics in key capitalist countries brought with it a reassertion of laissez faire notions of development strategy, shifting the terms of reference of the development agencies (Toye, 1987, p. 47). The categorical rejection by the British government of the propo- sals of the Brandt Commission to increase assistance to the developing countries was discussed at the time in the pages of The Guardian (17th July, 1980, p. 17) under the title ‘Let them eat cake’: poverty alleviation was out and encouragement of markets was in. A liberal gut reaction sees this in moral terms as a surge of selfishness and greed, but in reality the whole edifice of modern economic theory is premised upon Adam Smith’s contention that the pursuit of self-interest achieves the common good better than any conscious effort to promote the common good directly: the Northern lending agencies were merely reasserting economic consistency.

It was not in practice the reorientation of MDB lending priorities that had the greatest effect on the economic context of the developing countries (it must be admit- ted that attempts at poverty alleviation had in any case largely failed to penetrate to the very poorest), but rather the macroeconomic restructing of the industrialized economies and in particular the raising of interest rates. The ‘debt crisis’ precipitated by the sudden increase in the cost of outstanding loans, in conjunction with an incipient collapse of the international prices paid for primary produce, created the context for the stagnation of the economies of the majority of developing countries and, in the case of as many as a third, the emergence of what is euphemistically referred to as ‘negative growth’. The term ‘Third World’ increasingly lost its meaning as the greater diversity of situations and problems became evident (Toye, 1987, p. 14; Harris, 1987).

It has been widely documented how these new circumstances generally militated against the success of development projects and specifically accelerated negative environmental problems. In order to service their debts, governments in developing countries have been, if not forced, at least encouraged to make investments that promise to precipitate long-term damage to the environment. As is so often iterated, measures to protect the environment make inroads into the economic viability of investments. Pressures of the debt crisis, in conjunction with the new emphasis on serving international market demand for whatever can be advantageously locally produced-be it mineral exploitation, supplying exotic fruit and vegetables or manufacturing under conditions of cheap labour and lax environmental standards-militate against rigour with respect to environmental controls.

Even in situations where environmental agencies possess the expertise, technology

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and legal instruments, governments in developing countries simply cannot afford to pursue environmental objectives with any conviction. The environmental NGOs of the developing countries are well aware of the links between the recent evolution of development mechanisms and environmental deterioration, and have been attempting a spirited intervention in the final stages of the recent round of (GATT) negotia- tions, which appear to be smoothing the way to greater ease of intervention of multinational capital in the economies of the developing countries (Third World Resurgence, 1990); this is seen as presaging accelerating negative pressures on the environment.

A further cause of environmental deterioration that is widely discussed, and which is clearly also influenced by the new attitude to development, is the way in which the poor are forced to destroy their own environment in order simply to survive. In part this relates to the lack of resources to maintain the environment, and also to the pressures to which traditional peoples find themselves subjected by the ‘formal sector’ of the economy and by patterns of land ownership and transaction. The weakening of poverty alleviation programmes and promotion of laissez faire, in place of structured government planning and investment programmes, encourages ‘informal’ processes of population movements and economic practices that are de facto environmentally damaging, and over which environmental agencies can exert little influence, even if their remit should direct them to attempt it, especially within the context of the retreat of government generally from social and economic management.

DEVELOPMENT AND CULTURE

The fact is, however, that even within the development regime of the 1960s and 1970s, these social processes were already at work, pointing a critical finger beyond the immediate regime and more generally at the whole notion of ‘development’ as hitherto conceived. Riddell (1981, p. xi), anxious to point out that rural overpopula- tion and environmental degradation in developing countries-and we might add to this the creation of urban squalor as well-are not simply some consequence of ‘lack of responsibility’ or ‘lack of adequate environmental institutions’, asserted that these relate directly to the interventions of ‘development’: primary health care introduced without adequate knowledge and control of the mechanisms of social reproduction; improved-yield grain varieties introduced without adequate concern, knowledge or control of the social and economic consequences at the local level; mass education without thought for the radical change in values away from rural self-reproduction; and encouraging urbanization without there being any structure to receive or employ the human end-product. These are just a few of the problems.

In summary, we are looking at concerted processes of cultural destruction premised upon a notion of cultural reconstruction in the image of European culture. The messianic nature of European culture has blinded us to the fact that all that has been and continues to be perpetrated in the name of such value-loaded abstractions as ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ are no more than an insistence that European ways of thinking and doing are inherently better for everyone. When we see a Thai farmer carrying water in a plastic bucket, or an inhabitant of a Nairobi squatter settlement with a radio against his ear, when we see the city streets full of cars


and the proliferation of modern buildings, we are reassured that, given the choice, ‘people’ choose our culture over their own. We forget the systemic nature of ideology and culture and the generations of escalating coercive forces that have systematically encouraged, cajoled and, in the breach, forced our culture upon the world at large.

But in the end, however willing the people might be, the sheer incommensurability of profound cultural conditioning has left large parts of the human race incapable of crossing the cultural divide, and they fall increasingly into the gaping hole between, subsisting in a semi-dissolved cultural mess that is held together by a contingent instrumentality that builds shacks out of whatever materials come to hand, supplies whatever services will scrape enough together to buy the means of survival, and which keeps itself entertained by reference to the glittering oddities of ‘Western’ consumerist culture. The destruction of the environment, in so far as it is perpetrated by indigenous peoples, is but the material reflection of the retreat from cultural structures which traditionally regulate the local use of contingent place.

On the whole, as Redclift (1987, p. 151) put it:

‘Traditional environmental knowledge is not only devalued by development institutions, it is also largely overlooked in the environmental management literature . . . Without knowledge of the culture a people possess one is unlikely to be aware of their knowledge of their environment.’

Gradually in recent years, however, there has been the growth of a realization amongst development institutions of the dimension of cultural vandalism that the development process has hitherto entailed. Already in the mid 1970s, the International Labour Office (1976) was conceptualizing the ‘informal sector’ and attempting to give structure to methods of constructing small-scale initiatives to address economic problems amongst the poor, but without yet including the dimension of environmental sustain- ability. Increasingly aid agencies have allowed themselves to be influenced by indigenous intellectual perceptions (which are, however, themselves on the whole already far from the roots of indigenous culture) and have initiated new kinds of development programmes that ‘put the last first’ (Chambers, 1983).

Although there remain great constraints within the structure of development agencies upon the management of small, flexible projects and programmes, there has nevertheless been a proliferation of experiments with new mechanisms that supply knowledge and instruments to local organizations to construct appropriate means to solving immediate problems (Conroy and Litvinoff, 1988). The MDBs, too, are increasingly focusing on such approaches to the use of investment funding (Cernea, 1985). But so far there remains to these initiatives an air of their being ‘intermediate’ (as in Intermediate Technology), in the sense of providing staging posts between the dissolution of indigenous culture and the achievement of modernization, or of providing a ‘breathing space’ pending the implementation of more substantial programmes that overcome the problems resulting from the old (Toye, 1987, p. 20).

In short, these small-scale initiatives at the local level are as yet lacking in any context regarding an ‘alternative development model’ of which they might comprise components. With respect to the rural side of things, attempts have been made to construct a concept of ‘ecodevelopment’ (Riddell, 1981; Bartelmus, 1986) and, more ambitiously, links have been suggested between emerging political ecology in the

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industrialized countries and a new development theory for the developing countries (Galtung et al., 1980). Meanwhile, however, the conventional development juggernaut continues to dominate the landscape and, together with the depredations of the ‘debt trap’, continues the process of environmental destruction which local institutions are largely inappropriate and, indeed, powerless to arrest. Fatally flawed though the existing paradigm might be (Dube, 1988; George, 1988, pp. 255-263), it has yet to be decisively challenged.

POLITICAL ECOLOGY: THE NEXT STAGE?

Rather than leaving matters on this rather pessimistic note, it is useful to return to the notion, referred to earlier, that it has been the growth of the Green Movement in the industrialized countries that has so far made the running in inducing the creation of environmental institutions. The question now is: has this movement run its course, are the existing institutions the necessary culminating point of the efforts to bring the concerns of the Limits to Growth to bear upon the political process?

An interesting recent analysis of the Green Movement (Dobson, 1990), which looked at the literature of the movement itself and drew conclusions with regard to the ultimate aims to which it claims to aspire, made it clear that the consciousness- raising exercises of recent years, and the new environmental institutions which this has helped to bring into existence, are intended as but a preliminary to considerably more far-reaching social and political changes than we have so far seen. Referring to the events of the late 1980s, Dobson ended by asserting that ‘Act One of the Green Movement’s paradise play is over, and it is time the curtain was lifted on Act Two.’

O’Riordan (1976), in one of the earliest analyses of the movement, had posited the notion that a new spectrum of attitudes was in process of emerging, ranging from the ‘technocentric’, initially the natural mode of thought within contemporary European culture, to the ‘ecocentric’, which encompassed the first sketches of new attitudes that would be necessary to fully accommodate the social and political changes implied by the Limits to Growth perspective. In the 1981 edition of his book, O’Riordan went on to fill out the spectrum, as if this might be a series of stages through which our social attitudes, and with these our social and political institutions, might evolve from the technocentric to the ecocentric. Certainly, the achievements of the late 1980s were such as to indicate a clear shift of opinion out of ‘cornucopian’ technocentrism-the unquestioned assumption that technology will always come to the rescue, and that we can rely on technocratic management to see us into the future-into ‘accommodating’ technocentrism, which insists on the need for economic and legislative adjustments, managed by effective environmental institutions.

But what likelihood is there that matters will proceed onwards to Dobson’s Act Two, which would, according to O’Riordan’s progress chart, encompass a transition to a society run on the basis of ‘self-reliance and soft technologies’? On the face of it the task seems quite hopeless; but so have major changes in the configuration of social and political life in the past until these have actually been embarked upon. The solidity and apparent necessity of the macrostructure of the world economic and political system creates a massive scepticism in the average citizen that any

Environmental and development 41 1

progress might be possible towards greater self-reliance in the industrialized countries, and all indications are that international interdependence is on the increase. But at the same time there are growing initiatives working in a diametrically opposite direction.

The growth in efforts to develop and support projects which empower people in their immediate locality in developing countries has its direct parallel in the industrialized world in the revival of local self-awareness and (with the notable exception of Britain) the strengthening of local institutional capacities under the heading of ‘decentralization’. There is certainly an incipient groundswell in favour of regionalism in Europe and with this of notions of local economic planning and development. Whether these condense out into an altogether stronger move towards the Green Movement’s notion of ‘bioregiona1ism’-which is concerned ultimately to fuse local culture with local environment in a context of modem, albeit appropriately rede- signed, technology4learly remains to be seen.

This would without doubt require a significant shift in political outlook. But the ‘ecophilosophical’ side of the Green Movement contends (Naess, 1989, p. 130 et seq) this would in all likelihood emerge naturally, were we able to effect some fairly radical shifts in our cultural outlook. There has recently been considerable focus, discussed under the heading of ‘postmodernism’ (Harvey, 1989), on the feeling that some kind of major cultural shift is, in fact, already under way. Initially this appears in the form of a loosening of cultural bearings without yet possessing any notion of a coherent alternative to ‘modernism’. Arguments are, however, beginning to emerge that ‘political ecology’, encompassing environmentalist, feminist and radical egalitarian ideas, might provide a framework for a ‘new paradigm’ (Shiva, 1988; Atkinson, 1991), and indications are that this will imminently emerge as an intellectual growth area.

According to this scenario, the main solution to deteriorating environmental conditions in developing countries is, in the first instance, the removal of the current macroframework that is imposed upon the world by the industralized countries, serving in the first instance their material interest but also-and arguably more proble- matically-satisfying deeper ideological needs to justify the cultural and social psy- chological desires of their own people to see the world conforming to their vision of what is True and Right. Whilst the substitution of a more thoroughly assertive paradigm of self-reliance for the current development paradigm (and within it a rather long-standing set of suppositions about ‘progress’ and ‘rationality’) in the North could be expected to free the developing world from the physical and ideological domination of European culture, it does not, unfortunately, automatically resolve the problem of local environmental degradation and cultural dissolution in those countries.

However, in so far as the new paradigm is concerned with a resurgence of local self-awareness and self-reliance in the developing countries themselves (not the same as nationalism), it is clearly continuing along the path already being taken by the emerging consensus of development agencies, which notes the growing diversification of developing countries referred to earlier in this paper. Whilst this is far from saying that the fruitfulness of dialogue and cultural exchange will cease, it does imply that the terms upon which this exchange takes place will alter; again we can surmise that this is no more than continuing along the path already being trodden by the new ‘grass roots’ emphasis of aid projects, but it would remove the strident contradic-

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tion that currently exists between the requirements and effects of the macroframework and the objectives of these projects and programmes themselves.

Returning, finally, to the role of the existing environmental agencies in the developing countries, we can see them as Janus-faced creatures. On the one hand, they are restrictive of broader debate on the solution to environmental problems, because their terms of reference focus their attention exclusively on curative measures, deflect- ing attention from the causes of disease. It should be acknowledged that even this narrow remit does have some benefits in developing awareness and expertise--a culture of environmental management-which, even with the de-escalation of the ‘chemicalization’ of the environment which a Green future, if it is to emerge, would demand, is likely nevertheless to remain important.

But the other face of the Janus figure is the link, which so many of these agencies make, between the local Green Movement and the functioning of government. In my experience, in several developing countries, I have found in these agencies at once some very sound scientific thinking about technology and the environment, linked to a Green sensibility that spontaneously participates in environmental initiatives and debates and is happy to serve the institution in its environmental education campaigns. The links between environmental NGOs and agencies is generally strong and mutually supportive. But if we are to expect a further shift along the ‘technocentric-ecocentric’ spectrum in the coming years, then it is difficult to say which way these institutions will go: into the centre of the stage, or into oblivion as the whole institutional framework adjusts itself to addressing the disease rather than the symp- toms.

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Bartelmus, P. (1986). Environment and Development, Allen and Unwin, Boston. Brown, L. D. and Korten, D. C. (1989). The Role of Voluntary Organizations in Development,

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Documents

Environment and development: Concepts and practices in transition