Environmental management as a third-world problem

Policy Sciences 23: 163-176, 1990. �9 1990 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Environmental management as a third-world problem

J O H N D. M O N T G O M E R Y l Harvard University, Kennedy School, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA 02138 U.S.A.

Abstract. Of the three major sources of environmental deterioration - CFCs, carbon dioxide, and deforestation and land degradation - only the first two can be eased by industrial policies alone. The second and third also require changes in mass behavior, especially in pre-industrial countries. In order to encourage action on the part of their governments, international agencies have supported the preparation of more than fifty country environmental profiles. The next steps will require a careful analysis of current direct and indirect policies influencing human behavior toward the environment. This article describes the 'policy environment of environmental policies' in third-world countries and suggests a strategy for creating a coherent body of incentives to motivate environment-supporting public behavior.

Although most of the world's attention to environmental problems has fo- cussed on gas-guzzling cars, the growing reliance on chlorofluorcarbons, and the inefficient uses of energy in modern industry, probably about half the pre- dicted Greenhouse Effect over the next quarter century will come from activities of pre-industrial societies whose populations are growing faster than the generation of new resources to accommodate them. 2 While industrialized countries will try to change the habits of large industries, low-income countries will have to deal with farmers, squatters, and household industries bent on modernizing their styles of production and consumption.

Modernization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America will make things worse, not better. But who should oppose modernization? Not environmentalists, who are already painfully aware of suggestions from the third world that the Have-Nations - which have already built their factories and now can afford to clean them up at their leisure - are now demanding purity at the expense of the Have-Not Nations - which must settle for filth or else adopt costlier production methods to avoid the environmental consequences of cheaper processes.

Low-income countries will be further inconvenienced in dealing with the environment by the fact that the resources they are expected to conserve - land and water - are essential to survival. The sacrifices they are called on to make are not merely conveniences like the comfortable transportation pro- vided by eight-cylinder cars and the aerosol-powered deodorants that are so easy to apply. In reversing destructive behavior, they will have to deal with millions of farmers eking out a bare living, not a mere handful of manufacturers serving an opulent public.

But they will have to act. International pressures and the inexorable limita- tions of global resources will compel them to. The larger questions are

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whether and how political leaders can mobilize support for such action, and what kinds of policies will be effective.

The political arena

Adopting and implementing a policy of managing the environment is not like dealing with an unproductive agriculture, a noncompetitive industry, public debt, or even national defense, each of which has a constituency seeking immediate advantages like greater productivity, more profits, measurable improvements in the budget, or a balance of parallel forces. Environmental management is not productive, it offers no profits, whatever improvements it brings about are hard to measure, and it is not challenged by competing alternatives (except neglect). Being a public good it has no interest-based constituency, and its value to mankind changes with political whims. Almost any action taken to improve the environment will be plagued by 'free riders' who will benefit from whatever others do even if they do not join in ameliorative efforts themselves.

Current interest in the global 'Greenhouse Effect' illustrates the problem politicians face. Action is needed in three prime areas: (1) discovering and introducing substitutes for chlorofluorcarbons (CECs); (2) reducing the use of fossil fuels; and (3) arresting and reversing the deforestation and land abuse that is occurring in the rainfed tropics. These actions are discontinuous, in that each involves different actors; each is costly and likely to be unreward- ing in the short term for those expected to make the required investments; in each case, even a successful action in any one area can make only a slight con- tribution to the desired outcome, which means that each actor is tempted to wait for the first step to be taken by his neighbor. And in each case, the pri- mary actors are private (numerous individuals and households or a few corporations), but the planning and the coercion required must come from governments. Since governments, like individuals, can hope that the actions taken by their neighbors will be enough to do the trick, the incentive for delay seems to rise with the urgency of the action required. Aware of this paradox, statesmen are attempting to use diplomacy to promote joint action, including exhortations to some members of the international community to make dis- proportional sacrifices, in effect leaving the others to their own devices.

Stopping the production of CECs requires a few manufacturers to comply, once the order is given and appropriate substitutes have been found. But dis- counting the burning of coal and oil touches nearly all industry and most homes outside the tropics. Reducing the production of methane caused by anaerobic decay, whether from grazing cows or irrigated paddy fields, will require the cooperation of agriculturalists in many parts of the world who may see little alternative to their present behavior. And restoring the tropical rain forests calls for action by Brazil and other despoilers of the woods in Asia and Latin America, whose governments will have to protect trees against

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hosts of their own citizens, both corporate and individual. From the stand- point of most individuals involved, the sacrifices and the benefits are heavily disproportionate, yet the actions required cannot be implemented by the conventional regulatory or developmental agencies of government without their help.

Note that the second and third of these steps are essentially the responsibility of the low-income countries. They will affect almost all of their most active government agencies. Their ministries of agriculture will have to discourage inappropriate uses of fertilizers, usually by illiterate or semi-literate farmers, and find substitutes for most of the insecticides that are used for pest control. Their irrigation departments will have to deal with problems of waterlogging and salinity that do not appear in the large-scale industrial agriculture of California. Their migrant populations are contributing to desertifi- cation in parts of Africa and Asia. The location and licensing of industries away from overcrowded metropoles is a problem for the developing world more than the developed one. Urbanization is a problem in Mexico, India, and even several African countries that exceeds the greatest horrors of our own industrial slums. Commerce and trade ministries in Asia and Africa, more than those in the U.S. and Europe, are going to have to deal with the wasteful uses of natural resources, including those caused by international demand? There are even unfavorable consequences of actions by a ministry of health that opens up new areas of colonization by ridding them of the tse-tse fly, such as the destruction of fragile and hitherto inviolate soils when the population pressures mount. Education, too, encourages high consumption in countries that cannot support it within a responsible regime of environmental protection. The problem crosses just about all conventional sectoral boundaries and involves multiple patterns of use and control that are far more complicated than the responsibilities exercised by any of the existing ministries and agencies of those overstressed governments.

The fact that none of the conventional sectoral agencies can cover the entire range of needed environmental action means that governments will have to establish new organizations to do so, probably at the highest level. Just as Europe's forestry departments cannot protect trees that are being killed by industrial and urban pollution, so the irrigation departments in most of the world have little to say about agricultural practices that degrade the water, or about the needs of urban populations that are drawing down the same watershed that they see as their own domain. There are a few development programs that are now being administered through special devices for intersectoral coordination, but they still tend to ignore environmental factors. Programs undertaken in the name of integrated rural development, for example, try to incorporate in one managerial jurisdiction every activity that is required to pursue regional objectives, but they tend to ignore 'externalities' like the environmental consequences of their actions. One study analyzed 1900 typical incidents in the management of integrated rural development projects, and turned up only eleven instances in which problems of ecology

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and the environment were conceived as issues, and even in that almost in- finitesimal number of situations, the problem was resolved by activities like tree planting or environmental sanitation, all of which were called for in the project itself. 4

The institutions now in control of the human behavior that affects the environment would be overwhelmed by the suggestion that they take responsibility for the kinds of changes that will be required. The differences between private and public ownership do not include any evidence that governments (whether socialist or capitalist in orientation) are better environmental citizens than private corporations or community or cooperative producers and users. The relevant bureaucratic patterns are also confused: foresters working to protect public stands of timber are not sure whether or not to behave the same way as they do when they are assigned to serve as advisors to community woodlands. On the basis of experience, they usually see themselves as enforcers, whether the property belongs to public, communal, or private users. Their role is further complicated by the fact that sometimes communi- ties that hold forests as common property have different perceptions of their rights than do private leaseholders or owners. There are also different per- spectives from national, provincial, and local jurisdictions, each with its own style of decision-making and relations to the public. The bureaucratic siting of responsibility makes a difference in regulation and enforcement, too: a cabinetqevel agency has different clout than a presidential unit or a depart- mental agency. Even user groups respond to new programs differently de- pending on whether they are managed in a participatory style or under hierar- chical directives.

Thus when politicians finally do become ready to act, they still have to con- front uncertainties about which level of government to allocate to which of the necessary changes in human behavior. For reasons already suggested, governments at all levels hope the initiatives will come from without.

The policy arena

It is unlikely that any significant environmental policies can be effective unless they possess the capacity to influence the behavior of whatever major groups are contributing to the ensemble of degradation. In some instances, it is suffi- cient to induce changes in the behavior of a few manufacturers, or cities, or food producers) The U.S. economy grew over a third between 1973 and 1986 without increasing energy consumption, for example, by taking measures that consumers hardly noticed. 6 But few such 'easy fixes' remain.

In most cases, especially in the less developed countries (LDCs), the behavioral changes required to conserve the environment will require a major social effort, both because many actors are likely to be involved, and because for most of them the innovations required will be costly. Such is the case when environmental policies catch up with migrant herdsmen in the Sahel, goat-

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breeders in Central America, farmers in grain belts, and irrigators every- where. Changing the behavior of these people will be decisive for arresting certain forms of environmental degradation. Likewise, the current overuse of tropical forests is determined more by farmers, ranchers, and villagers than large timber corporations or even the developers and roadbuilders. Desertifi- cation and erosion caused as much by a multitude of small activities as by major infrastructure investments.

In cases where the behavioral changes are of this cost and magnitude, the government is the only actor capable of reaching the population involved.

Policies directed toward the changing of mass behavior are, of course, nothing new: they range from simple acts like fixing prices - a decision that is relatively easy to administer - to extremely complex efforts to change family- size preferences in order to restrain population growth. The first group of policies, once decided, leaves no discretion to the public. After manufac- turerers have been forced to adopt environment-saving processes or products, the public has no recourse exept to use them, unless it applies to the black market to obtain the obsolete forbidden goods. The second group of policies is much more difficult: it requires governments to respect freedom of choice among their citizens while reducing the range of options available to the public. In either case, whether governments have to regulate a few manufacturers or influence a mass of citizens, they are diminishing a traditional freedom of action. Neither action is likely to be popular. But dealing with the citizens is harder than dealing with the manufacturers.

Governments can resort to many instruments for achieving compliance when they decide to influence public behavior. Coercive measures are considered the least desirable of all policy instruments, both because they offend the moral sensibilities of some political leaders and because they are so difficult to carry o u t . 7 Positive inducements (usually taking the form of subsidies) are the preferred mechanism, but they too may give moral offense if they are seen as depriving individuals of free choice. The middle ground between coercion and inducement is education and participative decisionmaking 8 That course is preferred on all counts, though it is administratively difficult, and even sometimes awkward, and it can rarely bring quick results.

Policymakers remain uncomfortable at having to deal with such behavioral dimensions of their work. The manipulative qualities of these policies seem incompatible with both economic preferences for a free market and the pofiti- cal value of preserving free choice. Thus, except in rare cases where decision- makers are forced to consider public response (for example, where they encounter a black market in pricecontrolled goods, or discover a surplus of undistributed contraceptives), they prefer to ignore even the most important behavioral consequences of their decisions, if they can.

This studied ignorance is gradually disappearing as public responses become more visibly central to the goals of public policy. Program evaluations cannot ignore public responses any longer. Many formal evaluations of development policies now include opinion surveys, and there are occasional

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efforts as well to measure public response in behavioral terms (using economic and social indicators as surrogates for aggregated individual response data). Fortunately, as behavioral sciences advance, it is becoming easier to intro- duce these considerations at the project-design phase of policy-making.

There is now much more information available about public responses to government policies than was the case a few decades ago, but most of it has been aggregated sectorally. We know quite a lot about the numbers of 'users' of community health or family planning facilities; or the 'adopters' of preferred cultivation techniques among farmers; or the 'compliers' with health and safety regulations, for example. The next step is to discover how citizens behave as occupants of the environment. As we have already suggested, environmental policies have to be viewed as intersectoral (multi-agency) or even nonsectoral (i.e., unadministered) phenomena. This distinction, too, has consequences. The two call for different organizational responses.

When environmental policies are intersectoral, the problem must be solved by administrative and policy coordination. A coherent program is needed to determine whether or not current sector-based influences on individual behavior are compatible with each other in a given region. What environmentalists may want farmers to do may conflict with what irrigation technicians or crop specialists may want of them; public health officials might prefer more generous use of water than conservationists would; and practices harmful to the environment might be encouraged by industrial or urban developers or even city planners. Thailand provides a vivid example: the Agricultural Land Reform Office is issuing land titles to squatters who have denuded national forest areas and converted them to argricultural uses; while the Department of Forestry seeks to eliminate farming in forest areas in order to encourage reforestation. In such cases - which may be far more frequent and less obvious than the examples cited - it will become necessary to start the analysis with behavioral requirements as the end goal of policy rather than as a means.

When environmental policies are 'non-sectoral,' new agencies and instruments of government have to be created. Actions to protect the air, for example, cannot be undertaken by a Department of Air Purity because there is none; the American effort on behalf of water purity called for the creation of new bureaucratic organization with an unspecified client group; and reducing the dumping of hazardous wastes became the function of a Super Fund because no one had ever thought it might be necessary to create a Ministry of Waste that could take charge.

International influences on national policies

Most of the first steps dealing with 'nonsectoral' environmental problems in the industrialized countries have come as a result of international influence.

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International negotiations have prodded reluctant governments to do collec- tively what each of them recognizes as necessary but is unwilling to do alone. Indeed, the international level displays the clearest example of the learning process involved in dealing with environmental issues.

Readers of this journal need no reminding of the international accomplish- ments of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, the Vienna conference in 1977, or the UN Environmental Conference in Montreal on Sept 8, 1987. By now more than 50 nations have actually re- sponded to the invitation to work out controls over aerosol production and other uses of CECs, now that they have been identified as the greatest manageable threat to the protective ozone layer? And the next requirement for international action is also foreseeable: carbon dioxide emissions control will have to come soon.

Thus far, international negotiation has been successful among the wealth- iest nations, which, by no accident, are also the greatest offenders: European Economic Community members produce 42% of those threatening uses of the CECs, the U.S. 33%, Japan 11%, and the Soviet Union 10%. In one sense, dealing with those problems - the nonsectoral ones - are the easiest steps. Only a few big producers have to be induced to take the actions necessary to slow down the use of the CECs, along with the more wasteful forms of carbon dioxide pollution. Getting stricter controls over these uses has been possible because action was taken when there were only a few producers and regulatory policies were therefore still politically manageable, l~

But the sources of degradation in other parts of the world are both much more widespread and harder to deal with. Previous international actions have left largely untouched the sources of degradation in the unindustrialized countries, where the kinds of action that will be required involve not so much new institutions as the coordination of old ones, i.e., the development of 'intersectoral' policies. Tropical rain forests, none of which are located in the industrialized countries, are not a new element in national policymaking in the Third World. They are already being influenced by the policies and actions of several different agencies, each proceeding according to its own priorities and purposes. Concern over the environment is not high on those lists.

Up to now, the underdeveloped nations have participated in international negotiations largely as clients. Both the World Bank and the American Agen- cy for Intenational Development (AID), which together provide the lion's share of the funding for large-scale programs that might degrade the ecology, now require environmental impact assessments as a precondition for foreign aid. Such actions are not really international negotiations except by courtesy: rather are direct applications abroad of standards that had been developed to deal with different conditions (for example, those suggested in the U.S. under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, for the construction of nuclear power stations, the siting of incinerators and the actions of chemical

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industries that used volatile and dangerous elements). H It is scarcely sur- prising that the low-income countries are suspicious of international negotiations as a basis for developing environmental policies.

The first step in encouraging government action in those parts of the world has been to provide information on a systematic basis. Countries that possess only scattered information about their natural resource conditions can hardly be expected to deal with them holistically. International agencies have therefore begun generating 'environmental profiles' to serve as a basis of national planning. These studies have displayed a mounting degree of sophistication and penetration as more of them have appeared. Thanks to their common funding and staffing, they have followed a cumulative path, and there are now enough of them to demonstrate a learning process in the analysis of natural resource policies. Something like a 'stages of development' scenario can now be written about environmental management.

At the first level, there appears a simple inventory or geography of physical resources. All the existing country profiles contain such information. In some country reports, such as those prepared for Rwanda and Madagascar, that is all the reports themselves have to offer, leaving it to the future, and perhaps the countries themselves, to take further analytical steps. 12

A second level of analysis identifies trends or assesses priorities among the emergent problems. This function is performed adequately by the Thailand profile and one or two others? 3 These reports go beyond descriptive geography, building on a careful inventory of resources to interpret trends. These interpretations tend to make use of global or deductive model in order to appraise the seriousness of different problems.

The third step is to outline the organizational implications of the findings. This function, too, is illustrated, at least perfunctorily, in the Thai report. The policy implications drawn there begin with a proposal to establish some coordinating mechanism, envisaged essentially as a device for exchanging information. The assumption seems to be that the research capacity and administrative integration that will be required for effective action will come later.

The Nepal study goes a fourth step, offering a policy history of the efforts the government has already taken to improve environmental conditions. TM

Histories of this type are especially valuable as guidelines to the feasibility of future actions. The Nepalese situation does not provide much ground for an optimistic appraisal of the prospects for national action, but the pilot projects that have been undertaken there show that when the will and the resources are present, much can be done to arrest environmental deterioration.

At the fifth level, which is a precondition to undertaking wide-scale behavioral changes, comes a close examination of current practices by populations that are expected to adopt new methods of production and new habits of consumption.This level has been approached on a modest scale in the Dominican Republic report. 15 The report identifies series of activities in the agricultural

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sector that will have to be changed in order to achieve the desired level of environmental protection.

It will require extensive field research to reach the next logical stage of going beyond environmental profiles to determine how specific desirable behavioral changes may be achieved. At this stage, it will already have been possible to identify the preferred end state and to use empirical data as well as theoretical studies and analysis to sort out priorities and trade-offs in the kinds of supportive behavior different groups will be expected to practice.

National responses

Most of the actions by national governments, not surprisingly, have occurred in the industrial countries. As already suggested, in these countries, the actions taken have tended to deal with 'non-sectoral' problems, involving the private corporations, and calling for new institutions and product innovations. In the developing countries, the problems are still seen as 'intersectoral,' involving government programs and calling for coordinating mechanisms among existing organizations. Several such instruments have been created as a result of international influences.

But what are they to coordinate? Experience to date does not provide an answer. Surely not all actions of all agencies that deal with natural resources: such an inventory would almost equate with government itself. A new approach, with a new definition of the problem, is needed.

The most important dimension of governmental activities from an environmental perspective is the collection of behavioral requirements they impose on their constituents. Millions of small-scale household-level actors produce most of the environmental degradation in the unindustrialized countries. But environmental policy planners are almost entirely unaware of details about whether and how current practices that are encouraged by government destroy or conserve natural resources. Nor have they concerned themselves with alternative means of encouraging desirable practices among individuals and households, especially in the face of conflicting or reinforcing objectives of the very organizations they need to coordinate. It is almost certain that different incentives will be necessary to appeal to the different groups - households as well as small industries, diverse regions and occupations, farmers and users of city services - whose participation is needed. But these issues cannot be resolved theoretically. They are too varied, too site-specific for such broad strokes.

Analyzing human behavior for environmental purposes is a daunting task, especially if it has to be undertaken by the use of conventional anthropological methods. Fortunately, there are other ways of reinforcing and supplanting the use of detailed village and household studies. Mass surveys of relevant behavior can take place through the use of various methods that can identify

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relevant individual behavior on a large scale. 16 Aggregating such data at the community level is now both feasible and cost-effective. 17

The best approach would be to begin with an investigation of current policies that directly or indirectly influence environment-affecting behavior. Specifically, the kinds of information needed include: (a) compilation and analysis of official and unofficial policies regarding public behavior that influences the state of the environment, including national, urban, regional, village, farm, and industrial actors; (b) an analysis of links between policies and expectations of these organizations and the public they are attempting to influence; (c) reports of actual experience in the management of these policies and the monitoring of the expected public behaviors; and (d) data on macro- level outcomes of the collective behavior of the publics involved.

There are well accepted ways of gathering preliminary data on these kinds of behavior. A first step would be to gather official statements of environmental policies associated with the plans and programs of the major agencies and organizations under review, after which it would be useful to examine the experience of managers who are actually engaged in influencing the public. This supplementary step would serve as a test of policy as seen from central offices, and indicate as well which policies are succeeding. Similar procedures should be directed at sectoral development plans for the future, in order to identify the most urgent needs for policy review. Finally, since these micro- level data are likely to project a confusing picture of national policies regarding the environment, it would be useful to generate a computerized data base that would permit analysis of official and private behavioral preferences in the context of different agency operations, varying ecological requirements, and potential incentives to desired changes in performance.

Several countries have begun to conceive of the possibility of converting behavioral data to a basis for policy making. Countries that begun introducing environmental policies on an intersectoral basis include Brazil, Idonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Kenya, and it is in these cases that hitherto inde- pendent agencies are discovering that some of the behavioral demands they are placing on the public are in conflict with those posed by other organizations. Coordinating of their activities, especially in rural areas, will require recognition and analysis of these conflicts.

Two types of policy monitoring still lie ahead: first, setting up procedures for continuing analysis of public responses, in order to gain information about the extent to which public behavior is actually changing in directions proposed by existing environmental policies. A second requirement will be systematic observation of policy experience (especially regarding changes that take place in the policies themselves).

The public response monitoring calls for a comprehensive system for reporting on-going changes in environment-affecting behavior, is A few countries - Thailand and Indonesia spring to mind - have recognized the need for conducting such observations, and have even done so in isolated sectors.

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Both of them are beginning to gather data on how the developmental ministries and agencies are currently attempting to influence public behavior to protect the environment: adoption of new crops, use of biotechnological innovations, introduction of pest control measures, expansion of irrigation facilities, regulation of fisheries and mines, siting and assisting new industrial zones, and adopting regional approaches to urban development, for example. All such activities rest on expectations of public responses or behavior that have environmental consequences. At present the agencies involved are almost invariably acting in isolation of each other. In some unknown number of cases they are using public subsidies and other incentives to produce con- tradictory responses.

Conducting an inventory of current policies and expectations is likely to seem threatening to some organizations. The result is that whatever action is taken will probably come about from an international initiative, and it will have to be proposed at the highest level in order to gain the participation of all agencies involved. There are discussions of such possibilities in Nepal, Philip- pines, India, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritius, Madagascar, Tanzania, Ghana, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil, which are invited to explore policy alternatives for a comprehensive program of environmental protection. For them, an international initiative to mobilize political and administrative support for such an inventory may soon be acceptable.

The second form of observation entails a systematic effort to learn from experience. One valuable procedure for this form of organizational learning is the preparation of policy histories that analyze the process by which environmental decisions are made when new facts, interests, and procedures are introducedJ 9 Policies change faster than physical conditions, especially when they involve relations with the public. Policy trends are also harder to track than physical changes. Data-gathering on policy experiments, conducted for the purpose of evaluating an agency's own performance, is an accepted, though still fairly rare, procedure. When practiced, it contributes measurably to improvements in policies and operations.

Government agencies may not have as much influence over public behavior as they would like, but many of them are aware that they are dependent on an affirmative public response to their efforts and that they cannot achieve their goals without it. Recognizing that dependence is more than a symbolic gesture; it requires systematic examination of the interaction between an agency's efforts and the behavior of its 'clients.' The best sources of information for such purposes come from treating past poficies and operations as pilot projects. Assembling and analyzing previous expectations and current operations can produce a valuable basis for comprehensive policy review.

But even that is not enough. Few agencies enjoy an exclusive relationship with a public 'client,' and before coordination can take place, development ministries need to observe how other ministries are influencing the same public with which they are dealing. Empirical studies of the effectiveness of

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technical services, subsidies, and other incentives to public behavior will help determine what balance is needed among policies that directly or indirectly affect the public's actions toward the environment.

Conclusion

Nearly all governmental policies that aim at reducing environmental deterioration in developing countries do their work through conventional sectors like agriculture, forestry, fishing, industry, and irrigation. Most environmental decisions have heretofore been made on rather institutional criteria: municipalities define pollution as a problem for sanitary engineers who can install sewage treatment systems; industries respond to court orders com- pelling them to use cleaner methods of production by hiring the engineers to design complex traps for impurities; national forests are monitored by profes- sional foresters to discourage overcutting, and timber and paper companies try to oblige public opinion by following restrictions when they have to; farmers get their instructions about better uses of fertilizer and pesticides from extension departments and ministries of agriculture; fisheries reluctantly accept restraints imposed by the Law of the Sea when enforcement measures are powerful enough to make them change; and when a watershed deterio- rates, it is the irrigation specialists who offer advice on procedures for reducing salinity, waterlogging, and soil erosion. In no country there is even now an intergrating center that effectively monitors the interacting effects of these policy preferences.

At the moment, improvements in each of these fields are proceeding incre- mentally and haphazardly. Of course it is encouraging to note that improvements have been made, and that new technical advances are progressing also toward a better understanding of their ecological consequences. But now it is time to put the pieces together. The most appropriate way to start is by analyzing the ways in which public policies affect public behavior. Once these facts are known, effective environmental policies crossing sectoral lines can be put in place.

Notes

1. The author is grateful to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for its generous support during the preparation of this study. He has benefitted from helpful comments on an ear- lier draft of this manuscript by Lynton K. Caldwell of Indiana University and D. Jane Pratt of the World Bank.

2. William C. Clark of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, estimates that about half of the predictable deterioration in the atmosphere for the period 1980- 2020 will come from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

3. By 1973 Japan was importing 20m m 3 of Philippines mahogany a year to make 22b ft 2 of plywood to be used in forms for pouting concrete. This wasteful use is encouraged by the

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fact that this valuable timber is sold for less than softwood produced in Canada, Chile, New Zealand and even the USSR. Attempts to ban the export only led to a huge black market. Economist, 22 Apr 69, p. 35, citing Franqois Nectoux and Yoshi Kuroda, 'Timber from the South Seas,' World Wildlife Fund International, 1989.

4. Details about this data base may be found in John D. Montgomery, Bureaucrats and People: Grassroots Participation in Third World Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), Chapter 4. I am grateful to my research assistant, Mr. G. R Shukla of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, for recoding the data developed in that study.

5. In the industrial world, for example, chemical companies can contribute some of the most important actions needed to improve environmental conditions. They can find alternatives to some of the problem chemicals like CFCs, pesticides, nitrate fertilizer, and hazardous waste; they can help reduce emissions from factory chimneys and automobile exhausts; and they can promote industrial safety involving the storage and transportation of chemicals, all actions that require little public involvement. Economist 7 Jan 1989, p. 62. But for major ecologically sound improvements in third world productivity, comparable solutions in biogenetics such as health and disease technology, agricultural efficiency, and genetic diversity, a signficant degree of public involvement is required. See Lynton K. Cald- well,'International Aspects of Biotectmology,' MIRCEN Journal, 1988, Vol. 4, pp. 245- 258.

6 Environmental regulation caused an estimated 1/6 of the slowdown of GNP growth in the U.S. since 1973. The costs vary significantly among different industries, however, metals, paper, chemicals, oil refining and leather industries suffering the most. Peter J. Wilcoxen, 'The Effects of Environmental Regulation and Energy Prices in U.S. Economic Per- formance,' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Energy and Environment Policy Center, John E Kennnedy School of Government, processed, Nov. 30, 1988).

7 A prototype of actions that have been used to influence public behavior appears in David Rados, Marketing for Non-Profit Organizations (Boston: Auburn House, 1981).

8. On the prospects for coercive means to achieve moral behavior, see Harrell R. Rodgers and Charles S. Bullock, Coercion to Compliance (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976). On the moral dilemma of using bureaucratic means to change public values, see John D. Montgomery, Bureaucrats and People, cited.

9. As of this writing, 24 nations plus the European Community signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, but only Mexico and the U.S. have as yet rati- fied the protocol.

10. Boston Globe, 8 Sep 87, pp. 1, 8. 11. Lynton K. Caldwell, Science and the National Environmental Policy Act." Redirecting Policy

through Procedural Reform (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1982) presents the definitive history of that movement in terms of its policy and management dimensions.

12. Ruuhengeri and Its Resources, An Environmental Profile of the Ruuhengeri Prefecture, Rwanda Kigali, Government of Rwanda, 1987. Madagascar, An Environmental Profile, Cambridge, U.K.: International Union for Conservation of nature and Natural Resources, 1987.

13. Thailand Development Research Institute, Thailand: Natural Resources Profile, Bangkok: Government of Thailand, 1987.

14. Building on Success, the National Conservation Strategy for Nepal, prepared by HMG Nepal and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) under funding from several international donors. The team was directed by John K. Naysmith (Kathmandu, Nepal, n.d.)

15. Gary Hartshorn and others, The Dominican Republic, Country Environmental Profile, prepared under AID contract No. AID/SOD/PDC-C-0247 (Washington: JRB Associates, 8400 Westpark Dr., Mc Lean, VA 22102, July, 1981)

16. The seminal articles on this experience are J. C. Flanagan, 'Critical Requirements: A New

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17.

18.

19.

Approach to Employee Evaluation,' Personnel Psychology 2, 1949, 419-425. For a recent bibliography on the subject, see Grace Fivars, The Critical Incident Technique: A Bibliog- raphy (Palo Alto, CA., American Institutes for Research, 2d ed., 1980). This method should not be confused with survey techniques, which are intended to elicit information about opinions, and, as a predictive tool, rely on statistical sampling techniques to prevent distortion. In the critical incident method, it is the most recent experience of the respon- dents that is to be gathered, and that constitutes the universe to be analyzed. It is random in the sense that its selection of events requires each respondent to cite the most recent incident in his/her experience. Robert E. Krug, Paul A. Schwarz and Suchitra R Bhakdi, 'Measuring Village Commitment to Development,' in Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner and John D. Montgomery, Values and Development, Appraising Asian Experience (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976) pp. 104-132. A model that might be considered for such a system is described in Krug, Schwarz and Bhakdi, cited. Caldwell, Hayes and MacWhirter, cited, provides many examples of such policy histories.

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