Unfunded mandates on the frontline: Rio+20 and local environmental governance

Forests are being cleared illegally. Banned agricultural chemicals still abound and eventually end up in food products or local water sources. Villages and forests are being put at risk each year as grazing areas are opened up or rejuvenated through burning. Often economically and politically powerful individuals and companies involved in such activities escape being held responsible while other, less powerful offenders, usually only committing minor environmental misdemeanours, are fined. This is the picture which has emerged repeatedly throughout various research activities carried out by researchers from DIIS’s natural resources and poverty research unit, in collaboration with partners in the South.

With only limited legal, technical, political and financial backing from the levels of government ‘above’ them, it is hard – if not impossible – for the thousands of local government and ministry officers delegated to work on the frontline in developing countries to fulfil their mandates. This is the situation of local level environmental governance in many developing countries.

The institutional framework for environmental governance will be one of the two main themes when world leaders meet in June 2012 for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro – the so-called Rio+20 Conference.

Twenty years ago, the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio gave momentum to the establishment of an institutional framework for environmental governance. Apart from the three so-called ‘Rio Conventions’ – UNFCCC (climate), CBD (biodiversity) and UNCCD (desertification) – the conference gave impetus to the formulation and approval of national environmental legislation. As an example, prior to 1987 only one country in sub-Saharan Africa, namely Senegal, had environmental legislation in place. By 2002, ten years after Rio, this number had increased to 33 countries and in 2008, of the 46 sub-Saharan countries, 38 had environmental legislation in place. Moreover, the 1992 Rio conference and the subsequent Agenda 21 underlined the importance of including all levels from the global to the local in the governance of natural resources and the environment. Many developing countries have embarked upon processes of administrative deconcentration and political decentralisation.

Development assistance has contributed to this process. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) was established in 1991 and has channelled funding to assist developing countries to meet the objectives of international environmental conventions, including the three Rio conventions. Moreover, a review undertaken by DIIS as part of the Danida and Sida-funded Research and Communication Programme (ReCOM) of development cooperation agreements signed with Tanzania, Kenya, Mali, Nicaragua and Vietnam, shows that development assistance provided by Danida and other bi- and multilateral donor organisations has contributed both to the preparation of environmental legislation and to subsequent efforts to develop associated regulatory frameworks and organisational capacity. The review was undertaken on the basis of the OECD Development Database on Aid Activities, complemented by the AidData.

Exactly how much development assistance has been allocated to strengthen environmental governance – in terms of numbers of agreements and amount of monetary support – is, however, hard to tell, as available data on development cooperation agreements is far from complete. Moreover, the information that is reported does not allow for an assessment of the extent to which official development assistance commitments with respect to environment and climate are actually being met.

What seems certain, however, is that in many countries the mandates – but not the resources necessary to comply with these mandates – have precipitated from the central to the local levels of government. Understaffed and with limited political and legal support, frontline environmental officers are therefore often challenged to confront timber logging companies, farm input distributors, and powerful farmers and livestock keepers on their own. This produces frustration on the part of local environmental authorities, who find themselves cast as unwilling spectators of environmentally destructive activities. Moreover, when tax revenues from productive industries only sparsely benefit local government and when staff salaries hardly meet daily living expenditures, then perverse incentives are easily created for officials to pursue ‘alternative income opportunities which conflict with national legislation’. Altogether, this generates an unclosed gap between, on the one hand, the intentions written into multilateral environmental agreements and national environmental legislation and, on the other hand, their actual implementation and enforcement.

Effective local level environmental governance is essential to closing this gap. Besides the ubiquitous need for a deepening of democracy, it requires at least three types of effort. First it requires that ‘funds follow mandates’ and that ministries as well as associations of local governments join forces to make this happen. Second, it requires that legal authorities, both at national and local level, possess the necessary skills to deal with environmental issues. Third, rather than relying on development assistance which only reluctantly contributes to covering personnel costs, it requires improved capacity, willingness and efforts in developing countries to generate the tax revenues necessary to ensure the financial sustainability of environmental governance.

It is up to the world leaders at the upcoming Rio+20 conference to bring us closer to a sustainable use of the planet’s natural resources and to an equitable distribution of the associated costs and benefits within and between nations. Closing the gap between intentions and enforcement of the institutional framework for environmental governance developed in the wake of the first Rio conference would be an important step in this direction.