Poverty in the midst of plenty

1. Poverty in the midst of plenty Excellent Hachileka IUCN – Zambia Country Programme Coordinator

2. Discussion outline • 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

3. Genetic (Biodiversity) resources and poverty reduction 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

4. 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 (HIV/AIDs, Brain drain) • The wealth of Southern Africa is bound in its natural resources

5. 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)

6. 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

7. 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. • A failure to ensure sustainable and equitable resource use, over-consumption 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

8. 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”

9. 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

10. Need to clear the misconceptions of the poverty-environment 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

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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”

17. 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.

18. 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)?

19. 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?

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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

25. Recommendations • Ministries of finance and economic planning, and co-operating 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

26. Recommendations With respect to livelihoods, innovative research, communication and policy work is required to answer crucial questions and challenges relating to: • Ecosystem services and how these services can be developed or protected to sustain people’s livelihoods; • Strengthening regulatory and institutional frameworks for better livelihoods and environmental management; • Understanding what habitats must be protected to ensure that key livelihoods services are provided; • Developing human capacities to engender conservation livelihoods; • Deepening policy understanding of the relationships between conservation, development and livelihoods; and, • Sharing information on resource use, sustainability and livelihoods.

27. 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)