| Cutting Across Interests: Cleaner Production, the Unified Force of Sustainable Development |
| Written by Richard S. Stevenson | |
| Tuesday, 13 January 2004 | |
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National policy makers and planners have linked in their perceptions the drive for productivity and economic progress with a belief that the depletion of natural resources and the impact of industrial wastes on the environment and human health are inevitable consequences. Cleaner production (CP), rooted in production efficiency and productivity, is a unifying concept that can resolve this conflict traditionally seen between achieving industrial and economic growth and preserving the environment and human health, and it can be the basis in fact for de-linking economic growth and its assumed undesirable results. Governments, especially in the developing economies, are focused on economic growth that they still measure in the classical terms of financial assets and capital stock, often ignoring natural and human capital. While they recognize that the preservation of natural resources and the environment are important policy issues, along with economic growth and productivity, they have not seen cleaner production or related concepts as a national policy issue. Nor have they recognized how CP can de-link economic growth from environmental and resource consequences, with the result that proponents of economic growth and of environmental preservation have seldom collaborated with policy makers and planners to address both in an integrated policy and strategy. The focus of industrial development policy is usually on achieving growth and expanding markets through greater production efficiency and resultant competitiveness. Environmental policy addresses conservation of natural resources and preventing the degradation of the environment and human health from the byproducts of industrial production, transportation, energy generation and other forms of private and government activity. All of these concerns center on efficiency and materials productivity. CP prevents impact on the environment and human health and the depletion of natural resources, and it does so by increasing the efficiency of production and the productivity of resource use. CP thereby responds to the objectives of both industrial development policy and environmental policy, providing a forum in which their respective supporters can productively work together. CP cuts across the policy and the agendas of many sectors of the economy and can be an important unifying focus for collaborative efforts toward sustainable growth. CP comprises a perspective and a decision making process that simultaneously take into account both economic progress and environmental sustainability. It is measured as the reduction of both the impact of pollutants produced and the natural resources consumed for each unit of product or service, leading to growth and development that are economically, environmentally and socially sustainable. One wonders why governments have not seen that CP bridges the conflict perceived between national objectives for the environment and those for production efficiency and global competitiveness. CP is the \'unified force theory\' of sustainable development, with the potential to achieve otherwise conflicting objectives through integrated policy and strategic planning. Simple failure of governments to understand its importance is not an adequate answer. Policy makers in developing economies in particular have on average shown themselves more receptive to innovative ideas than have their counterparts in the more developed nations. But the pervasive territoriality of government agencies prevents their reasoning together, and the linking of economic growth with environmental degradation in the minds of national policy makers has left them believing they must chose economic growth and productivity over sustainable use of natural resources and human health. One may also ask why we should be concerned with national public policy, since it is the perceptions and behavior of private firms that must change in order to achieve CP. There are many practical reasons for firms to adopt principles of cleaner production on their own initiative. Yet despite the apparent advantages of CP to business and the resources spent by many donors and national organizations to promote it, the concept has not yet spread rapidly enough even to keep pace with the growth of production. Both international donors and national organizations have based their programs primarily on a belief that making information, skills and financing available and showing a few industry leaders how cleaner production can help their bottom line will cause many other firms to follow the leaders and seek out the available resources. There have been many successful actions with individual firms, but the spread of concepts and practices needed to achieve CP on a wide scale is not yet happening. The challenge we face is to change the behavior of not just a few demonstration firms but of millions of decision-makers in the many activities that have an environmental impact - in industry, services and government. To do so one must somehow alter the complex of conditions in which they make their decisions, including not only the technical and managerial resources available to them, but also, and more importantly, the array of rewards and penalties they confront. Those conditions that will bring about widespread change in perspective and practice can only be achieved from a holistic perspective, in the framework of an integrated national strategy and with the support of clear public policy. Some donors have concluded from a decade of efforts to promote CP that the largest obstacle to greater success has been the failure of nations to mainstream policy to support CP and to plan strategically to achieve it. It is not enough to have a single national policy for CP, particularly if it is promulgated at less than a truly national level, such as by the national agency for environment or for industrial development. The cooperation of many public and private sectors of activity is needed to achieve CP on a national scale. While the principles of CP originated in manufacturing, they are equally applicable to activities in transportation, mining, health services, agriculture, forestry, tourism and many other sectors. And they apply to all levels and aspects of government that provide facilities and services to their citizens, consuming resources and impacting the environment. All of these are stakeholders in a national process to achieve CP, and to be effective a national comprehensive policy and strategy for the achievement of CP must be both promulgated at a comprehensively national level and more importantly, integrated into the policy and strategy of each sector. The absence of national policies and strategies has probably been a major factor in the relatively slow spread of CP. Donors have not pressed on policy and planning, both because planning has fallen from fashion with the collapse of the planned economies and because recipient nations have resisted any external involvement in areas they guard as their sovereign prerogative. But then one must ask, if CP can make such an important contribution to sustainable development and to production efficiency and competitiveness, why haven\\\'t governments seen the importance of CP on their own and supported it with policy and strategic planning, as they have supported export promotion or productivity or education, or even protection of the environment? The answer may lie in the association of CP with the protection of the environment rather than with the production efficiency and materials productivity that are at its core. With the momentum of UNCED abating, governments have felt they are doing all they can afford to do with regard to the environment and need to concentrate more on productivity and global competitiveness. Sadly, CP has remained tarnished with the \'environment\' label while governments fail to recognize it as the synthesis of objectives for environment and for productivity, the proverbial \'two birds with one stone\'. Reflecting on a decade of hard work by many to promote concepts of CP, one realizes that the approaches used have been too heavily dependent on \'cleaner technology\', with programs top heavy in technical skills and weak in institutional, policy and political reach. Consequently, the perspectives that would cause national policy makers and planners to grasp the potential of CP have, at best, been poorly presented. Programs have been located at a functional level, often within an environmental agency already seen as the enemy by industry and a special interest by those responsible for broader national perspective. Alternatively, programs have been located within organizations responsible for business or trade development, seen also as representing narrow and often self-serving interests. One sees a critical need for donor coordination in order to achieve a sort of collective bargaining. The reality is that few donors have the clout to effectively push for policy reform in developing countries. Probably only the multilateral development banks and major bilateral development lenders have sufficient leverage, and even theirs is limited. Bilateral donor programs and international organizations are much more constrained by political considerations and therefore have much more limited leverage when it comes to policy and institutional reform. Their assistance for CP tends to depend on interests at home, thus their focus on demonstration projects in industrial subsectors. But if all donors and lenders actively supporting CP in a given country would get together and agree on the highest priority needs within an overall strategy, and advise the host Government that taking actions to address those needs is a condition for receiving assistance, then there might be substantially more progress. At a minimum, scarce aid dollars would be more wisely spent. Finally, one might reflect that focusing on national planning agencies is difficult and perhaps even inappropriate in some countries while appropriate in others. These agencies need the institutional capability to understand the actions required for \'sustainable development\' and to be able and responsible to push sector and regulatory agencies to take such actions. Remembering the days when the national planning institutions were supported and stimulated by the superpowers of The World Bank and USAID, no one did anything without their blessing. Over time they became super-planning agencies, and the quality of national and sub-national development plans improved but implementation did not. The reason was that the national agencies did not understand \'mainstreaming\' of policy and strategy. The sector agencies continued each to do their own thing without taking responsibility for environmental and other issues. To overcome this requires a careful\' institutional analysis as part of national CP policy and action planning. This process should assign clear responsibilities for different elements of CP implementation and force the national planning agency to think broadly, mainstreaming concepts across sectors. Then if the donors will collaborate within the framework, the strategy may be carried out with some coordination and cohesion. Achieving CP demands a new perspective, and offers in return a substantial resolution of the conflict traditionally seen between achieving industrial and economic growth and preserving the environment. Donors and national programs must shift their focus to building a broader national interest perspective and the institutional capacity to integrate policy and to plan strategically for CP, and most importantly to addressing the national policy implications and benefits of pursuing CP as a national perspective and goal. An essential start to this would be basing donor programs in support of achieving CP at a level of government with crosscutting perspective, such as the national economic planning agency. At such a level policy makers may be more able to see that CP can de-link productivity and economic growth from the degradation of natural resources and the environment. That sounds relatively easy when stated in a few paragraphs. But capturing the attention and building the understanding of policy makers is a difficult undertaking, a major reason it has been largely ignored. A shift of this nature in the focus of donor and national programs will require courage and will encounter strong resistance from entrenched interests, both in the recipient nations and within the donor organizations. But without this shift, the continued priority growth of production and its resultant impact on the environment, natural resources and human health will continue to outstrip the achievement of CP. The much sought economic growth will bring not a better life but disaster, first to the developing nations of the world and finally to us all. By: Richard S. Stevenson & J. Warren Evans Email : richard.stevenson[at]att.net Related News |