Transcript Poverty in the midst of plenty Excellent Hachileka – Zambia

Poverty in the
midst of plenty
Excellent Hachileka
IUCN – Zambia
Country Programme
Coordinator
Discussion outline
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Genetic resources and poverty reduction
Natural Resources endowment
The Poverty – Environment Nexus
Recent trends in NRM – Devolution
Making natural resources conservation work for
the poor
 Conclusions
 Recommendations
Genetic (Biodiversity) resources
and poverty reduction
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Biodiversity contributes to poverty reduction in 5
key areas:
Food security
Health improvement
Income generation
Reduced vulnerability
Ecosystem services
However, natural resource degradation leads to
biodiversity loss and negative impacts on
livelihoods
Natural Resources endowment
 Southern Africa is well endowed with natural
resources (wildlife, forests, fisheries, arable
land, water resources, energy, etc)
 30 % of the earth’s mineral resources
including 40% of gold, 60% of cobalt, 90%
of platinum are in Africa
 Human resources
 The wealth of Southern Africa is bound in its
natural resources
(HIV/AIDs, Brain drain)
Natural Resources and Poor people
 In Sub-Saharan Africa, the poor are more directly
dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods than
the wealthy – though the rich consume and waste a larger
proportion of goods and services that nature provides
 In 2000, 56% of Africans depended on agriculture for their
livelihoods
 Agriculture accounts for 24% of Africa’s GDP, 40% of
foreign exchange earnings, and 70% of employment
 Wild resources and non-timber forest products contribute
as high as 35% of the rural livelihood economic activity
(IUCN)
The dilemma
 These Natural resources are now
threatened with degradation from
unsustainable practices
 As a result, Southern Africa faces the
dilemma of increasing poverty and
increasing natural Resources
(environmental) degradation
The Poverty – Environment Nexus
 As the ecological and poverty crises have worsened, efforts to
understand the link between people’s livelihoods, the status of
environmental resources, and human security have increased (World
Bank, 1989; IIED, 1995)
 These efforts are based on a recognition of the importance of the
environment and natural resources in supporting livelihoods
 Understanding these linkages is an important step to facilitating
livelihood changes.
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A failure to ensure sustainable and equitable resource use, overconsumption of resources in support of particular livelihoods, or the
impacts of sudden shocks such as war or disaster on natural resources
or their rate of consumption, can lead to a loss of livelihoods
Misconception in simplistic extremes
 “Poor people are forced to degrade the
environment (natural resources) and therefore that
biodiversity must be protected from them”
or
 “Alternatively, that environmental degradation is
often a by-product of poverty alleviation and
addressing it can be postponed until secure
livelihoods have been attained”
The complexity of the poverty
environment - nexus
 Resources are things. Assets are relationships
between things and people.
 These relationships are mediated through complex
institutional and political processes.
 The process of turning resources into assets
should thus address complex power relations
between the state, the market, and the
communities, and through such engagement,
inform appropriate sustainable development
processes
 Need to clear the misconceptions of the povertyenvironment link
 It is not a question of either the environment or
poverty reduction as this has often led to policies
that either reduce poverty at the expense of the
environment or protect the environment at the
expense of the poor
 Failure to tackle both poverty and environment
(natural resources degradation) simultaneously,
threatens the asset base that the poor need to
survive or emerge from their state of poverty
Recent Trends in NRM - Devolution
 A key component of NRM sector reform has been
the devolution of authority and control over NRs to
local authorities or local communities.
 The benefits of devolution for both natural
resources conservation and livelihoods is yet to
be conclusively demonstrated.
 The devolutionary processes themselves have
three critical weaknesses regarding:
– Objectives
– Focus
– Tenure
Limits to Devolution
 Most devolution projects on the continent do not in
effect attempt to change fundamentally the
ownership of the resources in question, but seek
to bestow some limited ‘proprietorship’ over these
resources to communities or their representatives
 Resource ownership remains with the state, while
devolution usually gives communities the right to
benefit from the utilization of the resources
 Typically, communities cannot even determine the
types of resource use, although increasingly they
are getting involved in resource management.
 The devolution programmes have also tended to focus on
resources that are not especially attractive for investment
capital because of the challenges of harvesting and
marketing.
 Because such resources are generally not contested by
the state or the private sector, communities have tended to
have greater control over their use and management.
– e.g. wild fruits and nuts, oils, leaves and roots, which, though
sometimes producing high rates of return, are difficult to harvest,
occur seasonally or haphazardly, are subject to weather
fluctuations, and ubiquitous ownership.
Limits to Devolution
 Where control over high value resources
has been devolved, this has tended to be
informed by the need to streamline
bureaucracy and reduce the transaction
costs of private sector appropriation of these
resources: – e.g. wildlife, eco-tourism
Limits to Devolution
 Devolution has tended to constitute mostly
minimalist attempts to reinvent communal property
rights without challenging the large-scale
expropriation of property rights by both the colonial
and post-colonial states.
 The long-term impact of this expropriation has
been to turn natural resources into liabilities rather
than assets for most communities.
 The CBNRM programmes have devolved only
limited rights to these resources to generally
disempowered communities.
Limits to devolution
 Because of these limitations, the devolution
of natural resources management in most
Africa has come to be viewed as little more
than “strategic tokenism”
Rights based approaches
 Devolution has consisted mostly of the enunciation
of new legal rights to natural resources. However,
challenges still remain in terms of actualising and
operationalizing these rights.
 There remains a high level of ambiguity about how
the newfound community rights can be translated
into practice, and whether the envisaged level of
rights claiming by poor people can or does exist.
Rights based approaches
 This raises a range of issues :
 How organised are poor people?
 What access to information and organizational,
legal and other skills do they have?
 How do they relate to the state and other powerful
external interests (as rights holders, as passive
consumers, or as beneficiaries of state and other
forms of assistance)?
Rights based approaches
 How do politics, power and interests affect the
ability of rights claiming in practice in particular
settings?
 How do multiple legal orders affect the ability of
poor people to claim rights?
 How is the process of rights claiming mediated by
different interests? Which gain precedence over
others and who benefits in the end?
 Is the institutional context for rights claiming
effective; and so on?
Making natural resources work
for the poor
Poverty can not be reduced unless additional
assets are made available to poor people
 Road networks, basic health care, education,
reliable market access and potable drinking water
a toll order indeed without international support
 On the contrarily, biological resources are already
in place, though the poor people are often denied
access to them
 Poor people are often constrained from adopting
new approaches and technologies or entering new
markets because of risk and uncertainty
Through pro-poor conservation of natural
resources and biodiversity, efforts must be
taken to:
 Expand economic opportunities for poor people by
stimulating overall growth and by building up their assets
and increasing the returns on these assets through a
combination of markets and non-market actions
 Reduce poor people’s vulnerability to ill health, economic
shocks, policy-induced distortions, natural disasters and
violence
 Make state institutions more accountable and responsive
to poor people, strengthening their participation in political
processes and decision-making and removing all social
barriers
Conclusions
In many cases, poverty reduction strategies are
unsuccessful because they fail to:
 Recognise the importance of the environment as a sector, taking it only
into account as a cross-cutting issue such as environmental health or
environmental education
 In practice this means missing a golden opportunity to use the only
asset that is readily available to the poor, but which they are often
unable to exploit productively and sustainably due to legal, technical
and other constraints
 Pro-poor conservation can not work where environmental and natural
resources management ministries exclude themselves from the poverty
debate
 Such ministries and agencies need to assume an active role in
promoting the environment as a key poverty reduction sector and
building a convincing case for greater donor investment in biological
assets for the benefit of poor people
Conclusions
Although numerous initiatives aimed at achieving sustainable
development have been launched in the past decade, they have
failed to reduce poverty because they fail to:
 Operate at multiple scales of analysis and do not take action with a
landscape focus (single resource specific project modes)
 Ensure genuine local relevance of initiatives and results, driven by
local priorities, interests and urgency
 Confront the reality that “win-win” for livelihoods and the environment is
rare and put greater emphasis on winning more and losing less
 Deliver locally appropriate and scientifically-valid practical strategies for
balancing poverty and the environment approach, with performance
indicators and feedback across scales
 Refine and make use of mechanisms that can accelerate adoption of
improvement options around the world
 Ensure that local reality inform policy processes at national, regional
and global levels including Poverty Reduction Strategies
 Put into practice proven organizational models which emphasize
interdisciplinary teams, scaling-up results, flexibility, and new
relationships among resource managers (fishers, farmers, foresters,
,etc), researchers, policy makers, environmentalists, extension workers
and other groups
 Establish a long-term ,cross-regional coalition of partners from
conservation, development and research who bring strong capacity to
field level implementation, strategic research, policy dialogue, and
effective communication across local global issues
Recommendations
 Ministries of finance and economic planning, and cooperating partners must recognize the environment as a
key sector for poverty alleviation and to adequately
address its potential contribution in poverty reduction
strategies and associated pro-poor policies
 Environmental ministries and their executing agencies
must be assisted to step up to the challenge of poverty
alleviation and whereby the full contribution of their
departments to poverty reduction can be realized
 The Conservation community must consider for
themselves if it is ethically acceptable or practically feasible
to achieve their conservation targets and goals without
tackling the spectre of poverty head on
Recommendations
With respect to livelihoods, innovative research, communication and policy work
is required to answer crucial questions and challenges relating to:
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Ecosystem services and how these services can be developed or protected to sustain
people’s livelihoods;
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Strengthening regulatory and institutional frameworks for better livelihoods and
environmental management;
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Understanding what habitats must be protected to ensure that key livelihoods services
are provided;
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Developing human capacities to engender conservation livelihoods;
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Deepening policy understanding of the relationships between conservation, development
and livelihoods; and,
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Sharing information on resource use, sustainability and livelihoods
.
 The world needs to find ways of putting conservation to
work for the poor and the abundant natural resources to be
used sustainably to reduce poverty
 Support is required to bring together development,
conservation and research in long-term partnerships to
deliver results that matter for the poor through learning,
adapting, building capacity, and influencing public policy
across the region
“The current trend of exporting raw materials to the western world
means exporting jobs and money because processing industries
employ more people and make more money from raw materials
imported from Africa” – (Yoweri Museveni, Times of Zambia, 8/12/04)