Book Reviews

The Role of the Environment in Poverty Alleviation. By Paolo Galizzi and Alena Herklotz (Eds.), New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. In popular parlance, the credit for placing the poverty-environment linkage at the international centre-stage is given to the speech made by the former Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi at the Stockholm Conference (1972). The other prominent strand was Ingleharts post-materialist thesis-environmental protection being only a full-stomach phenomenon (1977). For both, however, the common argument was that, poverty and environmental protection cannot go hand in hand. Over the years, the responses to this apparent convergence has been two foldconflict, that is, separating the people from nature and cooperation, by integrating people with nature. In any case, people could be brought to the centre stage in the debate on environment, which is of special relevance for the most populous and incidentally not so prosperous areas of the world. UNDP, Fordham University and the Nature Conservancy came together with a lecture series titled People and the Environment starting in 2005, with the objective of changing the environment versus development debate into the environment and development dialogue to eradicate poverty. The book under review is the inaugural volume of this venture, covering the lectures and subsequent discussions. It documents successful strategies and actions across countries where the apparent trade-off in the poverty-environment linkage could be converted into win-win situations; and how it could be done and under what conditions. Part I of the book titled Poverty Reduction and the Environment Are Not Opposing Goals is the most interesting one and directly relevant to the title of the book. The next one provides a case for investment in protecting people from natural disasters while Part III charts out the possible avenues for percolation of information to the poor so that they can protect the surrounding environment better. The concluding section is the most ambitious one that discusses how legal empowerment of the poor can achieve sustainable environmental practices that reduce poverty. The latter two sections, to the reviewer, address the poverty-developmentenvironment linkage from the periphery and that too with a very long rope. Among the means towards protection, regeneration and conservation of the environment, there have been two distinct yet interlinked strands. First, the grant (or taking away) of legal rights to those who are directly dependent on the natural resources for livelihood; here the role of the state is central. Second is identifying and valuing various ecosystem services along with prioritising and allocating them, mostly by using market mechanisms. There are a number of options that integrate the two strands. Part 1 explores some of them. The first article in the volume (Halverson and McNeill) charts developments in the international policy and planning regime that link poverty with environment in recent times. The article mentions a report by the late David Pearce that puts forward a strong case for investing in environmental assets; according to the calculations, investment in clean drinking water and sanitation systems yield benefit-cost ratios of 4:1 and 14:1 respectively. Pearce, elsewhere in the book [Chapter 2] provides a number of other such possibilities from Kenya, Guatemala, and Indonesia. Decision, Vol. 36, No.3, December, 2009

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Halverson and McNeill [Chapter 1] also mention successful community based initiatives like the Namibian Torra Conservancy, which largely was the fallout of the Nature Conservation Act 1996 enabling creation of conservancies on state land. However, as Pearce points out so long as social capital is strong, communal property will tend to avoid many of the problems associated with private and state ownership [p. 37]. How such capital is created and sustained are enormously important questions from the point of view of public policy interventions in developing economies. At the same time, unless governance and institutional change take place within developing economies, no policy regime can work, it is argued. These are important lessons to be learnt. The successful transformation of Mhaswandi (Dsouza and Lobo, Chapter 5) is a case in point that underscores community cooperation on the one hand and the direct relationship between the environment and the well being of the community on the other. Mhaswandi is located in a rain shadow and drought prone region of Ahmednagar district of Maharastra, India. With external institutional and technical support, villagers could implement a comprehensive and integrated method of harvesting rainwater and mitigating soil erosion. The dramatic result is best illustrated by the price of irrigated land increasing from Rs. 15,000 per hectare in 1994 to Rs. 7,50,000 in recent times, reflecting many factors like vitality of the local economy, productivity of land, and change in peoples perception over future and risk. The key institutional factors behind the success story are not difficult to imagine: democratic functioning and accountability of the representatives to the people. Further, the registration of the Forest Protection Committee of the village under the regulations of the Forest Department somewhat completed the ideal institutional set up of cooperation between the state agencies and peoples representatives at the lower level. Moreover, the institutions continued to function even with a change in leadership while women have turned themselves into successful entrepreneurs in multiple ways. All these would not have been possible without the existing social capital, a working level of trust among different groups and a sense of ownership for the sustainability of the project. Environment friendly production Scherr et al [Chapter 3] bring forward the enormous possibilities of ecoagriculture, that integrates conservation, food security, livelihood and rural development. Approaches of this kind address the trade-off between ecosystem services head-on by reminding the conservation community that the idea of agriculture as ecological sacrifice is no longer valid in many regions. One can certainly hope that this co-evolution model is here to stay. While it is common to find adoption of this practice by small farmers at the individual level, any increase in scales of operation will require institutions of different kind at the community level along with increased rights of these communities over natural resources, the experience suggests. Whelan of Rainforest Alliance [Chapter 4] narrates how its certification programme, that included provision of social security and good housing for workers among other conditions, has been accepted not only by the consumers but also adopted by coffee major Kraft and banana giant Chiquita for their suppliers. It is interesting to note how a certificate provided by

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a non-statutory authority could prompt the business majors to see an opportunity in reducing production costs, taking care of environment and workers, in the process reducing cost substantially. Disaster risk reduction strategies and role of the state(s) The common theme among the three articles in the Section II has been the impact of poverty and exclusion in increasing the vulnerability of people so as to convert some of the natural hazards into disasters. Herklotz [Chapter 6] argues for integration of disaster risk reduction into the development planning and narrates the developments in the United Nations. Here strategies are focussed on increasing the resilience of the communities and the management of risk. Howsoever such a strategy is envisaged and implemented, the role of the state is enormous including and not limited to risk awareness, access to information, ability to respond to warnings and so on. One has been reminded of the crucial constraints facing governments in developing countries which is that of adequate and timely availability of finance. Declarations like Hyogo Framework for action 2005-2015, however, remain noncommittal on this issue; assistance to the developing countries is made conditional upon the donors financial capacity. At the same time, as Maxwell [Chapter 7] points out, early arrival of funding and the presence of elaborate coordination mechanisms, as in the case of the tsunami of 2004, could not prevent failure of the recovery efforts. Lastly, while there is no doubt that cutting down mangroves or encroaching wetlands reduce the resilience of the ecosystem [Thompson, Chapter 8], one is not sure how far mitigating measures could be effective in preventing or even reducing the impact of massive natural hazards under study, of the likes of Katrina and the the 2004 Indian tsunami. Knowledge and people Mehers et al [Chapter 9] narrate the importance of transformation of training to learning, with the emphasis shifting from information and knowledge push to personal development and learner-centred knowledge pull. It is heartening to find mention of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundations efforts to broadcast advance information on wave heights to villagers in Ecochard [Chapter 10]. Zaidman et al [Chapter 11] discusse innovations done at International Development Enterprises India targeting low-income farmers and Jamii Bora of Kenya in providing micro-finance as well as sustainable housing along with education and health programmes for the poor. Legal empowerment and the poor Singh [Chapter 13] describes the different ways in which legal empowerment in the form of property rights, labor rights, assistance in informal business, and access to justice can assist the poor to come out of poverty. Kjrven and Fach in the fourteenth and final chapter of the book provide an interesting route for the poor to address the environment-poverty linkage: through clean development mechanisms given that India and Brazil have accounted for half of all confirmed projects. However, neither of these two contributions deals with the implementation issues and the problems surrounding diversified systems of recording rights

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and claims, which are at the very heart of problems surrounding poor peoples claims over their share of development, especially in the developing countries. To sum up, for addressing the poverty-environment linkage, granting and guaranteeing property rights to communities with substantial social capital and effective institutions of governance at all levels have been proved to be a successful combination. Keeping in mind that the focus of the book has been the poor with special focus on rural ones, policymakers and researchers working in these areas are sure to find insights and motivations from many successful efforts undertaken in diverse circumstances which may be emulated. Nandan Nawn Assistant Professor in Economics West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata

Decision, Vol. 36, No.3, December, 2009