NGOs and Environmental Policies: Asia and Africa

NGOS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES NGOs and Environmental Policies: Asia and Africa Edited by DAVID POTTER FRANK CASS...

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NGOS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

NGOs and Environmental Policies: Asia and Africa

Edited by

DAVID POTTER

FRANK CASS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR

First published in 1996 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate, London N14 5BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS c/o ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo Street, Portland, Oregon 927213–3640 Website: www.frankcass.com Copyright © 1996 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data NGOs and environmental policies: Asia and Africa 1. Environmental policy—Asia 2. Environmental policy— Africa 3. Non-governmental organizations—Asia 4. Non-governmental organizations—Africa I. Potter, David 333.7 ' 2'09 ISBN 0-203-98913-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-7146-4215-0 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data NGOs and environmental policies: Asia and Africa/edited by David Potter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7146-4215-0 (pbk.) 1. Deforestation—Government policy—Asia. 2. Deforestation— Government policy—Africa. 3. Forest conservation—Government policy—Asia. 4. Forest conservation—Government policy—Africa. 5. Environmental policy—Asia. 6. Environmental policy—Africa. 7. Non -governmental organizations—Asia. 8. Non-governmental organizations—Africa. I. Potter, David, 1931– SD418.3.A78N56 1996 333.75' 0 95–dc20 95–26760 CIP

iv

This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue of The Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1 (March 1996), [NGOs and Environmental Policies: Asia and Africa]. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of Frank Cass and Company Limited.

Contents

1

Introduction David PotterAnnie Taylor

1

Democratisation and the Environment: NGOs and Deforestation Policies in India (Karnataka) and Indonesia (North Sumatra) David Potter

9

1.1

The First Hypothesis: Democratisation and Numbers of Environmental NGOs

11

1.2

The Second Hypothesis: Democratisation and NGO Influence on Policy

14

1.3

An Indonesia-North Sumatra Story

15

1.4

A Karnataka-Uttara Kannada Story

21

1.5

Conclusion

28

NGO Advocacy, Democracy and Policy Development: Some Examples Relating to Environmental Policies in Zimbabwe and Botswana Alan Thomas

37

2.1

NGO Influence and Democratisation in Africa

38

2.2

Four Hypotheses

43

2.3

Does Democracy Matter At All? Normal Policy Development

45

2.4

Four Stories of Attempted NGO Influence

48

2.5

Analysis: Factors Affecting NGO Influence

54

2.6

Conclusion: Implications for Democratisation and for NGO Strategy

58

Does North-South Collaboration Enhance NGO Influence on Deforestation Policies in Malaysia and Indonesia? Bernard Eccleston

63

Global Civil Society and Optimistic Expectations for NGO Collaboration

64

2

3

3.1

vi

3.2

Interlinked National Civil Societies and Guarded Expectations for NGO Collaboration

67

3.3

Contrasting Styles and Outcomes of NGO Collaboration

70

3.4

NGO Collaboration to Share Resources and Widen Domestic Political Space

74

3.5

NGO Collaboration to Open Up Global Political Space

76

3.6

Reactions to NGO Collaboration from Policy-Making Networks

78

3.7

Conclusion: Choices About Future NGO Collaboration

80

Regime Theory and Non-Governmental Organisations: The Case of Forest Conservation David Humphreys

85

4.1

Regime Theory

85

4.2

NGOs and the Tropical Forestry Action Programme

88

4.3

NGOs and the International Tropical Timber Organisation

91

4.4

NGOs and the UNCED Forest Negotiations

92

4.5

NGOs and the Negotiation of the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1994

97

4.6

The Role of NGOs in Regime Creation

98

4.7

Conclusions

102

NGOs and Competing Representations of Deforestation as an Environmental Issue in Malaysia Bernard Eccleston

111

5.1

Multiple Environmental Consequences of Forest Conversion

112

5.2

Disputing Responsibility for Over-Rapid Depletion of Tropical Forests

119

5.3

Competing Conceptions of Sustainable Forest Depletion

122

5.4

South-North Conflicts over Tropical Forest Depletion

125

5.5

Competing Claims to Ownership and Control of Forest Resources

126

5.6

Conclusion

131

Does the Definition of the Issue Matter? NGO Influence and the International Convention to Combat Desertification in Africa Susan CarrRoger Mpande

137

Defining the Problem of Desertification

138

4

5

6

6.1

vii

6.2

The Lead-Up to the Convention

141

6.3

Negotiating the Convention

143

6.4

NGO’s Role during the Negotiations

146

6.5

NGO’s Role over the Longer Term

150

6.6

Discussion

151

Index

159

viii

Introduction DAVID POTTER AND ANNIE TAYLOR

The eight-volume Handbook of Political Science (1975) made no reference to NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations). Twenty years later most political scientists have heard of NGOs but probably regard them as of marginal political significance. It therefore may come as something of a surprise to learn that there is now a growing literature on the political work of NGOs, including transnational NGO networks and coalitions, and on the significance of NGOs in explaining political processes in different countries. One may not agree entirely with Salamon (1994:109) that ‘we are in the midst of a global “associational revolution” that may prove to be as significant to the latter twentieth century as the rise of the nation-state was to the latter nineteenth’. But surely it is time for students of comparative politics to pay careful attention to this phenomenon in their work. The papers in this volume aim to make a contribution in this regard by summarising some results of new research on the political work of NGOs trying to influence environmental policies. The papers are grounded in empirical evidence obtained through interviews and other field research in Asia and Africa, and in Europe. They speak to a range of theoretical literatures: theories of democratisation in the field of comparative politics, regime theory and other theories in international relations, the literature on policy analysis and agenda setting, network analysis and the literatures on environmental politics and development. Comparative analysis figures prominently; comparative analysis is the organising principle of both Papers 1 and 2 using a form of a ‘comparative case-oriented method’ (Ragin 1987) due to the very different but small number of political contexts being compared, while Papers 3, 5 and 6 draw on more particular comparisons to support the arguments being made. All the papers address aspects of one main question: why are NGOs influential in affecting the development of certain policies related to global environmental problems? The concept of NGO as used here refers roughly to non-governmental, nonprofit organisations. As an organisation an NGO has at least several full-time staff, some sort of hierarchy, a budget and an office (although with local NGOs this can sometimes mean little more than someone’s house or flat). Environmental NGOs are embedded in, but distinct from, environmental movements. The famous Chipko movement in India, for example, involved village people in the Garwhal Himalaya, especially women, hugging trees when loggers arrived to cut them

2 NGOS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

down; but it was not an NGO because although there were leaders and followers there was no formal organisation. The non-governmental aspect of an NGO places it conventionally outside the state in civil society, that ‘intermediate associational realm between state and family populated by organisations which are separate from the state, enjoy autonomy in relation to the state and are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values’ (White 1994:379). Some NGOs within civil society are politically uninvolved but others engage with government and other organisations, advocating changes in policy. Individual NGOs can advocate progressive or reactionary policies and the NGO community may or may not strengthen civil society; for example, Kenya’s NGO community has been unable to do so due to its fragmentation, competitiveness and unrepresentative character, according to Fowler (1993, cited in Clarke 1995: 14). The distinction between NGO and government is not always easy to make; for example, some NGOs are financed almost exclusively by governments—does this make them an arm of the state? The non-profit aspect of NGOs can also pose boundary problems; for example, is a non-governmental environmental research organisation sponsored entirely by a profit-making business enterprise an NGO? Normally, there are legal distinctions; in most countries organisations must be registered, and as such are formally classified as profit or non-profit undertakings. The NGOs that concern us in this volume are engaged with global environmental problems. An environmental problem is defined, following Sloep and van DamMieras (1995), as a change in the physical environment brought about by human interferences which are perceived by people to be unacceptable with respect to a particular set of commonly shared norms. Many NGOs have broader remits than just the environment. This is particularly true in the South, where nearly all environmental NGOs direct their attention at development problems within which an environmental aspect can be one of several concerns. An environmental problem is global if its consequences are global or if the political actors involved transcend the nation-state. Despite various boundary problems, the definition of environmental NGOs as non-governmental, non-profit organisations engaged with environmental problems works reasonably well in identifying a distinct category of political actors in the arena of environmental policy making. An environmental policy for an NGO can be defined as a deliberate course of action by a target organisation, or set of organisations, designed to accomplish some end related to an environmental problem. It can involve deliberate choices to alter a present course of action: it can also involve an unchanging course of action by a target organisation ‘pursued over time in a fairly consistent way against pressure to the contrary’ (Heidenheimer 1990:5) We refer in our main research question to

David Potter is Professor of Political Science, the Open University; Annie Taylor, formerly at the Open University, is currently in the Politics Department, University of Southampton.

INTRODUCTION 3

the development of policy, conceiving policy, following Grindle and Thomas (1991), as a continuous process with three distinguishable phases: agenda setting, policy choices and implementation processes. (There is no implication that the development of policy will necessarily be beneficial to the environment.) Agenda setting is the first stage in the policy process during which an environmental issue or set of issues becomes for an organisation a subject for policy choice. An issue ‘is any unresolved matter, controversial or non-controversial, that awaits an authoritative decision’ (Crenson 1971:29). The potential number of issues of possible interest to an organisation far exceeds the capacity of the organisation to act on them; issues thus can be said to compete for a place on the policy-making agenda. To be able to set the agenda of a target organisation, to bring an environmental issue to the fore and shape how it is to be considered, can be a most important part of policy advocacy work (Riker 1993). The actual decision or choice made by the target organisation is a process distinct from agenda setting. Furthermore, a policy choice, once made, must be implemented; and that also is a distinct part of the policy process because all sorts of detailed choices are subsequently made at ground level, so to speak, by people other than those who initially made the policy choice. Environmental policies made by state agencies, for example, typically engage with businesses or other non-state agencies when being implemented. An NGO can be more influential in relation to one of these aspects of environmental policy than another. Also, by referring in the main research question to certain policies we acknowledge that NGOs can be influential in relation to some environmental policies and not others. Influence, of course, is a complex concept. A standard definition (Knoke 1990) in the context of this research is one that says that NGO A is influential when it intentionally transmits information to target organisation B (a government agency, business or intergovernmental organisation) which alters B’s policies. The definition is useful as far as it goes, but A can also intentionally influence B in order indirectly to influence C. For example, NGOs have indirectly influenced the World Bank by directly lobbying the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Foreign Operations in Washington; because the USA government is the single largest shareholder in the Bank, this gives these legislative committees important leverage to which the Bank must pay careful attention. Further complications arise upon consideration of the fact that A may influence B’s policies without A intentionally transmitting information. The mere existence of A may shape B’s policies because of B’s belief in what A could or would do if certain policy options were adopted. Such influence is structural; it is part of a broader structure of power which shapes the interrelationships between A and B and helps to determine their relative power. The analysis of NGO advocacy work in relation to specific environmental policies of particular target organisations involves both intentional transmissions of information, directly or indirectly, from one to the other, and other interdependencies that are structural in character. We argue in this volume, especially in Paper 2, that there are four major forms of such


influence: collaboration, confrontation, complementary activities and consciousness-raising. Are NGOs influential? It is widely assumed that sometimes they are; but can one be certain? Answer: not really. Such uncertainty about assessing influence is part of a general problem in interest group research: an NGO transmits information advocating a change of policy, the policy then changes, but there may be no connection between the two events (the policy may have changed because of pressure from other organisations or other factors like sheer chance). Correlation can be mistaken for causation. Also, NGO opinions and changes in policy can both take place over time because of general shifts in internationally accepted norms. Such problems do not mean that determinations of NGO influence are impossible, but there is no doubt that one needs to be careful about accepting public or private claims by the parties involved. And even when care is taken there is still an element of uncertainty. Why are NGOs influential? A number of factors are involved. Some involve agency—the actions of NGOs and others. Some involve structure—constraints and opportunities that shape what NGOs can and cannot do and determine the content of their demands. A structural constraint can severely limit what an NGO can do, but it is not an irremovable obstacle. Its features can and do change over time and such changes can provide opportunities for NGOs in the longer term. Four such constraints that NGOs confront, about which they can do very little in the short term, are given prominence in the research reported in this volume. First, any NGO attempting to influence an environmental policy inherits the particular environmental issue to which the policy relates. Certain environmental issues tend to be less amenable to NGO influence than others. For example, an environmental policy proposal by an NGO which would affect the vital interests of powerful organisations is unlikely to be accepted; examples are NGOs campaigning to end commercial logging in tropical forests when the interests of government are served by land concessions as political favours to large woodproducing firms, or when policy proposals would involve agrarian reform detrimental to powerful landed interests. Similarly, proposed environment policy changes advocated by NGOs that are self-evidently grounded in ideas about intergenerational equity are also difficult to bring to fruition. Many NGOs work on one particular environmental issue at a time, and if it happens that the issue is not intrinsically amenable to NGO influence, then that is a major constraint on their advocacy work. But issues can also provide opportunities. For example, an environmental issue can become more amenable to NGO influence as it advances on the global environmental agenda when international conventions and protocols on that issue are agreed by nation-states. Second, a major structural constraint on NGO advocacy work is the character of the target organisations they confront. There are three main types: organisations within the state (for example, a Ministry of the Environment, of Industries, of Forests, a Nuclear Inspectorate, an Overseas Aid Agency); domestic or transnational business organisations whose policies use or abuse the environment; and IGOs

INTRODUCTION 5

(Intergovernmental Organisations) whose policies have important environmental consequences (for example, World Bank, the UN and its agencies, World Trade Organisation, International Tropical Timber Organisation, G 7, G 77, relevant agencies within the EU). Basically, certain target organisations are more amenable to NGO influence than others. A secretive organisation representing very powerful interests and hostile to an NGO’s policy agenda is a tough target; for example, environmental NGOs were never able directly to influence GATT. But there are also opportunities. Targets can become more accessible or vulnerable. Vulnerability in this context means that the organisation is accountable to some constituency or ‘public’. Where there is such accountability, then political leverage can be brought to bear. For example, commercial firms whose policies impact adversely on the environment can be vulnerable to consumer boycotts organised by NGOs. Such boycotts can hurt sales and profit margins. Target organisations can also be vulnerable if their sources of funding are accessible to NGO lobbying. Third, NGOs cannot choose the domestic political context in which they find themselves. Some political contexts are more favourable to NGO advocacy work than others. In this regard, the literature broadly assumes that NGOs have more opportunities to be more influential when operating in more democratic political contexts. Or, put another way, target organisations in more democratic political contexts are more amenable to NGO influence than target organisations in more authoritarian political contexts. We take democratic regimes to be modes of making binding rules collectively at the level of the nation-state characterised by (1) accountability of rulers to the ruled through representative assemblies based on multi-party elections and adult suffrage, (2) diversity of power centres within the state and a plurality of power centres outside the state into which the state does not normally reach, (3) guarantees in law of civil and political rights (including freedoms of expression and association), and (4) popular participation by people throughout society in decisions that directly affect their lives together with the principle of equality informing political life generally. The first three are normally found in conventional liberal democratic definitions. Some democratic theorists include all four (for example, Beetham 1994). No democracy anywhere at any time has met all four tests very well, certainly not in Asia and Africa. But the features do enable discriminations to be made between more or less democracy at a national level. They also define the dimensions on which democratisation takes place. Fourth, structures of power that shape what NGOs can and cannot achieve by way of influencing environmental policies are not confined to local and national political arenas. Such structures can also be global in scope. Transnational economic processes of global capitalism and uneven North-South development are powerful forces about which NGOs can do nothing in the short term. However, transnational processes also provide opportunities. Northern NGOs may call on the support of Southern NGOs in their coalitions or alliances when campaigning against a state-level target organisation in the North. Southern NGOs may send action ‘alerts’ directly to Northern NGOs who then urge their members to write letters to environmental policy makers in a Southern country. Even very local-level


NGOs will sometimes ‘go global’ when campaigning against policy-making targets in their own country. In doing so, they in effect bypass the nation-state. The way people think and act within the NGO sector in the 1990s can be strikingly transnational. All six papers in this volume are set within the research framework summarised above and address certain aspects of the large question posed at the outset. Papers 1 and 2 focus on the democracy question: are environmental NGOs more influential when they work in more democratic political contexts? In addressing this question, Paper 1 compares NGO advocacy work in India and Indonesia, paying special attention in these different political contexts to different aspects of the policy process—agenda setting, policy choices and policy implementation. Paper 2 compares NGO advocacy work in Zimbabwe and Botswana, developing hypotheses linking the four aspects of democracy with the four forms of policy influence—collaboration, confrontation, complementary activities, consciousnessraising. Paper 3 examines transnational NGO networks, alliances and coalitions and their bearing on NGO advocacy work. The literature on global civil society tends to express optimism about such linkages. The research reported in Paper 3 suggests that there are in fact major differences between Northern and Southern perceptions of such transnational linkages, with NGOs in the South experiencing various problems with the ways such transnational connections operate. Comparative evidence mainly from Malaysia and Indonesia is referred to in the analysis. Papers 4, 5 and 6 are about the work of NGOs in the development of conventions, protocols and other international agreements related to two environmental issues: forests and desertification. Paper 4 examines regime theory in this context and the work of NGOs in regime formation, paying particular attention to the role of Northern and Southern NGOs in the international politics of the Tropical Forestry Action Programme, International Tropical Timber Organisation, forest negotiations of the UNCED process, and the negotiation of the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1994. Paper 5 draws on the theoretical analysis in Paper 4 in order to explain why a Global Forest Convention has not yet been agreed, and in doing so considers the role of Southern NGOs, especially in Malaysia, in the political processes involved. Paper 6 also draws on the theory in Paper 4 to explain why a Convention on Desertification was quickly agreed in the mid-1990s, and examines the role of NGOs, mainly from Africa, in this political process. Papers 5 and 6 together offer a comparison which throws light on the general proposition that certain environmental issues are more amenable to NGO influence and international agreement than others. The literature on NGO advocacy and environmental policy is mostly Northern in orientation and written in the North. Where there are references to the South, they tend to be sporadic, general and uninformed by research in the South. This volume aims to make a contribution by concentrating on what the literature tends to neglect. The research reported here has a pronounced Southern orientation. It concentrates for the most part on Southern NGO advocacy work in relation to

INTRODUCTION 7

global environmental issues particularly salient in the South; and much of the evidence on which it rests comes from South-North collaborative research. This research, which commenced in 1993 and is on-going, has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom under their Global Environmental Change Initiative, and by the Open University. We are grateful for their assistance. The authors of the papers in this volume are members of the GECOU (Global Environmental Change—Open University) research group. The GECOU group has worked closely together as a team for some time, so much so that it is to some extent misleading to put individual names to individual papers. Each paper in this volume can therefore be said to be a product of collective effort, involving not only GECOU colleagues but also colleagues in Asia, Africa and elsewhere associated with the GECOU research (and who are acknowledged at appropriate places in the individual papers). We also thank Arnold Hughes for reading and commenting on all the papers, John Hunt for the maps, and Sally Eaton, Jennifer Potter and Joan Dale Lace for seeing the manuscript through to publication. REFERENCES Beetham, D. (ed.) (1994) Defining and Measuring Democracy, London, Sage. Clarke, G. (1995) ‘Participation and Protest: Non-Governmental Organisations and Philippine Politics’, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of London. Crenson, M. (1971) The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-decision Making in the Cities, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Fowler, A. (1993) ‘Non-Governmental Organisations and the Promotion of Democracy in Kenya’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sussex. Grindle, M. and Thomas, J. (1991) Public Choices and Policy Change: The Political Economy of Reform in Developing Countries, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Handbook of Political Science (1975) 8 vols., edited by Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, Reading, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.; esp. Vol. IV ‘Non-Governmental Politics’. Heidenheimer, A. et al. (1990) Comparative Public Policy, 3rd edn, New York, St Martins Press. Knoke, D. (1990) Political Networks: The Structural Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ragin, C. (1987) The Comparative Method: Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies, Berkeley, University of California Press. Riker, W. (ed.) (1993) Agenda Formation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. Salamon, L. (1994) ‘The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 4, pp. 109–22. Sloep, P. and van Dam-Mieras, M. (1995) ‘Science and Environmental Problems’ in P. Glasbergen and A.Blowers (eds.) Environmental Policy in an International Context: Book 1, Perspectives on Environmental Problems, London, Edwin Arnold. White, G. (1994) ‘Civil Society, Democratization and Development (I): Clearing the Analytical Ground’, Democratization, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 375–90.

8

1 Democratisation and the Environment: NGOs and Deforestation Policies in India (Karnataka) and Indonesia (North Sumatra) DAVID POTTER Given that democracy and environmental sustainability are two prominent values in current international discourse, it is remarkable that the comparative politics literature on democratisation virtually ignores the environment. Recent comparative analyses of democratisation drawing on modernisation theories refer to a wide range of more or less propitious economic, political, social and cultural conditions; but environmental variables are not amongst them, nor is there consideration of the possible consequences of democratisation for the environment (for example, Dahl 1989, Diamond et al. 1989, Vanhanen 1990, Hedenius 1992, Lipset 1994, Fukuyama 1995). Such analyses framed by transition theories, in which democratisation is seen as driven by the agency of particular elite initiatives, alliances and conflicts, likewise have nothing to say on this subject (for instance, Di Palma 1990, Mainwaring et al. 1992, Higley and Gunther 1992, Schmitter 1994, Pridham 1995). The same is the case with respect to explanations using some form of structural theory, in which democratisation is regarded as one of several historical trajectories each shaped by changing structures of class, state and transnational power (for example, Haggard and Kaufman 1992, Rueschemeyer et al. 1992, Potter 1993, Stephens 1993). In other recent works on democracy and democratisation there is no mention of the environment or only the briefest of references ‘in passing’ (examples are Beetham 1994, Held 1993, Parry and Moran 1994). Huntington’s (1994) major review article of the comparative politics literature on democratisation pays attention to both causes and consequences of democratisation, but there is no mention of possible environmental consequences. The growing academic literature on environmental politics likewise has had little to say systematically on the subject of democracy and the environment (for instance, Hurrell and Kingsbury 1992, Lipschutz and Conca 1993, Ghai 1994, Princen and Finger 1994). This is also true of the major reports on the environment (examples are, Brundtland et al. 1988, Tolba et al. (for UNEP) 1992, Agenda 21 1992, World Bank 1994). The standard annual environmental publications also largely avoid the issue, like the Green Globe yearbooks (for instance, Bergesen and Parman 1994) and the Worldwatch

David Potter is Professor of Political Science, the Open University.


Institute’s State of the World reports (for example, Brown 1995). Where there has been reference to the subject it has amounted to a general presumption that either the consequences of democratisation are beneficial for the environment (examples are, Clark 1991, Hardoy 1992, Fowler 1993) or that the consequences of global environmental crisis or collapse could produce a strong trend toward authoritarian regimes in both capitalist and socialist countries (a review of such views is in Phaehlke, 1989). Very recently, several political scientists have begun to try to theorise more systematically the relationship generally between democracy and the environment (Payne 1995, Gleditsch and Sverdrup 1995, Munslow and Ekoko 1995). One part of such discussions is directed at what is perceived as the greater role of environmental NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) in more democratic political contexts. Payne argues that (i) in democracies ‘citizens are free to gather and disseminate environmental information and lobby their government collectively’ resulting in there being more environmental NGOs in democracies than in non-democracies, and (ii) democratic states are ‘more likely to be accountable and responsive to demands’ with the result that NGOs as pressure groups ‘enjoy greater success in democratic societies’. Gleditsch and Sverdrup similarly argue that democratisation ‘tends to mobilise counterforces’ like NGOs which are likely to become more influential in relation to environmental policies with more democratisation. These arguments can be stated summarily in terms of two linked hypotheses about democratisation and environmental NGOs: 1. In more democratic regimes there are more environmental NGOs providing opposition to policies adversely affecting the environment; 2. Environmental NGOs in more democratic regimes have more influence on policies adversely affecting the environment than NGOs in less democratic regimes. In this paper, I consider these two linked hypotheses by comparing the number and influence of environmental NGOs on policies affecting a particular environmental problem—tropical deforestation—in democratic India (Karnataka) and non-democratic Indonesia (North Sumatra). The analysis is based mainly on field research in India and Indonesia during 1993–95. The assistance of those who helped the most in this regard is gratefully acknowledged at the end of this paper. The comparative analysis suggests that these two conventional hypotheses may not represent accurately the relationships between democratisation and the number and influence of environmental NGOs.

DEMOCRATISATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT 11

1.1 THE FIRST HYPOTHESIS: DEMOCRATISATION AND NUMBERS OF ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS In discriminating between more or less democratisation in Asia, I use the criteria set out in the working definition of democracy in the introduction to this volume. On this basis, India is one of Asia’s more democratic regimes. A large literature has examined critically its various features (for example, Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, Frankel and Rao 1989 and 1990, Kohli 1990, Mitra 1992, Brass 1994). The polity has been noted for competitive elections at national, state and local levels. There is also a plurality of power centres inside the state. As for civil and political rights, data produced by Amnesty International and the US State Department for the 1980s (as reported in PIOOM 1990), for example, were not complimentary, primarily due to a record of dreadful abuses of human rights by police and security forces in North India, especially in Kashmir, Punjab and Assam. Other rankings for the 1980s put India toward the top for organisational freedoms and freedom of opinion (for example, Hadenius 1992:67–88). India also has probably the most active civil rights movements in Asia (Rubin 1987). As with most other liberal democracies, there was not much popular participation by the majority of people in state decision-making arenas apart from the power exercised by their vote at periodic elections. Deploying these democratisation criteria regionally, Karnataka in South India could be rated as one of the most democratic states in India, perhaps in Asia. It has, for example, a lengthy history of comparatively stable multi-party politics, a free and lively press, and a ‘culture of accountability’ (Crook and Manor 1995). By comparison, Indonesia has been since the mid-1960s one of Asia’s most authoritarian regimes. The political leadership has not been accountable to voters. The electoral system was organised to ensure that the government party GOLKAR won. There were opposition parties but they were strictly controlled. Political activity was banned between elections and the rural population—most Indonesians —was not allowed to belong to a political party. Pluralism inside and outside the state in Indonesia was minimal. There was a virtual ‘fusion of state, local and foreign capital’ (Chan and Clark 1992:44), with generals, politicians and bureaucrats pursuing power, patronage and revenues through their control of state monopolies, concessions, licences and subsidies (Robison 1993). In 1980, 24 of the 34 local companies engaged in the timber business involved military interests (Bresnan 1993: 212). Other ‘centres of power outside the government were eliminated or appeased’ (Dauvergne 1994:505). Within the state, the fusion of executivelegislative-judicial power was striking, together with military penetration of the civilian apparatus. In 1990, probably more than 60 per cent of the senior officials in central government ministries were military people; in 1987 21 of the 27 governors were active or ‘retired’ generals or colonels (Dauvergne 1994:504). As for political rights and freedoms, Indonesia was regularly rated very low for the


1980s by Amnesty International, the US State Department and other rankings (for example, Hadenius 1992). An environmental NGO is defined in the introduction to this volume as an organisation that is non-governmental and non-profit making and engaged in an environmental problem or problems. Does democratic India have many environmental NGOs? Does non-democratic Indonesia have very few or none at all? India’s political scientists have remarked on the country’s vigorous associational life and ‘extraordinary pluralism’ (Kothari 1988:136). Indeed, it has been estimated that ‘the number of NGOs active in rural development in India range from fewer than 10,000 to several 100,000 depending upon the type of classification used’ (Farrington and Lewis 1993:92–3). Only a small percentage of these engage directly with environmental issues, fewer still with policies affecting a particular environmental problem like deforestation. Very few indeed deal with only environmental problems. Karnataka in the mid-1990s, with a population of 48 million, probably had roughly 400 NGOs involved in development issues with at least some environmental interest. A few of these were large hierarchical organisations, for example, MYRADA (Mysore Relief and Development Agency) in Bangalore. Most were so small that they occupied a borderline position as an ‘organisation’ in terms of full-time staff, size of budget, extent of record keeping and so on. An example was Spandana Samaja Seva Samudaya, near Sirsi in Uttara Kannada District. Spandana aimed at sustainable agricultural development in a small area. Its 60 members in 1994 engaged in activities to promote environmental awareness, use of alternative sources of energy, and so on. There was a membership fee of Rs 100 and a managing committee. They kept rudimentary records related to their sources of funding, but there were no paid employees. Spandana may not have been quite a formal organisation, but it was certainly a little NGO engaged in development work and environmental advocacy. Spandana in 1994 was one of ten little development/environmental NGOs in Uttara Kannada District (one of 20 districts in Karnataka). Uttara Kannada, with a population of about 1.3 million in 1994, had somewhat fewer development/environmental NGOs per head of population than most other districts in the State. By comparison, one might expect from the first hypothesis that non-democratic Indonesia might have very few, if any, development/ environmental NGOs. No estimate of the total number of such NGOs in Indonesia is available, but there is little doubt that there are fewer per head of population than in India. The surprise, however, is that there is a lively NGO sector of some size and significance in what has clearly been a most unpromising political context. Some years ago the authors of probably the most authoritative study (unpublished) of environmental NGOs in Indonesia prepared for ANGOC (Asian NGO Coalition) and the Asian Development Bank (Purnomo et al. 1989) remarked on the ‘great expansion and maturation’ of the NGO sector and hundreds ‘springing up throughout the nation’ (p. 5). Belcher and Gennino (1993) profiled 44 indigenous NGOs working more


or less on forest protection issues: 11 in Jakarta and Bogor, four in the rest of Java, eight in Kalimantan, seven in Sumatra, five in Irian Jaya and nine in other areas. In 1994, WALHI (Indonesia Forum for the Environment) had network links with over 300 environmental NGOs throughout the country. WALHI conducted research, engaged in policy advocacy work related to the environment, and campaigned publicly on environmental issues. Its basic stance was to promote decentralised management of Indonesia’s natural resources and to strengthen local NGOs. Another national forum or networking secretariat for NGOs was SKEPHI (NGO Network for Forest Conservation in Indonesia); it linked student and other groups and NGOs throughout Indonesia working to stop forest destruction and supported the rights of local communities dependent on the forests. Other national networking secretariats of NGOs working in the environmental field included INDHRRA (Indonesian Secretariat for the Development of Human Resources in Rural Areas), KRAPP (Indonesian Pesticides Action Network) and SKREPP (NGO Network against Pollution). North Sumatra is one of Indonesia’s 27 provinces with a population in the mid-1990s of about 7.5 million (excluding the city of Medan). According to Osmar Tanjung, Executive Secretary of an NGO forum in North Sumatra called WIM (Wahana Informasi Masyarakat), there were ‘at least 27 and no more than 62’ development/environmental NGOs in the province in 1994, some very small. WIM itself had paid workers, files and records, an office, and was linked to many other NGOs throughout Indonesia via WALHI in Jakarta. Identifying the number of NGOs is never easy because there are always numerous examples on the boundaries of the definition. There is an added problem in Indonesia, where even the term ‘non-governmental organisation’ in its Indonesian translation is not acceptable to many environmental organisations because it is too confrontational; a ‘non-governmental organisation’ may be perceived by government agencies as an ‘anti-government’ political institution, which can attract unnecessary government harassment and intimidation. It is far better to be known as a ‘self-reliant community organisation’ (lembaga swadaya masyarakat), even better if your community organisation is part of a loosely structured forum or coalition of organisations and individuals who act collectively, thereby making it tougher for the government to single you out for retribution. The interim conclusions from this very brief survey are: 1. The number of development/environmental NGOs in a local area of nondemocratic Indonesia can be roughly the same as the number in a local area of democratic India; 2. There are more environmental NGOs per head of population in India as a whole than in Indonesia; 3. A non-democratic regime like Indonesia can have a fairly substantial environmental NGO sector, even though it may not be as large as the sector in a more democratic regime.


To these three can be added a fourth: NGOs can be virtually non-existent in (other) non-democratic regimes with strong political parties. Vietnam, for example, with a population of 74 million in 1994, had only 20 indigenous development NGOs, only four of which had anything to do with the environment; these four were all very small, recently formed and located in Hanoi (Mulla and Boothroyd 1994). It is clear that these four interim conclusions are not well caught by the first hypothesis stated in the introduction. I shall come back to this point in the conclusion. 1.2 THE SECOND HYPOTHESIS: DEMOCRATISATION AND NGO INFLUENCE ON POLICY In order to consider the second hypothesis I compare an Indonesian and Indian ‘influence story’. Both relate to the advocacy work of NGOs in relation to policies affecting tropical forests. In each case the particular story was identified for me by NGO people and others in the country as the one from which they said (roughly speaking), ‘much can be learned by you about NGO advocacy work here’. These were not necessarily the most ‘successful efforts’, but my informants regarded them as significant. Our definitions of influence and policy are briefly set out in the introduction to this volume. Both stories relate to policies affecting tropical deforestation, a particularly urgent problem in Asia. In the early 1990s the rate of destruction escalated in many places. A cautious expert in these matters (Myers 1993) estimated that the 1991 deforestation rate, if projected, would mean all the main tropical forests would be gone within 50 years. The rates are far from uniform. The current destruction in Indonesia is so ferocious that little of the forests will be left within 20 years outside a few pockets in Kalimantan and Irian Jaya. These new estimates may be too conservative. The data on which they are based come from either forest department reports or satellite pictures. The former are notoriously inexact and the latter portray surprisingly little. For example, it is almost impossible to distinguish in a satellite picture between moist forest canopy and a plantation of eucalyptus trees, and pictures showing canopy can hide extensive degradation below. There are also strong reasons for believing that the current accelerating rate of deforestation will itself accelerate, unless vigorous measures are taken to tackle the main causes— commercial logging, shifting agriculture, government sponsored transmigration schemes, and large-scale development projects such as dams and mining operations. If current rates continue, then millions of forest dwelling people will be dispossessed of their livelihoods; soils will be degraded through erosion and water supplies threatened; tropical storms will be more devastating; the loss of biological diversity will mean millions of unique animal and plant species will become extinct; a unique source of food, industrial materials and medicines will be lost forever; billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases will be released into the atmosphere. The destruction


of these moist forests is largely irreversible; they are extremely fragile and once they are destroyed they cannot be recreated. 1.3 AN INDONESIA-NORTH SUMATRA STORY The Indonesian Government claims the sole legal jurisdiction over all designated forest lands (74 per cent of Indonesia’s land area). However, these forest lands are also a vast “commons” in so far as a wide range of actors…have loosely restricted access to them, …such “open access” being a powerful incentive to deforest and degrade lands since none of these actors holds a secure right to forest lands that might serve as an incentive for careful, long-term management, and none possess the practical means to control or exclude others, especially in remote areas. (WRI 1994:13) The main actors include the commercial firms that dominate and profit from timber production and processing, ‘bureaucratic capitalists’ (Shin 1989) within the state who maintain beneficial business links with the private firms, Ministry of Forestry bureaucrats whose jobs and responsibilities under the law are involved, NGOs and local communities. The changing support structures and conflicts of interests between these actors frame the politics of deforestation in Indonesia. The sector of the Indonesian state that deals with forests and implements forests policy is large and highly centralised. There are the Ministry of Forestry in Jakarta, regional offices, provincial forestry services and four state-owned forestry corporations. They all report directly to the Minister and are basically under the Ministry’s control. Government policies are premised on forest officials in the field managing the forests, but the ratio in the field of forestry staff to hectares of forests is 1:314,000 in East Kalimantan, roughly 1:120,00 elsewhere in Indonesia, except Java (GOI/ FAO 1990). The capacity of the Ministry of Forestry even just to monitor what is going on in the moist forest is minimal. Since 1965, under President Suharto, the Ministry of Forestry and the government more generally has encouraged the exploitation of the forests for wood and wood products by commercial firms largely for export, particularly to Japan. Such commercial activity was consistent with a broad strategy of the Indonesian Government to pursue development principally by providing infrastructure to enable the dynamism of capitalist enterprises to flourish. The results of this strategy were impressive from the government’s point of view. Indonesia’s per capita GDP grew from $75 in 1966 to an expected $1000 in 1996, one of the highest growth rates in the world during that period (McBeth 1995:48). Export of timber products and rattan (stems of climbing palms used in wicker work, thongs, and so on) earned $4.2 billion in foreign exchange in 1991 (World Bank 1993) and half the world’s plywood came from Indonesia. The wood-based pulp and paper industry also expanded dramatically.


One aspect of that strategy of development had been, in 1965, to create huge logging concessions in the moist forest on 20-year (renewable) leases. The leases were ‘consigned on a non-competitive basis to individuals closely related to the military government and its senior officials, and to business organisations controlled by the military directly’ (Rush 1991:36). That system remained virtually unchanged in the early 1990s. In 1991, 580 logging concessionaires held claim to more than 60 million hectares, that is, more than 41 per cent of designated forest lands (Djamaluddin 1991). About 25 million hectares had already been ‘logged out’ by mid-1990 (WALHI/ LBH 1992). The concessionaires were powerful indeed, and could largely ignore any local forester bold enough to try either to investigate breaches of concession agreements or to collect unpaid taxes. Illegal, untaxed and unreported logging on a wide scale by cheap labour, with governments standing idly by, meant enormous profits for the concessionaires. The livelihoods of local forest people were adversely affected. The concessions and related regulations enabled the companies to ‘own’ former community forests. Local people were then forbidden to enter the forests. Wood carvers found they had to ‘steal’ from ‘their’ former forest to keep up their traditional crafts and means of existence. Family needs of other families were threatened because the rattan culled from the nearby forest by women and then sold in local markets was no longer available. People who used to gather incense from the community forest were no longer able to do so. Indigenous forest peoples protested fairly frequently at the loss of their customary rights under the traditional adat law of access to the forest and its products, but received little response. Local NGOs worked with local communities, broadly tried to represent their interests and engaged in advocacy work on their behalf. Many were linked with other local NGOs and also with NGOs at provincial and national levels, for example, the WIM-WALHI links mentioned earlier. There were conflicts between NGOs, but most advocated promoting sustainable forest uses, enforcing concession-holders’ responsibilities under their contracts, phasing out concessions that threaten areas ecologically unsuited to logging and forests that established local communities depend upon for a significant share of their livelihood, and granting legal recognition of customary adat land and resource rights in areas where communities are willing to work with government and others to manage forest resources sustainably (WRI, 1994). The particular NGO influence story summarised here involved WALHI and SKEPHI in Jakarta and, in North Sumatra, WIM in the city of Medan, and KSPPM (Kelompok Studi Pengembangan Prakarsa Masyarakat) working in an area near Lake Toba. The area around Lake Toba is known for the rich cultural life of the local Batak people and the natural beauty of the surrounding countryside and its forests. The NGO targets were several Ministries in the central government, the provincial government and the company which held the concession in the Lake Toba area, namely PT Inti Indorayon Utama Ltd. Indorayon runs a pulp and rayon factory on the Asahan River and hires the loggers to obtain the wood from the surrounding forests to feed the factory. Indorayon is a joint venture of Canadian,


Korean and Indonesian partners backed by President Suharto’s eldest son and part of the Raja Garuda Mas Group owned by Sukanto Tanoto (alias Tan Kuang Ho), the ‘timber King’ of Sumatra. Tanoto obtained a permit from the government’s Central Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) in 1983 to build the pulp and rayon factory and in the next few years the Ministry of Forestry granted the necessary forest concessions and land use permits for an area totalling about 150,000 hectares along the Asahan River near Lake Toba and the region surrounding the Lake itself. Other necessary licences were obtained from the Governor of the Province and the Ministry of Industry. Various conditions were attached to these permits and concessions, including ones meant to safeguard the environment. The Minister of Population and Environment, Emil Salim, expressed concern when it was decided to locate the factory on the Asahan River, as did other organisations working in the area including the Asian Development Bank which was assisting an irrigation development project in the area and feared deforestation would cause serious reductions in the amount of irrigation water. But all these concerns were swept aside by Indorayon, which had the backing of the more powerful government ministries and the President’s office. Virtually from the outset, it is clear that Indorayon behaved cavalierly with regard to the environmental conditions laid down in the various licences and concessions. For example, it ignored detailed stipulations about the disposal of waste water from the factory, simply dumping most of it into the Asahan River. Even more serious, in the forests there was indiscriminate tree felling despite the stipulations that Indonesia’s Selective Felling System should be adhered to. On 9 August 1988 an aerated lagoon used by Indorayon as a place of storage for waste materials sprang a leak during a trial run. Tests conducted only hours afterwards found harmful chemicals from this leak in the river. Fish died and local people complained of skin irritation. This incident triggered considerable media attention, and Indorayon’s large-scale forest felling activities were also publicly aired at this time. This was accompanied by angry protests from some politicians, environmental NGOs and local people. WALHI (Indonesian Forum for the Environment) in Jakarta had been trying to investigate the impact of Indorayon’s activities on the environment for more than two years. It had also been urging local NGOs in North Sumatra to become more actively involved in such work, without much success (Tanjung 1992). Using the momentum created by the burst lagoon, WALHI and LBH (the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation) filed a lawsuit in December 1988 against Indorayon, the Chairperson of the BKPM, the Minister of Industries, Minister of Forestry, Minister of Environment and Population and the Governor of North Sumatra. WALHI and LBH charged that the company and the government officials and agencies had neglected to conduct a proper EIA as stipulated in the 1986 Environment Impact Assessment Regulations and were therefore legally responsible for pollution and deforestation in the area covered by Indorayon’s operation.


FIGURE 1.1 MAP OF INDONESIA AND NORTH SUMATRA


Before filing this suit, WALHI sought support, including financial support, from individuals and groups in Indonesia and abroad. It sent a questionnaire to about 180 Indonesian NGOs asking if they approved such an unprecedented step. Eighty NGOs returned the questionnaire all approving the idea of suing the government and the industry. According to the director of WALHI at that time (Purnomo 1994) the 80 NGOs also recorded on their questionnaire remarks urging WALHI to be cautious in the action, and these shaped the moderate tone adopted by WALHI and LBH during the trial. WALHI also held meetings with NGOs and local people in North Sumatra, including a training workshop in ‘Bare-Foot Environmental Assessment Training’. Together with local NGOs in North Sumatra WALHI helped the village people suffering from the factory’s pollution to file another lawsuit at the provincial level. The case brought by WALHI and LBH, which was prolonged and costly, is regarded now as a ‘milestone in the history of environmental advocacy work in Indonesia’ (Purnomo 1994). This was the first NGO lawsuit brought before the courts and established an important precedent: an NGO can sue the government and/or a company on behalf of the environment. Although WALHI and LBH unsurprisingly lost the case, the court recognised WALHI’s right to file a suit in the interests of the public and its domain. NGOs believe this judgment may have laid the groundwork for later, more winnable, cases. Certainly the case was widely reported at the time and appears to have breathed new life into many NGOs throughout Indonesia. As for the government agencies, being sued by an NGO was something of a disgrace even though they ‘won’ the case. The action seems to have been one factor in subsequent slight shifts in government policy towards getting a bit tougher with those concessionaires which persistently ignored conditions in their contracts or certain other government regulations meant to safeguard the environment. Back at Lake Toba, conflict between Indorayon and local people/NGOs continued. Indorayon expanded its operation while being denounced locally, nationally and internationally for their logging and pollution practices. Locally, KSPPM and other local NGOs and individuals monitored the deforestation in the area and reported it to the environmental fora in which they were involved. There were also periodic demonstrations by local people outside the Indorayon factory and police arrests. In 1991 KSPPM was closed down by the government for six months without explanation and allowed to resume its work on condition that it discontinue its legal aid programme for local people (WALHI, LBH 1992). Nationally, WALHI and SKEPHI reported what the North Sumatra NGOs were learning about Indorayon to relevant government agencies in Jakarta. SKEPHI in particular reported what was going on to international NGOs through action alerts and its journal Setiakawan; prominent in this international campaign were the World Rainforest Movement, Asia-Pacific Peoples Environmental Network, Rainforest Action Network, International Campaign for Ecological Justice in Indonesia, Friends of the Earth and the European Rainforest Movement.


The conflict at Lake Toba escalated when, on 5 November 1993, a chlorine tank at Indorayon’s factory on the Asahan River exploded. Employees and people living nearby fled, fearing the chlorine gas billowing up in the air was dangerous. Indorayon’s officials wearing gas masks tried to assure the people that all was safe. The next day, about 2,000 people demonstrated at the factory demanding that operations be halted and an explanation given of what had happened; upon receiving unsatisfactory answers, they broke into the plant and damaged factory property worth $2.4 million. NGO people and students at Medan also demonstrated at the Provincial Assembly buildings on 9 November, insisting that the government investigate the incident. National and international NGOs were also alerted. The factory was shut down for only five days while perfunctory government inspections were carried out. Ignoring the protests, the Minister for Industry allowed the company to resume operations, but also ordered Bapedal (the Environment Impact Management Agency) to arrange a full audit, the first such audit of a private company in Indonesia. Labat Anderson, an environmental auditing company from the USA, was engaged to carry out the audit, which included in its terms of reference Indorayon’s management of the forests and its pollution control. Labat Anderson were instructed to obtain input from local NGOs. The audit commenced in early 1994 and ran on for the rest of the year. That such an audit was being carried out under government auspices via Bapedal was unusual and attracted considerable publicity. Also, there was a four-hour meeting on 1 February 1994 in Medan between the owner of the company (and two of his staff) and representatives of seven NGOs in North Sumatra, including KSPPM and WIM. The company made clear that they knew their environmental record was poor and promised to try and improve, to relate more openly to the local community, to communicate more openly with NGOs and so on. In June there was a meeting of three of the Labat Anderson auditing team, an adviser from the Ministry of Environment, a representative of the Forest Department and local NGOs. Such meetings involving NGOs were unprecedented in Indonesia outside Jakarta. The NGOs were sceptical about the audit process because of the heavy government presence in it. They were also concerned about its highly publicised nature and their involvement in it, which provided the government with an opportunity to claim that NGOs supported Indorayon. Although sceptical, they were nevertheless of the view that the 1994 audit had resulted in some shift in company policy affecting the environment. They believe that part of the reason for the shift may have been related to Indorayon’s negotiations with CS First Boston Corporation in 1994 for a loan of $110 million and the company’s concern that First Boston might pull out because of lobbying of First Boston by USA NGOs demanding that the corporation withdraw from the loan. They also accepted that their efforts locally and nationally had helped to bring about some shift in company and government policies affecting the environment.


1.4 A KARNATAKA-UTTARA KANNADA STORY The Government of Karnataka is not a ‘sovereign’ entity like the Government of Indonesia, but as one of India’s states in India’s Federal Union it has been given under the constitution virtually complete responsibility for the management of the forests within its boundaries. The NGO story considered here is about forest management. The influence of the Indian Government on forest policies in Karnataka can be important, as will be noted in a moment, but the advocacy work of NGOs in relation to forest management policy is basically a state-local story. The local end of this story is in Uttara Kannada District in the Western Ghats. The humid tropical forests in the Western Ghats have been described by noted ecologists as ‘of considerable significance for India’ because they ‘constitute an economic resource, protect watersheds of all the major rivers in the Southern Peninsula, support livelihoods of substantial peasant and tribal populations and are

FIGURE 1.2 MAP OF KARNATAKA STATE, INDIA


a depository of biodiversity surpassed only by the Eastern Himalaya’; and it is ‘a matter of considerable concern therefore that the Western Ghats have suffered substantial outright loss of forest cover, loss of standing biomass in areas retaining forest cover and loss of biodiversity’—forest cover in Uttara Kannada specifically having declined from 8,000 square kilometres to 6,000 square kilometres during the past 40 years (Daniels et al. 1993:16). The reasons are various, including overutilisation by logging industries, poaching, over-grazing and over-use generally by local people. Explanations for the historical destruction and degradation of forests in the Western Ghats and elsewhere have centred on the radical transformation of the social relations of resource use that were initiated during colonial rule and then became more firmly entrenched with the coming of democracy in the 1950s. Such processes involve the use of state power to undervalue the products of the forests and organise their supply at subsidised rates to powerful urban elites and dominant classes. The people who in effect have paid for this system have been the rural poor. They traditionally practised a form of sustainable forestry because they relied on the forests for many of their basic needs. The colonial state then abolished most traditional rights in common lands when setting up the system of forest extraction. Since then, the rural poor gradually have become the victims of deforestation. Today, many living in or near what is left of the forests cannot or will not cooperate in their prudent management because the forests have been largely taken from them. They now prey upon the forests too. This analysis of deforestation fed into the discourse on forest management practices locally and globally, which began to shift in the 1970s and 1980s. An important early marker was the energy crisis of 1973. ‘For more than a third of the world’s people’, Eckholm (1975) remarked, ‘the world energy crisis is a daily scramble to cook dinner’. The fuelwood crisis became linked to the escalating rates of deforestation in tropical forests, which began to receive prominence in the media at this time. All this connected with another trend in the 1970s towards paying increased attention to rural ‘basic needs’. These events and processes began to influence the thinking of some people who mattered in the world of forestry. In 1978, for example, the theme of the Eighth World Forestry Congress was ‘Forests for People’. This marked the increased importance being given to the subject in teaching and research in the forestry schools throughout the world; and this may have influenced professional foresters trained in the schools who began to fill the forestry departments of governments and international agencies. In the same year, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN agency concerned with forests and rural development, published a policy paper on ‘community forestry’ (FAO 1978). Forestry, they said, must start at the ‘grassroots’. Such ideas globally became more prominent during the 1980s (for example, as summarised in FAO 1991). These ideas began to have consequences for forest policy agendas in India. For example, various ‘social forestry’ policies were set in motion in many states during the 1980s. By the early 1990s most states were beginning to implement new policies setting up joint forest management schemes involving forest officials, village


communities and NGOs. The main premise of such schemes was that the regeneration of forests can be achieved only with the active participation of local forest communities in their management. What triggered such policy shifts in the states, including Karnataka, were definite statements in favour of such action by the Government of India. A new National Forest Policy, presented to Parliament in December 1988, clearly indicated that a move in that direction would be desirable. This emphasis was subsequently built into the Eighth Five Year Plan (1992–97). Most important was a circular of 1 June 1990 sent from the Secretary of Environments and Forests, Government of India, to the Forests Secretaries of all states setting out the details of a new policy called: ‘Involvement of Village Communities and Voluntary Associations in the Regeneration of Degraded Forest Lands’ (reprinted in SPWD 1993). These and other Government of India statements and policy directives contain the results of political work by policy elites in New Delhi in the 1980s who succeeded in redefining government policy on forest management practices (a story not pursued in this paper). In doing so, they drew upon ideas in the changing discourse about sustainable forest management, linking these ideas to events and political forces in India in order to make a case for joint forest management. Of the 13 state governments that had by August 1993 issued government orders setting up joint forest management schemes, Karnataka’s Order (GO AHF 232 FAP 86, dated 12.4.93) establishing JFPM (Joint Forest Planning and Management) was one of the longest and most detailed. Its provisions can perhaps be summarised briefly in terms of six main features: 1. JFPM is restricted at present to degraded areas of forests, where the canopy cover is less than 25 per cent, and certain other forest lands. Reserved forests (Classes A and B) with better canopy cover, which comprised the bulk of forests controlled by the Forestry Department, are excluded from JFPM. 2. Village Forest Committees (VFCs) are formed consisting of beneficiaries of the scheme in a village or group of villages in or adjacent to JFPM forest areas. One member per family is eligible to become a member upon payment of a small fee. A number of ex-officio members also join the VFC, including an NGO representative nominated by the relevant Deputy Conservator of Forests. A VFC has a number of duties and responsibilities, such as to ‘help the Forest Department in preparing a Joint Management Plan in the area, protect and develop the forests areas and other government waste lands assigned to it’. 3. Each VFC has a Managing Committee elected for a period of five years by the members: a ‘Chairman’, ten other elected members, and four ex-officio members (the village accountant, mandal panchayat secretary, NGO representative and a forester). The Managing Committee is expected to meet at least once a month. It has various powers, including ‘to apprehend the forest offenders and hand them over to the forest authorities’; ‘to check and to prevent those indulging in forest encroachment, illicit cutting, smuggling and


poaching’; ‘to seize wood illegally cut’; ‘to impound cattle engaged in unauthorized grazing’ in the forests. 4. All members/beneficiaries on the VFC are entitled to grasses, leaves and fuelwood from the JFPM area free of costs. The Managing Committee supervises the distribution of such quotas, ensuring it is ‘fair and equitable’. When disposing of minor forest products/fruits, timber and fuelwood, ‘the requirement of the local village should be treated as a first charge on such final produce’, and any surplus ‘shall be disposed of by the VFC at open public auction or local sale’. The proceeds from such transactions are shared: 50 per cent to government; 25 per cent to beneficiaries on the VFC; 25 per cent to the Village Forest Development Fund. 5. A ‘tree patta’ scheme enables private landowners adjoining the JFPM area to enjoy the usufructs from trees on roadsides and canalsides free of cost ‘providing he maintains the trees at his own cost after the third year of its planting’. A small rent per tree per annum is charged. If no such private landowners are interested, then the trees are available to members/beneficiaries of the VFC. 6. The Government Order explicitly gives voluntary agencies and NGOs ‘with proven track record’ a role in JFPM, but not a very central one. NGOs ‘may play a supportive role in assisting the Forest Department and VFCs’. Several months after the Karnataka Government Order was made public, the Chairperson of the Committee of Forestry and Common Lands of FEVORD-K (Federation of Voluntary Organisations for Rural Development—Karnataka), the main NGO federation in the state, drafted a response to it. (The following summary is based on the author’s interview with the Chairperson on 5 December 1993 at Rennibennur, Dharwad District.) Although the NGOs in FEVORD-K generally welcomed the Government Order as an important step forward, they were unhappy with some of its main features. Most importantly, they objected to the restriction of JFPM to degraded areas of the forest with 25 per cent canopy or less. They urged the government to consider extending the scheme to less degraded lands also. They argued that many tribal and other forest dwellers lived in less degraded areas and would be unable to benefit from JFPM. They also made a number of detailed suggestions aimed at relaxing the exclusive and rather tight control of the scheme exercised by the KFD (Karnataka Forestry Department). For example, they recommended that the power to nominate NGOs to the VFCs and Managing Committees should be moved from the Deputy Conservator of Forests to the Deputy Commissioner of the District in which the village(s) is(are) located. The NGOs advanced detailed proposals to ensure that women, who are most involved in using forests on a day to day basis, were better represented on the VFCs. For example, they recommended that two adults from each household be eligible for membership of the VFC, one male and one female. The NGOs criticised the complex arrangements for sharing and disposal of produce from the forest lands under JFPM. They made several suggestions aimed at making this arrangement


simpler and more transparent to VFC members. They also recommended that the VFC should simply decide how its 50 per cent share of the produce is disposed of, and it should set the rates for any produce it sells. They also urged the abolition of the tree patta scheme on the grounds that it amounted to the privatisation of common lands. FEVORD-K, the NGO grouping that ‘responded’ to the new policy, is an unusual ‘federation’. It has an address in Bangalore and a couple of people there who act as a conduit for information going to and from the roughly 120 member organisations (in 1994). The tiny central office is not involved in the internal functioning of member organisations. It does not evaluate member organisations or fund them. It does not have projects of its own. The life of FEVORD-K is in the countryside amongst the member organisations. If the members are not active, FEVORD-K is not active. All major decisions of FEVORD-K are made at the Annual General Meeting, which constitutes the Board of Directors and various standing committees. The Board has 21 members and meets about every three months. The President of the Board and other office bearers in FEVORD-K cannot hold office for more than two years, nor can they be active in party politics. There were 14 standing committees in 1993 on different aspects of FEVORD-K work. Each committee meets several times during the year in a location convenient to the members. The Forestry and Common Lands Standing Committee was chaired in 1993–95 by a leading figure in SPS (Samaj Parivarthana Samudaya), an NGO in Dharwad District. Also prominent in the affairs of the committee and FEVORD-K’s work in relation to the new forest management policy is IDS (India Development Service), an NGO at work on rural development projects in several districts. For example, IDS appointed a person in November 1993 on a full-time basis to act as FEVORD-K’s ‘Interdevelopment Services Coordinator’ for JFPM. IDS pays his salary. He has been travelling throughout the state alerting NGOs to the implications of JFPM for their work, providing training programmes for NGOs about JFPM, and encouraging the development of new NGOs needed to assist in effective implementation of the new forest policy. This example underlines how the life of FEVORD-K, even the financing of new initiatives, lies with individual member organisations of the federation. One of FEVORD-K’s major activities is to engage in advocacy work in relation to government policy. The forest subcommittee has been particularly energetic in this regard, acting in effect as both an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ pressure group. FEVORD-K representatives are regularly invited along as ‘insiders’ to KFD workshops and seminars when policy proposals are being considered. Their best known ‘outsider’ action was their involvement in a long struggle from 1984 to 1993 to return 30,000 hectares of village forest and common lands to village communities, lands which had been acquired by Karnataka Pulpwood Ltd (KPL) (51 per cent shares owned by the Karnataka Government, 49 per cent by a Birla company, Harihar Polyfibres) set up to plant eucalyptus plantations for the exclusive use of the Harihar Polyfibres factory on the Tungabhadra River. Thousands of


people engaged in periodic non-violent direct action against KPL (that is, the Karnataka Government) including the Kittiko Hachchiko (Pluck and Plant) Satyagraha in 1988 during which various satyagrahis, including FEVORD-K people, were arrested. At one point a FEVORD-K organisation filed a public interest writ in the Supreme Court of India, which issued a Stay Order against the Government of Karnataka. The campaign to wind up KPL went on for years and was ultimately successful. The whole story was written up and published by SPS and others for FEVORD-K (Kanvalli 1993). The fact that FEVORD-K engages in both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ activity in its advocacy work with the Karnataka Government is symptomatic of a certain lack of overall coherence within the federation. Such problems are perhaps intrinsic to an NGO federation lacking centralised control. Some member organisations in FEVORD-K are small action groups, regularly receiving attention from the police and other enforcement agencies of the government, which are very ‘outsider’ in orientation. Other member organisations, larger and better financed, consult with government departments as ‘insiders’ on a fairly regular basis. The former tend to feel ‘that FEVORD-K has not done much to benefit them’ (Ramaswamy and Prasad 1990:18). The latter are concerned that the ‘outsider’ action orientation of some members hinders their efforts as FEVORD-K representatives to work cooperatively with government. Both groups sense that this problem of overall coherence may help to explain why a number of NGOs committed to rural development are still not part of FEVORD-K. Despite such problems, however, FEVORD-K is without question the single most important NGO presence in Karnataka, and is recognised as such by the government. Has FEVORD-K been influential in affecting the development of JFPM policy? Any major policy change like JFPM involves a continuous process with three distinguishable phases—agenda setting, policy choices and implementation processes (Grindle and Thomas 1991). Reference has already been made to the way the agenda related to forest management policy changed over a period of two decades as new ideas circulated in the world of forestry. FEVORD-K was only one of many organisations (or set of organisations) at local, national and global levels involved in this political process. In this context, its influence, considered separately, on agenda setting was slight. Policy choices within the KFD that led to JFPM occurred essentially between June 1990, when the Government of India’s directive to all state governments was received, and April 1993, when the Government Order summarised above was published. The evidence from interviews and other sources suggests that, of the array of agencies involved in the policy choices, those within the state were profoundly influential, those outside much less so. Within the state generally there was the pressure bearing down on the Karnataka Government from the Government of India, including the general provisions of the Seventh and Eighth Five Year Plans and the directive of June 1990. The proof of the importance of this national directive lay in some of the language of the Karnataka JFPM policy when it emerged in 1993; for example, both documents referred to NGOs ‘with


proven track record’. Within the Karnataka Government the Council of Ministers during this period gave broad political direction to the KFD to produce a JFPM policy but left much room for detailed policy choices within the broad remit. These choices were made basically within the KFD. External sources were less important. I have shown elsewhere (Potter 1995) how the Overseas Development Agency of the British Government, which financed much of the JFPM scheme in Uttara Kannada District, had little influence on JFPM policy details worked out by the KFD and indeed were unhappy with some of them. As for FEVORD-K, they tried hard throughout 1990–93 to influence JFPM policy decisions; their critical response to the policy content of the 1993 Government Order summarised earlier in this paper is one important indicator of their relative lack of influence on the policy choices made by KFD during 1990–93. Implementation of JFPM in Karnataka had, by 1994, gone furthest in Uttara Kannada District. Field research by Dr Kripa Ananthpur was conducted in 1994 in all five of the districts’ Forest Divisions. This involved interviewing people in all ten NGOs there working on JFPM, 16 forest officials in the district (one Conservator of Forests, seven Deputy Conservators of Forests, and eight Range Forest Officers); and people in 25 villages: five villages where an NGO was active and JFPM had been implemented; nine with JFPM and no NGO; six where an NGO was active and there was no JFPM; and five where there was no NGO and no JFPM. Care was taken to ensure that no forest guards were present when villagers were interviewed. Further interviewing in the district is taking place in 1995 and 1996. The main provisional finding from the 1994 interviews in Uttara Kannada is that FEVORD-K and other local NGOs appear to be having an impact on the implementation of JFPM policy. For example, in those villages where JFPM had been implemented and NGOs were active, the people interviewed in 1994 had a noticeably clearer understanding of JFPM and more enthusiasm for it than in JFPM villages where no NGOs were present. Villages where there was no JFPM and no NGO either had not heard of JFPM or were less interested in taking part in it than villages with whom NGOs were involved. This suggests that NGOs can play an important role in both explaining environmental policy to local communities and building support for such policy. Also, it was particularly noticeable that women were more involved in JFPM where NGOs worked than in villages where they did not. In Sirsi Division, where the local NGOs were not keen on JFPM, implementation via the KFD without active NGO involvement appears to have been less successful. Also, in Honavar Division where there was no NGO involvement, village people interviewed were either unaware of JFPM or, where it had been implemented, were less enthusiastic or knowledgeable about it; one NGO there had repeatedly approached the local KFD officials wanting to get involved but had been rebuffed. Throughout the district it was striking that where NGOs were present in JFPM villages, the VFCs tended to give more emphasis in their plans for the JFPM forest plot to long-term ecological conservation, for example, the planting of a variety of different types of trees, including fruit trees. Where no NGOs were present, the


tendency was for the VFC to emphasise considerations like the planting of trees only giving timber intended to provide financial benefits for the members in the shorter term. These findings clearly suggest that environmental NGOs in India working locally can have an important influence upon the implementation of state policies affecting the environment. NGO people tend to be better than forest officials at explaining environmental policies to local communities; they can help to build the local support needed for successful policy implementation; their work in promoting the participation of women is noteworthy; and where environmental NGOs are present greater emphasis by local communities appears to be given to both the longterm ecological conservation of forests and the regeneration of forest lands. 1.5 CONCLUSION This paper has considered the hypothesis that environmental NGOs in more democratic regimes have more influence upon policies affecting the environment than NGOs in less democratic regimes by reporting briefly on two stories of NGOs attempting to influence policies affecting tropical forests in democratic India and less democratic Indonesia. The stories are comparable because, although they are in many ways very different, they both do relate to NGOs trying to influence the formulation and implementation of particular forest policies; as regards implementation, for example, NGOs in Indonesia have tried to get Indorayon in North Sumatra to abide by the environmental stipulations in its contracts with the State, whereas NGOs in Karnataka have tried to get the forest department in Uttara Kannada District to abide by the environmental and other stipulations in the JFPM Government Order. The comparison appears to suggest that the extent of NGO influence on forest policy may be largely unaffected by the extent to which the domestic political context in which NGOs work is democratic; instead, the analysis finds that NGOs in both democratic and non-democratic political contexts may have little direct influence on forest policy choices, more influence on policy implementation. I comment very briefly on these findings by way of conclusion. First, the evidence reported here is, of course, limited. It relates only to NGOs trying to influence environmental policy on forests in parts of India and Indonesia. NGOs in other political regimes in the South can have more political influence on policy making than has been reported here; the two most prominent examples are probably Chile (Loveman 1993) and the Philippines (Clarke 1995). Also, democratic contexts may have more salience for NGOs trying to influence policy on other environmental issues. (That the nature of the environmental issue may affect the influence of NGOs is a subject taken up in Papers 5 and 6 in this volume.) In sum, the conclusions drawn from the comparison in this Paper about relations between democracy, NGOs and the environment are necessarily only suggestive and provisional.


Second, it is hardly surprising that NGOs in Karnataka and Indonesia have little influence on forest policy choices. Even though NGOs are linked together in a federation (FEVORD-K) or forum (for example, WALHI, SKEPHI), their political resources are unimpressive when compared to those of the state organisations and transnational enterprises they seek to influence. In Indonesia the state-business nexus is powerful, unaccountable and virtually inaccessible. NGOs are defined out of the political process that produces policy choices. Furthermore, NGOs have had to operate in what they call a ‘climate of terror’—a pervasive feeling that someone is always watching and ready to punish them if they behave ‘irresponsibly’. So they must try to straddle a more or less supportive line on government policies and the dominant ideology of pancasila. This can blunt their advocacy position over time on environmental issues, rendering it ambiguous or contradictory. By contrast, NGOs in Karnataka operate in a much freer political context, in which there is a political ‘culture of accountability’. Pluralist theory might suggest that environmental NGOs as interest groups in democratic Karnataka would have considerable influence on public policy from time to time. However, prominent analyses of India’s ‘demand groups’ show clearly that the state dominates pluralist representation and policy choice (for example, Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). Kochanek (1974: xii) pointed out years ago that ‘policy initiatives usually come from government…so most groups are forced to take a negative or defensive rather than a positive stance…the pattern of public policy…has concentrated vast powers in the hands of government officials’. Environmental NGOs may have considerable influence on some policy choices in Northern democratic contexts (for example, Princen and Finger 1994), but it is wrong simply to suppose they are similarly influential in Southern democracies. In Karnataka also, FEVORD-K deliberately stays out of electoral politics and the work of political parties, thereby operating on the margins of the political process that produces state policy choices. Third, when it comes to implementing forest policies, NGOs and people dependent on the forests are not on the margins of the process, they are at the centre of it. Forest officials in Uttara Kannada District are thin on the ground; to translate policy choices into reality requires relating to such people. Where there are NGOs, the implementation of JFPM policy has worked particularly well. Our research in Uttara Kannada shows this clearly. NGO presence also has noticeably beneficial consequences for the environment. The unusual structure of FEVORDK reflects the strengths and weaknesses of NGO advocacy work on environmental policy in Karnataka: FEVORD-K hardly exists in Bangalore, the centre of policy choice, whereas FEVORD-K is prominent in the countryside, where policy is implemented. The position of NGOs and people dependent on the forests in North Sumatra is broadly similar. Local communities struggle against the activities of Indorayon which is ‘implementing’ only very partially environmental policies of the state in the forests around Lake Toba and on the Asahan River. Forest officials are thin on the ground, but KSPPM and other small NGOs work closely with local communities in their struggle over the forests. NGOs in their forums at provincial


and national levels may have been defined out of any direct influence on policy choices in Jakarta and Medan, but they have had some influence on the actions of the concessionaires locally and government agencies which support them, for example, the environmental audit of Indorayon, the slight shift in Indorayon’s forest and industrial practices. Even these modest achievements in influencing the implementation of policy are noteworthy in such an authoritarian political context. Why does the state juggernaut in Indonesia allow NGOs to oppose its policies, or even allow NGOs to exist? There are various reasons. One is that certain environmental agencies in the Indonesian Government, whose budgets in the 1980s were small and whose remit included the environment, actually tried to mobilise public support for their activities by assisting the development of environmental NGOs. Other government agencies allowed this because students were predominant in many such NGOs and NGOs therefore offered for the government a politically useful means of channelling student frustration at that time. By the 1990s, as Macandrews (1994:376) remarks, ‘student activism in support of environmental causes is quite acceptable in Indonesia whereas more direct protest against the government and its other policies is not’. Another important reason is that most environmental NGOs are part of global NGO forums, coalitions or alliances. For example, WALHI is part of Friends of the Earth International, SKEPHI is part of the World Rainforest Movement. Their colleagues in Northern NGOs operating in more democratic political contexts and more highly regarded there are sometimes influential in relation to Northern governments, the World Bank and other intergovernmental organisations whose policies profoundly affect the timber trade and international capital markets, and therefore affect the vital interests of the Indonesian State and the concessionaires. In such an international context, it would be politically unwise for the Indonesian Government to wipe out the Indonesian end of these global NGO networks. This is an aspect of what Wapner (1995:337) called ‘world civic politics’ or ‘interactions that take place above the individual and below the state yet across national boundaries’ and that ‘are distinct from the instrumentalities of state rule’. One therefore cannot explain the existence of NGOs and their influence on environmental policy in Indonesia only in terms of more or less democracy in Indonesia. There is a global political dimension involved; NGOs in authoritarian Indonesia can exist and be influential because they are linked to influential NGOs working in more democratic contexts elsewhere. Finally, this paper has focused mainly on NGO advocacy work directly aimed at trying to influence environmental policy choices and implementation. Less has been said about agenda setting and longer term NGO effort which indirectly and eventually may shift ideologies and other structural constraints. There is little doubt that the normal work of NGOs, year in and year out, can gradually have the consequence of transforming political consciousness about the environment, and, in so doing, shift the calculations of environmental policy makers. This aspect of NGO influence is given more consideration in Paper 2.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research on which this paper is based was funded mainly by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its Global Environmental Change Initiative, and partly by the Open University. I am grateful for their support. The Karnataka research reported here is based largely on interviews by me in Bangalore, Uttara Kannada District and elsewhere during NovemberDecember 1993 and on field research by my research associate Dr (Ms) Kripa Ananthpur in Uttara Kannada District in 1994 and 1995. Many helped, but I wish to acknowledge in particular Kripa’s work and the assistance of: in Bangalore, E.Raghavan (Times of India), Ms Shobha Raghuram (HIVOS), Professor Madhav Gadgil (Centre for Ecological Sciences), Aloysius Fernandez (MYRADA), M.K.Bhatt (NOVIB), Gerry Pais (OXFAM), Ms Tamsin Barton (Action Aid), Dhirendra Singh (former Secretary, Forest Department), A.S.Sadashivaiah (Chief Conservator of Forests); in Mysore, Professor V.K. Nataraj and V.V.Gadgil (Institute of Development Studies); in Dharwad District, S.R.Hiremath and Dilip Kumar and Ms Shobha Karjagi (SPS); in Uttara Kannada District, Ranjan Rao Yerdoor (IDS), Ms Sheela Khare (Vikasa Rural Development Society), Shivappa Poojary (Siddi Parisana Vardhini), Pandurang Hegde (Parisara Samrakshana Kendra— Appiko Movement), Susairaj Reddy and Ms Theresa Reddy and Ganesh and Apa Belurkar (all of Karwar Rural Women and Children Development Society), T.H.Mallakarjunaiah (Deputy Conservator of Forests—JFPM); in New Delhi, Eric Hanley (ODA, British High Commission), R. Sudarshan (UNDP), H.N. Mathur and R.K. Mukherjee (SPWD), Shiv Visvanath (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), Murray Culshaw (OXFAM), S.Meenakshisundaram (Ministry of Rural Development); in the UK, Professor James Manor (IDS, University of Sussex), Ms Tricia Feeney (OXFAM). The Indonesia-North Sumatra research reported here is based partly on interviews by me during January-February 1994. Ms Indira Simbolon acted as translator when necessary. I wish to acknowledge the assistance in particular of the following persons who helped with arrangements and/or from whom I learned much: in Jakarta, Mas Achmod Santosa, (LBH and WALHI), Ms Suraya Afiff (WALHI), Mohammed Anung (WALHI), Achmad Taufik (WALHI), Ms Arimbi Heroepoetri (WALHI), Indro Tjahjono (SKEPHI), Saleh Abdullah (SKEPHI), Ms Hardini Indarti (SKEPHI), Agus Purnomo (Pelangi), Ms Binny Buchari (INFID), Ms Hira Jhamtani (Konphalindo), Alastair Fraser (ODA, Programme Director, Ministry of Forestry), Chip Fay (Ford Foundation), Martin McCann (CUSO); in Medan, Osmar Tanjung (WIM), Ms Cindy Gilbert (WIM), Jafar Siddiq (LBH); in Parapat, Ms Saur Tumiur Situmorang (KSPPM), Ms Indira Simbolon (KSPPM); in the USA, Professor Ann Hawkins (University of Oregon),


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Kohli, A. (1990) Democracy and Discontent, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kothari, R. (1988) State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance, Delhi, Ajanta. Lipschutz, R. and Conca, K. (eds.) (1993) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press. Lipset, S.L. (1994) ‘Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited’, America Sociological Review, Vol. 59, pp. 1–22. Loveman, B. (1993) ‘The Political Left in Chile 1973–1990’ in Barry Carr and Steve Ellner (eds.) The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika, Boulder, Westview Press. Macandrews, C. (1994) ‘Politics of the Environment in Indonesia’, Asian Survey, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, pp. 369–95. Mainwaring, S. et al. (eds.) (1992) Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective, South Bend, University of Notre Dame Press. McBeth, J. (1995) ‘Succession Talk Recedes: Suharto could Lead into the 21st Century’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 18 May, pp. 48–52. Mitra, S. (1992) Power, Protest and Participation: Local Elites and the Politics of Development in India, London, Routledge. Mulla, Z. and Boothroyd, P. (1994) Development-Orientated NGOs of Vietnam (prepared through the cooperation of the Vietnam National Center for Social Sciences and Humanities), Vancouver, Centre for Human Settlements, University of British Columbia. Munslow, B. and Ekoko, F. (1995) ‘Is Democracy Necessary for Sustainable Development?’, Democratization, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 158–78. Myers, N. (1993) ‘Tropical Forests: The Main Deforestation Fronts’, Environmental Conservation, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 9–16. Parry, G. and Moran, M. (eds.) (1994) Democracy and Democratization, London, Routledge. Payne, R. (1995) ‘Freedom and the Environment’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (July), pp. 41–55. Peluso, N. (1993) ‘Coercing Conservation: The Politics of State Resource Control’ in R. Lipschutz and K.Conca (eds.) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press. Phaehlke, R. (1989) Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, New Haven, Yale University Press. PIOOM (Interdisciplinary Research Program on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations) (1990) ed. A.P.Schmid, Centre for the Study of Social Conflicts, University of Leiden, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn). Potter, D. (1993) ‘Democratization in Asia’ in D.Held (ed.) Prospects for Democracy: North, South, East, West, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 355–79. Potter, D. (1995) ‘NGOs and Forest Management in Karnataka’, GECOU Working Paper No. 3, Milton Keynes, The Open University, January. Pridham, G. (ed.) (1995) Transitions to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives from Southern Europe, Latin America and Eastern Europe, Aldershot, Dartmouth Publishing Co. Princen, T. and Finger, M. (1994) Environmental NGOs in World Politics: Linking the Local and the Global, London, Routledge. Purnomo, A., Witoelar, E. and Belcher, M. (1989) ‘Institutional Strengthening of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations: The Indonesian Case’, completed for the Asian NGO Coalition and the Asian Development Bank, internal document.


Purnomo, A. (1994) ‘Policy Influence for Sustainable Development: Case Studies from the Environmental Movement in Indonesia’, MA Thesis, Tufts University. Ramaswamy, S. and Prasad, G. (1990) An Experiment in Working Together, Bangalore, FEVORD-K, privately printed. Robison, R. (1993) ‘Indonesia: Tensions in State and Regime’ in K.Hewison et al. (eds.) Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarian Democracy and Capitalism, St Leonards, Australia, Allen & Unwin. Rubin, B. (1987) ‘The Civil Rights Movement in India’, Asian Survey, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 371–92. Rudolph, L. and Rudolph, S. (1987) In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State, London, University of Chicago Press. Rueschemeyer, D. et al. (1992) Capitalist Development and Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press. Rush, J. (1991) The Last Tree: Reclaiming the Environment in Tropical Asia, New York, The Asia Society. Schmitter, P. (1994) ‘Danger and Dilemmas of Democracy’ Journal of Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 57–74. Shin, Y. (1989) Demystifying the Capitalist State: Political Patronage, Bureaucratic Interests, and Capitalists-in-formation in Suharto’s Indonesia, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. SKEPHI (NGO Network for Forest Conservation in Indonesia) (1993) Setiakawan, No. 11, July-Sept. SPWD (Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development) (1993) Joint Forest Management Update, 1993, New Delhi, SPWD. Stephens, J. (1993) ‘Capitalist Development and Democracy: Empirical Research on the Social Origins of Democracy’ in D. Copp et al. (eds.) The Idea of Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 409–47. Swaminathan, M. (1992) ‘An Eventful Summit’, Frontline, (New York), 14 Aug., p. 84. Tanjung, O. (1992) ‘Gerakan Advoksi Lingkun’, Medan, WIM, cyclostyled. Tolba, M. (1992) Saving Our Planet: Challenges and Hopes, London, Chapman and Hall. Vanhanen, T. (1990) The Process of Democratization: A Comparative Study of 147 States, 1980– 88, New York, Crane Russak. WALHI (1992) Mistaking Plantations for the Indonesia’s Tropical Forests [sic], Jakarta, Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia. Wapner, P. (1995) ‘Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics’, World Politics, Vol. 47 (April), pp. 311–40. World Bank (1993) Indonesia: Sustaining Development, Washington DC, World Bank. World Bank (1994) Indonesia: Environment and Development, Washington DC, World Bank. World Bank (1994) Making Development Sustainable: The World Bank Group and the Environment, Fiscal 1994, Washington DC, World Bank. WRI (World Resources Institute) (1994) Breaking the Logjam: Obstacles to Forest Policy in Indonesia and the United States, by C.Barber et al., Washington DC, World Resources Institute.

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2 NGO Advocacy, Democracy and Policy Development: Some Examples Relating to Environmental Policies in Zimbabwe and Botswana ALAN THOMAS Why are non-governmental organisations (NGOs) influential in the development of certain policies relating to global environmental issues? They are certainly not always influential and their influence varies in different parts of the world and according to the particular environmental issue in question. This paper pays particular attention to democracy and its relationship with NGO influence, using examples from Zimbabwe and Botswana, countries with highly contrasting claims to democratic credentials. As Paper 1 argues, it is too simplistic to say that NGOs are likely to have more influence in a more democratic context. However, in general and in the African context in particular, there are high expectations both for the process of democratisation and for the role of NGOs. The first main section below discusses NGO influence and democratisation. It differentiates between forms of influence and between aspects of democracy. The following section develops a set of hypotheses suggesting how different types of NGO campaign might be more or less influential in different democratic contexts. An alternative view is that, as far as NGO influence is concerned, democracy is not significant. In this view, factors relating more directly to the particular environmental issue are more likely to determine whether or not NGOs can have influence. Such factors might include the political and economic centrality of an issue in a particular country, its relation to the sequence of policy development and implementation, and the potential for internationalisation of the issue. To illustrate this, the next section introduces four stories of attempted NGO influence in Zimbabwe and Botswana, of which two (one each from each country) are examples of normal policy development with little NGO influence and two (again, one from each country) involve policy changes following NGO campaigns over specific projects. The following section then describes the four stories in more detail in terms of what the NGOs concerned actually did in their attempts to influence

Alan Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Systems and Co-Chair of the Development Studies subject group at the Open University.

38 NGO ADVOCACY, DEMOCRACY AND POLICY DEVELOPMENT

environmental policy. Although the outcomes were, in crude terms, quite similar between the two countries, there were important differences in how influence was achieved (where there was NGO influence) and in why influence could not be achieved in the other cases. The final sections analyse how and why influence may or may not be achieved in terms of the hypotheses put forward and the other factors relating to the particular environmental issue, and conclude with some implications for democratisation and for NGO strategy. 2.1 NGO INFLUENCE AND DEMOCRATISATION IN AFRICA In Paper 1, David Potter pointed out that there is little in the comparative politics literature associating environmental issues directly with democracy or democratisation. However, links are frequently made between NGOs and democratisation. A typical example is the 1992 Special Issue of Review of African Political Economy on ‘Democracy, Civil Society and NGOs’, the editorial introduction to which starts with the assumption that ‘progressive commentators’ now agree that ‘the mere existence of multi-party competitions and elections do not guarantee genuine democracy’. What is required is ‘a widespread and complex process involving the strengthening of civil society’. As for NGOs, they are ‘one of the institutional forms that can deepen [civil society]’ (ROAPE 1992:3–4). Democratisation and Features of Democracy Democracy has always been a hugely contested idea with many competing models. Although the liberal democratic model is now dominant, with its emphasis on individual choice and on political competition between parties in tandem with economic competition between firms, Africa post-independence has been important for the number of deliberate attempts to develop alternative models of democracy. In several African countries, nationalist movements led after independence to both de facto and constitutional one-party states claiming a socialist form of democracy in which the state aims to transform society into an ‘organic whole with common interests’ (Pinkney 1993:10). This occurred either where a liberation movement took power following an independence struggle or where a nationalist party won an overwhelming election victory after the outgoing colonial power had set up mechanisms for multi-party democracy. Simple mechanisms could not compensate for the general lack of a tradition of pluralism, especially since the colonial state itself had generally concentrated power in itself until almost the last moment. Such a one-party or socialist model of democracy emphasises people’s direct participation (or mobilisation) and unity. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia argued in favour of the de facto one-party state as follows:

NGOS AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES 39

Democracy is first, last, and all the time sovereignty of the people, or it is nothing. If the people have such confidence in a particular party that they give it an overwhelming majority at the polls then the best possible powerstructure has been created for mobilising national resources for nationbuilding. (Kaunda 1966:107) Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, in a statement on ‘Democracy and the One-Party System’ in January 1963, claimed that ‘w here there is one party, and that party is identified with the nation as a whole, the foundations of democracy are firmer than they can ever be where you have two or more parties’ (quoted in Cliffe 1969:139). Generally, however, the one-party or African socialist democracies have been victim to military coups, degenerated into autocratic and/or corrupt regimes, or become discredited as they failed to provide lasting economic improvements. The recent trend to democratisation comes from a combination of internal pressures via the struggles of elements of civil society and external pressures including political conditionality on the part of the donor community and the Bretton Woods institutions, making the continuation of aid dependent on the adoption of certain of the forms of liberal democracy and linking structural adjustment programmes to political reforms such as the (re)introduction of multi-party elections (Rasheed 1995). Although multi-party elections are the most testable of the demands of political conditionality, in practice the donor community tends to promote a much broader version of democracy, on the one hand linking it to good governance and economic liberalisation, while on the other hand including elements such as political participation which were central to the socialist or one-party model. Thus in December 1993 the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) endorsed a number of ‘Orientations on participatory development and good governance’, in a document which links democratisation to participatory development and human rights and defines democratisation itself as requiring not only periodic free and fair elections but also ‘the development of a pluralist civil society comprised of a range of institutions and associations which represent diverse interests and provide a counterweight to government’ (OECD 1994:12). As for those in receipt of aid, Rasheed quotes from a document of the Global Coalition for Africa in which African countries accepted the idea of evaluating themselves against criteria for ‘democratic governance’ within broad areas as follows: ‘rule of law; accountability and transparency; budgetary policies and priorities; administrative and bureaucratic consistency; political openness and tolerance; participation and communication; and a favourable environment for private enterprise’ (1995:349). Precisely which criteria for democracy should be used is open to debate. The Introduction to this volume puts forward the following four ‘features of democratic regimes…at the level of the nation state’ (p. 5): accountability through multi-party elections; civil and political rights; diversity of power centres; political participation.


In the African context these features taken together represent more or less the current broad liberal democratic consensus. Though the last feature in particular may derive from socialist or African one-party democratic traditions, it has been incorporated, though not necessarily in the same form, into that consensus. Neither of the two countries which provide the examples in this paper, Zimbabwe or Botswana, has followed the path outlined above as typical for African one-party states. Botswana is generally regarded as one of Africa’s few successful multi-party democracies. It is certainly unusual in that the liberal democratic institutions set up by the departing colonialists have survived continuously since independence. For some commentators, even those who espouse some form of variety of democratic ideals like the lists above (for example, Pinkney 1993), this makes Botswana one of only two ‘continuous democracies’ in Africa (the other being Mauritius; there was a third example in the Gambia until 1994 when a military coup occurred there). Such commentators imply that Zimbabwe, as a virtual one-party state, is undemocratic. However, it may be better to conceive of Zimbabwe as exemplifying other forms of democracy also surviving in Africa. Zimbabwe is an example, another being Tanzania, where the socialist emphasis on people’s participation and mobilisation has continued since independence. If one does conceive of Botswana and Zimbabwe as both to some extent democratic, they certainly contrast with respect to the above four features. There are similarities, not least in both countries having had regular multi-party elections with the same party always winning. However, in Botswana multi-partyism may provide more accountability because there is a credible opposition party which wins parliamentary seats and, from time to time, control of certain local councils in urban areas. By contrast, in Zimbabwe, ZAPU, which would have been the permanent opposition party, merged at the end of 1987 into the electorally dominant ZANU(PF) after armed ZAPU ‘dissidents’ caused a near civil war, a process of what Stoneman (1992:2) calls ‘shot-gun unity’. Since then Zimbabwe has had no effective opposition party. In terms of civil and political rights, the two countries are not dissimilar. Despite a long history of suppression of rights and freedoms, Zimbabwe has become more open, particularly since about 1989, with a lively political culture and varied independent media. Botswana has been in principle politically ‘free’ since independence, though there have been self-imposed restrictions on this freedom, justified until recently by the need to guard against possible retaliation by South Africa for Botswana’s support of the struggle against apartheid (Zaffiro 1989). The two countries differ markedly in terms of which types of alternative power centre are more important. The state itself is rather centralised in both countries. In Botswana it is run by a politico-administrative elite with ‘a high degree of reciprocity and cross-fertilisation of ideas’ (Charlton, 1991: 273) between the two key groupings of senior bureaucrats and politicians. There is some plurality within the state, although as Molutsi (1993:5) points out: ‘The country’s institutions and democracy are imposed from above. Starting from the highest—parliament—down to the most grassroots, the village development committee (VDC), [they] were


handed down to the population.’ At a local level, particularly in rural areas, traditional institutions, such as the kgotla system of community meetings (originally these were local chiefs’ courts), persist alongside the modern VDCs and local councils. However, there has been very little spontaneous development of NGOs or other institutions of civil society, and those which have emerged have often been coopted or dominated by government, leaving civil society relatively weak (Molutsi and Holm 1990). In Zimbabwe there is more plurality outside the state with, for example, white commercial interests quite separate and an NGO sector second only to that of Kenya within Africa (Muir 1992, Copestake 1993). Also, since the economy is much weaker than that of Botswana, the government has to allow independent actions by donors providing aid and by their local NGO partners, if only to fill the gaps in state provision and bring in foreign exchange. As for the last feature, political participation is not surprisingly more important in Zimbabwe with its pretensions to socialist democracy. There was a period of political debate and participation within the liberation movement itself, with ideas of voluntary participation, cooperation and cell organisation formed alongside the importance of loyalty to the central leadership. Hence, the period of struggle and its eventual success left a legacy of expectations, both that the government should be working for the improvement of all the people and that there should be a right to political participation, though more likely through the party rather than in opposition to it. By contrast, in Botswana independence was gained through negotiation between the ruling colonialists and the local national elite and there is no strong popular political culture at a national level. NGOs, Democracy and Forms of Influence The discussion so far has differentiated between features of democracy, each of which might have a separate effect on NGOs. It is also necessary to differentiate between different ways in which NGOs might seek influence. Edwards (1993) distinguishes between direct advocacy work aimed at changing particular policies of specific institutional targets, and campaigning work, aimed at indirect influence over the long term through changing public opinion and norms. Rose (1993) uses similar distinctions in arguing that Northern NGOs such as Greenpeace should move from issue-based campaigning aimed at raising awareness to actions aimed at specific results in terms of policy changes. Thus one strategy is to work in the most indirect way, on public opinion at the widest level. Within the other, direct advocacy, strategy, it is worth making further distinctions in terms of how directly NGOs work on particular targets and policies. Potter (1994) suggests following a policy network approach (Smith, 1993). This leads one to ask whether NGOs should try to ‘get in’ to such networks, so as to be able to influence policy changes directly at the risk of being coopted, or ‘stay out’, maintaining independence but having no direct input into policy-making processes. This would give two general models, which one could call entryism (or collaboration) and opposition.


However, severe constraints prevent this from being a free choice of strategy for NGOs. As noted by Christiansen and Dowding (1994) with respect to Amnesty International (British Section) and its relationships with the UK Government, an NGO, even when it ‘possesses all the necessary attributes of a legitimate/insider group’, can be ‘frozen out of the policy-making process at the very point at which its preferences diverge from those of the government’, showing that ‘the government is clearly the source of the “legitimacy” granted or withheld’ (Christiansen and Dowding 1994: 24). Thus entryism would imply accepting the terms of those already in the policy networks, notably politicians, government officials and their advisers, while, if an NGO is known to differ fundamentally from government or other type of target institution, collaboration of any kind may not be an option. Other writers suggest more than two types of direct policy influence. In the Zimbabwean context Moyo (1991) suggests four models of NGO advocacy: entryist; complementary; passive resistance; oppositional. If one regards ‘passive resistance’ as a kind of opposition, one is left with roughly the same three-fold distinction as in Clark (1991) who suggested NGOs are bound to act in one of three general ways with respect to the state: reforming the state, complementing the state or opposing the state. One can generalise this to working with, apart from or against any target institution. It may not be immediately obvious what is meant by complementary activities or how they constitute a form of advocacy. Complementary activities are projects or programmes carried out independently of government or other decision makers. Their success can oblige those decision makers to change their policy to accommodate the new development. Most development NGOs, Northern and Southern, undertake or support projects of the complementary activity type. They have been criticised for merely ‘gap-filling’ (Vivian 1994), but may also be exercising comparative advantage over governments (Fowler 1988) by, for example, putting innovative ideas into practice. Here it is interesting to contrast some Northern environmentalist NGOs with what is more typical of development NGOs, and see how circumstances have led the behaviour of these two types of NGO to converge in this regard. Thus Rose from his position within Greenpeace states that ‘in effect NGOs came into existence to define issues’ (1993:291), but suggests that they should now move on to ‘enforcing solutions’ through ‘interventions’ (295) such as Greenpeace’s work on developing, publicising and promoting the so-called ‘Green Fridge’—an archetypal complementary activity. Development NGOs, on the other hand, tend to start with such activities, may later wish to ‘scale up’ in order to make a bigger impact (Annis 1988) and may then realise that this implies policy advocacy. As several writers have noted, this attempt at ‘making a difference’ (Edwards and Hulme 1992) can still take different forms, notably ‘lobbying and political action’ by the NGOs themselves or, alternatively, mobilisation work at grassroots level (Diaz-Albertini 1993, Clark 1991).


Thus complementary activities are often combined with other activities to form an advocacy strategy. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this paper it is useful to differentiate complementary activities from entryism on the one hand and opposition on the other and to regard all three as forms of direct influence or attempted influence by NGOs. Indirect, generalised campaigning or consciousnessraising should not be ignored and is a fourth form of influence, although it is not directed at specific targets. Thus there are four main ways in which NGOs try to achieve influence. They may be summarised as the ‘four Cs’: (i) collaboration (including reform and entryism); (ii) confrontation (or opposition); (iii) complementary activities; and (iv) consciousness-raising (indirect, generalised campaigning). This is not to argue that NGOs must make their attempts at policy influence in just one of these ways. It is certainly possible to combine them. One interesting suggestion in this regard is Fowler’s (1993) ‘onion-skin strategy’, where an NGO is on the surface pursuing a collaborative or complementary strategy, but at a deeper level is simultaneously holding oppositional beliefs and may undertake indirect campaigning or consciousness-raising as and when it is feasible to do so. 2.2 FOUR HYPOTHESES A set of four hypotheses is proposed, designed to reflect the complexity of the concept of democracy and the variety of ways in which NGOs may seek influence. Each hypothesis links one of the forms of influence with one or more of the features of democracy. A previously conducted general review of the roles of NGOs in environmental politics in Zimbabwe and Botswana (Thomas 1995) suggested these respective features as most crucial to the success of NGO advocacy efforts of each form. The four hypotheses may be summarised as follows: Hypothesis 1 NGO influence via the collaborative, entryist route is most likely to be effective in a highly participative political culture. In other words, in such a culture, working in policy networks with members of the target institutions or the government is likely to achieve real change. However, this will also imply working within ‘allowed’ parameters as defined by government. This hypothesis was derived partly from noting, in Zimbabwe, a significant amount of NGO collaboration with government agencies in fields relevant to the environment such as indigenous seed research, policy on drought alleviation and rural food security (Ndiweni 1993, Wellard and Copestake 1993). NGOs in Zimbabwe have also been active in national consultations on environmental policy, including the National Conservation Strategy in the mid-1980s and, more recently, policy on Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). In Botswana, although NGOs have been involved in formal consultations on environmental policy, they do not have such a strong input (Thomas 1995:7).


Hypothesis 2 NGO activity of the complementary kind is most likely to influence policy where there is a diversity of power centres in civil society, particularly ones with links to interests external to the country. These complementary activities can include both pure gap-filling and institutional or technical innovations. They can lead to major policy shifts as state or other agencies are obliged to change policy to accommodate them. Zimbabwe, which acts as a regional focus for environmental NGOs and also has a considerable number of local NGO development projects supported by international NGOs, abounds in this type of activity. Thus the Zimbabwean Government’s national report to the 1992 UNCED conference at Rio de Janeiro was complemented by an ‘alternative’ report prepared by two NGOs with strong international links (Gore, Katerere and Moyo 1992). Another example from Zimbabwe is the Campfire programme of local community-based natural resource management schemes, the experience of which may provide its NGO backers with the ammunition to force policy changes. By contrast, in Botswana civil society is relatively weak (Molutsi and Holm 1990) and such initiatives are generally quickly coopted into the state apparatus. According to this hypothesis, one would not expect complementary activities to be a source of NGO influence in that country. Hypothesis 3 A confrontational approach by NGOs may work where there is accountability through multi-party elections and internal plurality of power centres within civil society or particularly the state. As noted above, Botswana has a well-established multi-party system, with free and fair elections, a credible opposition party, and alternative power centres in certain towns and regions, as well as the continued use of the traditional kgotla mechanism of community-level consultative meetings. There appear to be at least one or two examples of confrontation from NGOs leading to the cancellation or shelving of projects. One can also note one example where oppositional strategy led to a change in Zimbabwe, namely the case of Mobil Oil prospecting in the Zambezi valley (Thomas 1995:6). This involved an alternative internal centre of power in Zimbabwean civil society, though a limited one, in the white commercial interests represented by the Zambezi Society. Hypothesis 4 Finally, consciousness-raising or indirect campaigning is most likely to be successful where civil and political rights are upheld. As a strategy, consciousness-raising is very indirect and NGO activities tend to combine it with other forms of attempted influence. Some NGOs engage in it in Botswana, and the fact that it is increasing in Zimbabwe as the political culture frees up from the more repressive past gives some credence to the hypothesis. In the long term consciousness-raising may be the most significant of all the forms of influence, and it may often arise indirectly from the various ways of trying to


achieve direct influence in the sense of effecting a change of policy on the part of some ‘target’ institution. This paper reports on work done to test these hypotheses, particularly the first three. Four stories are presented of attempted influence by NGOs on environmental policy, two in Zimbabwe and two in Botswana, and analysed to see how far the NGOs’ successes or failures were actually due to the factors envisaged. 2.3 DOES DEMOCRACY MATTER AT ALL? NORMAL POLICY DEVELOPMENT The four stories of attempted NGO influence are: • The development of the New Agricultural Policy and the fencing of communal lands in Botswana; • The review of land tenure policy in Zimbabwe by the Land Tenure Commission, and its impact on community-based resource management; • The NGO campaign against the Southern Okavango Integrated Water Development Project (SOIWDP); • The campaign for water from the Zambezi for Bulawayo. The first two of these stories are examples of policy development with little NGO influence while the second two are examples of policy changes involving NGO campaigns over specific projects. These four stories have been chosen partly because at first sight they appear to offer some credence to what might be termed a ‘null’ hypothesis, namely that the presence or absence of various features of democracy has no effect on NGOs’ ability to influence policy. As noted in the Introduction, NGO influence on policy can be looked at in terms of three stages in the policy process, namely: agenda-setting, policy choices and implementation. While this does not imply a normal process of policy development entirely unaffected by democracy, one can see how such a ‘null’ hypothesis would restrict any part played by NGOs strictly to the beginning and end of the process. In the early stages of the policy process NGOs can be one source of information about the interests they represent or the groups they work with; later on, they can assist with implementation. In this view it would only be on specific projects, where particular interests may be involved or threatened, that NGOs may be able to have any larger impact, and then only on that particular project and not the larger policies of which it may be a part. On the face of it, the first two stories appear quite similar. In both countries there has been an historic division of land into commercial farmland, alienated by white settlers and now held under private tenure, and other lands remaining under more or less traditional forms of communal tenure. In Zimbabwe the division is more extreme with commercial farmland comprising a considerable proportion


(36 per cent) of the country’s area and a much higher proportion of the best and best-watered land. Fifty-six per cent of the population lives in the communal areas which occupy only about 42 per cent of the country, and almost three-quarters of the communal area land is in regions with the least agro-ecological potential (Moyo et al. 1991:57, 61). This land is subject to seasonal drought, at best marginal for rain-fed maize cultivation, and suitable mainly for semi-intensive or extensive animal husbandry. In Botswana, by contrast, there were relatively few white settlers and most of the land (80 per cent at independence) remained under communal (or tribal) forms of tenure. This is virtually all arid or semi-arid rangeland with a low population density. However, there is a similar movement in the two countries towards the adoption of private tenure as a more generalised norm, and in both countries there is some opposition to this movement which includes most NGOs. Environmental arguments are brought forward on both sides, particularly since it is clear that the unequal historical division of lands has a lot to do with contemporary problems of land degradation. In Zimbabwe, in particular, some of the worst degradation occurs on densely populated communal lands, where the vicious cycle between poverty and over-exploitation of soil, water and forest resources tends to appear (see, for example, Moyo et al. 1991). In support of privatisation of land is the suggestion that land degradation is in fact caused, or at least exacerbated, by communal tenure. This is argued on the grounds that if no single person or organisation has ownership, no one will take responsibility for conserving or improving land or any other natural resource. Private ownership, it is said, will give better security of tenure and by allowing landholders to exclude other users will make it worthwhile for them to invest in improvements to their land and adopt improved farming practices (Selolwane 1995). Thus the official perception in Botswana is that overgrazing and hence environmental degradation is occasioned partly by the communal land tenure system and partly by the poor management practices of the poverty-stricken majority of land users. Poor land management by local farmers in communal areas is also often cited as the immediate cause of land degradation in Zimbabwe (Vivian 1994). Those opposed to this view agree that security of tenure is required before farmers will invest in land conservation or learn new techniques. However, as Vivian (1994:178–9) points out, it is not clear which form of tenure gives the best security. It can be argued that under the private system sales under duress could well become the norm, and that communal tenure in fact provides better security for the poorer sections of the population. Those opposed to privatisation also suggest that degradation on communal lands is caused not by communal tenure as such but by factors such as overcrowding, lack of investment and poverty, in the context of an historically unequal distribution of land and other resources, forcing people to over-utilise resources (Moyo et al. 1991:71, 123). Private control of land, with no public accountability, is no guarantee of good management practices. Thus, in Botswana, the resilience of the ecosystem is said to have been damaged by overgrazing under the enclosed private tenure system, the productivity of private farmers may be no better than that on communal lands and the traditional cattlepost


system may even be more productive than the commercial ranch, while the majority of ranchers have not in fact adopted the improved management practices recommended by the Ministry of Agriculture (Selolwane 1994). This argument ends by suggesting that, rather than gradually doing away with communal tenure, communal institutions need strengthening and modernising—otherwise, given the impact of commercialisation and other changes, communal tenure cannot work as it traditionally did. One specific point, again in Botswana, would be the question of ‘dual grazing rights’, where an individual with a commercial herd may retain hereditary rights to communal grazing and thus be able to move cattle between communal and commercially zoned areas, to the environmental detriment of the former. Abolishing dual grazing rights does not require increased privatisation but rather a clarity about the rights and responsibilities enjoyed under both systems together with enough power delegated to communal institutions for them to regulate the users of communal lands. However, these latter arguments, whether from NGOs or from others, are not having much impact on the issue. This may be because, although environmental arguments are invoked on both sides, the issue of tenure is a more central economic and political matter than that of environmental degradation. Private ownership is regarded as an aspect of modernisation and a necessary part of developing a modern economy, particularly since it is the commercial farmers and cattle-ranchers who succeed in turning agriculture into an exporting industry. Politically, while historic injustices make land tenure an extremely emotive issue, particularly in Zimbabwe, in practice those likely to benefit from privatisation tend to be members of the ruling elites. The third and fourth cases also look quite similar. Both involve proposals for large-scale water engineering works in arid areas. The environmental arguments are similar in the two cases. On the one hand, there is the need for the sustainable management of water as a scarce but crucial resource, with some important competition between different uses (domestic, irrigation, mining or industry). On the other hand, there are questions of possible adverse environmental impact. These two cases differ in the position of the local NGOs involved. In the Okavango the Tshomorelo Okavango Conservation Trust (TOCT) was campaigning to stop the SOIWDP, because of its likely impact on conservation and tourism potential, and also on local communities and their traditional uses of resources. However, in Bulawayo the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP) was set up to work for the building of a pipeline from the Zambezi. In this case the water resource problems were more critical, and any adverse environmental impact from the proposed project was not thought to be serious. Nevertheless, the two cases were similar in that they both involved a change of government policy in which NGOs were apparently implicated. In each case, too, the local NGO concerned was able to internationalise the issue so that its respective government was forced to take notice. Can one say, then, that democracy does not matter? Irrespective of any differences between Zimbabwe and Botswana in terms of more or less democracy,


when an issue (like land tenure) is of basic historical, economic and political importance it appears that the normal process of policy development will exclude NGOs. All NGOs seem able to do is occasionally to force changes to specific projects on the basis of special local interests, particularly if they can bring international concern to bear as well. Democracy certainly is not the only consideration that determines NGO influence. However, I argue that the different aspects of democracy do have some significance. To see this, one has to look more closely at the four examples. 2.4 FOUR STORIES OF ATTEMPTED NGO INFLUENCE In all these cases, what did the NGOs actually do to try to effect change? In the first two stories, did their efforts achieve at least some minimal impact? In the last two, to what extent were NGOs responsible for the changes in policy? The answer is that they adopted different strategies which could be categorised as various combinations of collaborative, complementary or confrontational activity. Let us look at each of the stories in turn. The Development of the New Agricultural Policy and the Fencing of Communal Lands in Botswana In Botswana, NGO action against the fencing policy has been restricted to occasional participation in government-led consultations and some public statements, with scattered local actions supporting communities likely to be affected by proposed fencing of particular stretches of rangeland (Selolwane 1994; 1995). Not surprisingly, given the general weakness in civil society and lack of participative culture, these forms of NGO opposition to fencing policy have had very little effect. Botswana’s system of policy making, which has succeeded in delivering a high rate of economic growth together with a degree of universal welfare provision over almost three decades, has been termed ‘paternalistic developmentalism’ (Charlton 1991:276). Under this system, there is clear political control over major policy decisions, while technical aspects are generally worked out by officials in the relevant departments in some secrecy before any new policy is announced. The New Agricultural Policy was typical in having technocratic origins in the planning unit of the Ministry of Agriculture. In fact the element of this policy on fencing communal lands is not new, being ‘an extension of the 1975 Tribal Grazing Land Policy’ (Selolwane 1994:14). Nevertheless, it only came to involve other parties, including the extension officers of that Ministry, in its later stages of consideration for implementation. The first consultative conference took place in 1990 and included participants from various government ministries as well as some NGOs. Few NGOs were present at the 1990 conference, and their views do not appear to have had much impact on the form of the new agricultural policy as far as fencing of communal lands is concerned. The role of NGOs was strongly limited by the


fact that consultations began at an advanced stage, when crucial policy choices were probably already made. One NGO activist commented that, as usual, policies only open up for discussion when virtually at implementation stage. The Botswana Government apparently envisages some role for NGOs in implementation, though it is not clear how this might come about. Selolwane (1994:22) points out that although the policy documents give [NGOs] prominence as major partners in this development programme in fact these have not been involved in the planning and implementation of the programme so far. The Government structure for implementing this policy…completely excludes NGOs. This policy may be delayed in its full implementation, perhaps partly because of uncertainty over certain aspects including some of the points raised in opposition by NGOs. However, it is going ahead with hardly any modification despite vehement opposition from several quarters. In any case fencing is a gradual process that happens here and there, so it does not need a clear new policy to be implemented, whereas to halt the process would need a very clear commitment to a policy change from government. The Review of Land Tenure Policy in Zimbabwe by the Land Tenure Commission, and its Impact on Community-Based Resource Management In Zimbabwe there have been some opportunities for NGOs to make representations to the Land Tenure Commission, and the more participative political culture has meant, for example, that there have been NGO-sponsored workshops and some public debate. Nevertheless, there has been little impact. In fact, many Zimbabwean NGOs have not attempted to enter the debate, although the channels were apparently open for them to do so. Some have tried, however, notably the NGOs in the Campfire Co-ordinating Group (CCG). They felt that certain specific needs of community-based resource management were threatened by the promotion of private land tenure, or, alternatively, that the review of land tenure systems offered an opportunity. Thus these NGOs wish to ensure that any change to more private tenure would not adversely affect local Campfire schemes, and they also hope that the review may provide scope for local Campfire groups to obtain a new status to allow them legal control over the benefits accruing from communally managed natural resource utilisation. It is not clear if the CCG will succeed. The Land Tenure Commission report was concluded before the end of 1994, but not immediately published. ZANU(PF) won another overwhelming victory in the 1995 election, losing only two parliamentary seats. What will actually be implemented after this remains to be seen. However, to the extent that Campfire may succeed in shifting policy in the course of its development, that will surely only be due to its previous history of


complementary activity (plus some collaboration; the CCG consists of several NGOs and government departments working together). A set of projects has been built up covering some 23 districts, including all the communal areas where wildlife is of importance. These projects have international support and embody principles of community-based resource management which make them an internationally known model. The government is thus more or less obliged to take them into account when formulating policy (though, despite their large numbers, since Campfire projects are mostly in economically marginal areas they probably need not threaten the general trend towards private tenure and commercialisation). The NGO Campaign against the Southern Okavango Integrated Water Development Project (SOIWDP) By contrast, the campaign against the SOIWDP was mainly confrontational. It was largely a matter of mobilising local opposition—TOCT was itself formed out of this campaign. On an international level, Greenpeace and other NGOs, such as the South Africa-based Okavango Wild Life Society (OWLS), have also been vocal in opposition to the SOIWDP, and there have been suggestions of potential campaigns aimed at harming Botswana’s diamond exports or lobbying to reduce Botswana’s EC beef quota. The Okavango Delta, in the north-west of the country, is one of the world’s greatest wetlands, famous for its wildlife and hence of increasing importance for tourism. It also has especial importance in an otherwise arid region in providing livelihoods for over 100,000 people of a variety of ethnic groups. The SOIWDP was planned in the government’s Department of Water Affairs (DWA) as ‘a multisectoral project for meeting a wide range of goals’. Water was to be provided for commercial irrigation, village-based flood recession agriculture, communities and livestock throughout the area, but particularly the town of Maun and surrounding areas and the De Beers diamond mine at Orapa. Apart from dredging and bunding 42 km of the Boro river (one of the main Okavango waterways), the scheme included building two reservoirs each 100 km long, one providing mainly irrigation and the other water for the diamond mine and a number of communities (see Figure 2.1). When earth-moving equipment began to arrive in Maun in late 1990, a new local community-based environmental action group was formed (TOCT), which mounted a very effective local campaign culminating in a kgotla meeting at which government officials were harangued for several hours by hundreds of people who had come from a wide area around. In parallel with the mobilisation campaign, local and South African environmentalists allied to TOCT contacted Greenpeace International and other international NGOs. Greenpeace in turn wrote to the Botswana Government and on its invitation undertook a study tour and recommended shelving the project pending further scientific enquiry. The same environmentalist activists appear to have used the media in South Africa and Botswana to spread rumours that Greenpeace might add a ‘Diamonds are for Death’


FIGURE 2.1 MAP OF NORTH-WEST BOTSWANA SHOWING OKAVANGO DELTA AND PROPOSED ENGINEERING WORKS FOR SOIWDP

campaign to its anti-furs work or lobby within the European Community for a reduction in Botswana’s beef quota. Although there is no evidence that Greenpeace made any specific threats, Botswana Government spokespersons to this day seem happy to give credence to these rumours and to paint Greenpeace as an unrepresentative, interfering, Northern organisation. Whether as a result of the campaigns by TOCT and Greenpeace or simply in response to general local opposition, the Botswana Government suspended the SOIWDP and commissioned an independent study through the World Conservation Union (IUCN), who got together a team of 13 under an American expert, Ted Scudder. To the surprise of the DWA, the report was negative. In fact it made some positive proposals for alternative developments of the water resource of the Okavango, which amounted to a combination of several small-scale improvements, mostly aimed at supporting the livelihoods of local people. However, although there was no official response the project was ‘terminated’. One interpretation of these events is that the anti-SOIWDP campaign was led by expatriates in Maun with interest specifically in wildlife conservation and connections to safari companies. In this view the local NGOs such as TOCT that


became involved were not really representative of local opinion and the international NGOs such as Greenpeace took up the issue without really understanding the local situation. Nevertheless the threat from international lobbying was sufficient for the Botswana Government to drop the project, at least for the time being. In this interpretation, confrontation between NGOs and government was more significant than scientific consideration of the issue. Even where NGOs might have apparently been collaborating with the government, as with the IUCN assessment of the SOIWDP, the result was pointed disagreement, with Scudder accusing the Botswana Government of ignoring his team’s alternative recommendations in order to keep open the option of putting forward a similar project at a future date. The Campaign for Water from the Zambezi for Bulawayo MZWP was formed, after previous collaborative attempts had failed to shift the government’s opposition to the pipeline idea despite repeated and worsening water shortages in Bulawayo and Matabeleland generally, specifically to raise funds and to promote the project itself. Figure 2.2 shows the likely route of the pipeline, which could be constructed either as a one-off project or as the culmination of a linked series of dams. Gunby and Mpande (1995) give details of the MZWP campaign. They describe how the NGO was carefully constituted so as to incorporate a broad base of support, including representation from Ndebele political leaders and from the predominantly white business community. Those politicians in MZWP were among the most senior Ndebele figures in ZANU(PF), although the party itself was not formally represented in the NGO. Within less than a year, MZWP accumulated funds and pledges from local sources totalling Z$8m (over US $1m), a unique achievement for a Zimbabwean NGO. Local and international media were targeted so as to promote the idea of the pipeline project as widely as possible, and help was obtained from Zimbabwe Environmental Research Organisation (ZERO), an environmental research NGO, on the relationship of the pipeline idea to other possible uses for Zambezi water by other countries in the region. MZWP went on to commission feasibility studies and negotiated directly with foreign donors for aid for the project, and would have gone ahead with actually building the pipeline if the government had not stepped in. In my terms, MZWP was engaged in complementary activities. There was also a small element of confrontation in the Zambezi water case. Bulawayo and Matabeleland generally provided the Ndebele base of the ZAPU opposition in the early 1980s and of the ‘dissidents’ of the mid-1980s. Though there is no specifically Ndebele-based opposition party since the ‘shot-gun’ merger of ZAPU with ZANU(PF) in 1987, Matabeleland is still the nearest thing politically to an alternative internal power centre in Zimbabwe. However, tribally based confrontation is recognised on both sides to be extremely dangerous and on the whole this aspect of the issue has been deliberately played down. In fact the broad


FIGURE 2.2 MAP SHOWING PROPOSED ROUTE OF MATABELELAND ZAMBEZI WATER PIPELINE

basis of MZWP, with its inclusion both of white business leaders and of political leaders with senior positions in national and regional government, was designed to be non-confrontational. It was when MZWP began acting as a development agent in its own right alongside government (complementary activity) that the Zimbabwe Government was obliged to take notice. The involvement of international agencies, which operate as important externally based power sources, coupled with the government’s own lack of capacity, meant that the MZWP’s activities could not be suppressed. The only alternative was a change of policy so that government adopted the idea of water from the Zambezi for Bulawayo among its national water development options. Rather than simply take on the pipeline project itself, the government set up a new organisation, namely the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Trust (MZWT), with some overlapping membership with MZWP but including formal representation from ZANU(PF), regional and national government agencies, and MZWP itself. By 1995 there was concern that this could be a way of delaying action indefinitely,


since MZWP had been rendered more or less inactive. However, the election campaign was used by members of the old MZWP to oblige the President, on a campaigning visit to Matabeleland, to make a very public pledge to move ahead with the project quickly. 2.5 ANALYSIS: FACTORS AFFECTING NGO INFLUENCE Political and Economic Centrality of the Issue The presentation of the four stories as two pairs suggested that it might be ‘normal’ for NGOs to be excluded from certain issues, almost irrespective of democratisation. Such issues would be those of central importance: land tenure, for example. However, there is a good deal of national specificity in the relationship between economic and political power in a particular country. In Botswana, for example, the politico-administrative elite is closely related to the class of large-scale cattleowners (Tsie 1993), so that questions concerning the beef industry, ranching and export quotas, including the fencing of communal lands, are of central importance to the government as a class as well as to the economy of the country. Not surprisingly, then, NGOs have virtually no influence in this area. Similarly, in Zimbabwe, the reform of the land-tenure system is an issue which combines historical resonances relating to racially based inequities with present-day matters where members of the ruling elite have material interests. However, although NGOs are largely excluded from influence here as well, there are some differences, both in the ways in which they attempt to exercise influence and in the extent to which there may be some minimal areas of influence open to them. As the issues on which NGOs attempt to have influence become less central to the interests of the government or the ruling elite, so these differences become more marked. Hence it is worth looking back at the first three hypotheses in more detail and then at some additional points which emerge. Revisiting the First Three Hypotheses To the extent that in Zimbabwe there is less accountability through multi-party elections, according to the hypotheses one would not expect confrontation on the part of NGOs to succeed. Although NGOs provide a legitimate form of autonomous organisation, the political system in Zimbabwe is extremely intolerant of such autonomy and there are increasing restrictions on NGOs with new legislation to control them and exclude them from anything that could be regarded as political activities. The only exception could be for an NGO to relate its confrontational activities to a strong alternative internal power centre, but this would be a very high-risk strategy carrying the possibility of a backlash from the


government. As we have seen, the only element of confrontation in the Zimbabwean stories examined was in the activities of the MZWP, which did indeed relate to Bulawayo/Matabeleland as an alternative centre, but on the whole this confrontation was played down for fear of the risks involved. Nevertheless, the electoral process was utilised by campaigners. In Botswana, on the other hand, multi-partyism is more meaningful as a source of accountability, and the government is very sensitive to its democratic credentials. This means that issues cannot remain unresolved or open lest the opposition take them up to their political advantage. Not only the local councils but also the traditional forms of consultation such as the kgotla system provide some (limited) internal alternative power centres. If there is clear dissent from a government position at these levels then the government may give way at least temporarily, if only to ensure that it controls the political agenda in the longer term. Hence the success of the TOCT campaign against the SOIWDP, at least in the short term. Thus the third hypothesis, that a confrontational approach is most likely to lead to influence in a multi-party system where there are alternative internal power centres, seems to be reinforced. Conversely, in Zimbabwe other aspects of democracy may be more in evidence than in Botswana. In particular, there may be a more participative political culture at some levels, and the state certainly has less capacity (or ‘reach’), so that a variety of international organisations act as important external power centres. This leaves room, first, for collaboration from NGOs prepared to accept the government’s agenda and the role allocated to them, and, second, for a variety of complementary activities, including both simple ‘gap-filling’ and some institutional creativity as with the notion of Campfire. Thus the success of MZWP in forcing the Zambezi pipeline into the government’s plans was achieved through complementary activities, and the only hint of any NGO influence on the land tenure debate came from the CCG. Botswana’s ‘paternalistic developmentalism’, with its strong technocratic and political elite, leaves little room for complementary activities and has little need for collaboration with NGOs. Consultation is even more on the government’s terms than in Zimbabwe, and hence the influence of NGOs on actual policy development is even more marginal. However, as noted above, NGO influence on matters of central economic or political importance, like land tenure, is minimal in both countries. Thus, with this proviso about how the economic or political centrality of a particular issue may override considerations of democracy, the first and second hypotheses also seem to be reinforced, although evidence from these stories is quite weak on the first hypothesis. In other words, it still appears that the collaborative form of influence is more likely to be effective in a more participative culture. One might suggest even more strongly the proposition that complementary activities are likely to be effective in influencing policy where there is a diversity of power centres with links to interests external to the country.


International Links It is clear that the possibility of linking to international agendas, either in terms of issues or in terms of specific organisational links, offers an additional dimension to NGO influence. However, as noted by Bernard Eccleston in Paper 3, collaboration with Northern NGOs can be a two-edged weapon as far as Southern NGOs are concerned, and this is borne out in the stories covered here. Eccleston notes that moving an issue to an international level can be a way of accessing additional resources and opening up political space. With regard to the former, the whole area of complementary activities is typified by rural development projects run by indigenous NGOs in countries like Zimbabwe with support from Northern NGO partners. The Campfire projects are no exception; links through the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Zimbabwe Trust bring additional development funds into the country. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why the Zimbabwe Government continues to allow NGO activities, despite its intolerance, noted above, of autonomous organisations. How moving to an international level can create additional political space can be seen from both the campaign for water from the Zambezi and the campaign against the SOIWDP. In the latter case, the issue may appear at a national level to be a rather small local debate about the best way of utilising resources in a region. It becomes internationally a debate about the conservation of an ecosystem of global significance. However, Eccleston also notes how internationalising an issue can galvanise the policy-making system (in this case the various institutions and forces in favour of large-scale development of the water resources of the Okavango) into becoming more effective proponents of their cause. There are certainly signs in Botswana of government spokespersons talking up the impact of the suggested threat from Greenpeace International in terms of Northern conservationist interests wanting to prevent development. To the extent that local conservationists (especially expatriates and other whites) can be portrayed as in league with Greenpeace, then their alliance with local community interests in the area around the Okavango may be shaken and a future proposal might not meet with such united opposition. In the case of the MZWP also, the fact that an NGO went direct to foreign donors may have prodded the Zimbabwe Government into action, but it may also have led that same government to try to ensure that MZWP cannot in future act independently. Capacity and Autonomy of the State The space afforded to NGOs in Zimbabwe comes largely from the fact that the government does not have the capacity to regulate their activities and indeed needs the resources they bring in and the projects they carry out. This is true particularly of welfare organisations. Limited reach on the part of the state may allow NGOs effectively to form a kind of alternative power centre, and thus relates to the third


of the four features of democracy. However, the question of the autonomy or capacity of a given state is a separate issue and cuts across the issue of democratisation. Just as both authoritarian and more democratic governments can exhibit the capacity for developmentalism found in Botswana as well as in certain South-East Asian states (Leftwich 1994), so one can find both authoritarian and more democratic states lacking in capacity. Lack of capacity can lead to collaboration with NGOs, though not necessarily to much real influence for them. Environment is one area where even relatively strong, autonomous states may well lack expertise, scientific knowledge and experience. This is partly because it is an area whose importance has been pushed internationally in the period leading up to and following the Rio UNCED conference, a period in which many African countries have been undergoing structural adjustment and hence when new resources and staffing have not been available to build up new ministries or other institutions. Compared to longer established line ministries, a new environment ministry, as in Zimbabwe, may have few resources and also few direct powers. Thus it may build up a culture of collaboration with NGOs even if this goes against the norm for other ministries; hence the scenario of extensive consultation without much real influence on the part of the NGOs, since they are collaborating with a rather weak part of government. In fact, as seen in the cases of MZWP and the CCG, it is through building on complementary activities that NGOs can utilise lack of governmental capacity to influence policy. However, this is only likely to be effective where there is a basic measure of agreement with government. Even weak governments are likely to use what capacity they do have to clamp down on autonomous activity by NGOs which is seen as contrary to national interests. Policy Development as a Process As noted above and in the Introduction, NGO influence on policy can be related to three stages in the policy process, namely: agenda-setting, policy choices and implementation. Agenda-setting can itself be thought of in the relatively short and then the longer term. It is probably through the fourth form of influence (consciousness-raising) that NGOs affect agendas over the long term, although it is enormously hard to document and evaluate. However, one should note that, with respect to the stories described here, there has been a global shift in attitudes (some might say a paradigm shift) on environmental issues, which has brought in its wake both a general scepticism around large-scale water development projects and a willingness to confer increased importance on indigenous knowledge and community-based resource management techniques. The traditional cattle-post system in Botswana and some aspects of Campfire projects might both come into this category. In Botswana, NGOs have not so far been able to utilise these shifts in global opinion to make much impact on agenda-setting amongst policy makers. This may


be because of the closed policy network in that country, as well as the continuing relative weakness of the NGO sector. In Zimbabwe there is perhaps a little more indication of NGO impact on agenda-setting, particularly with the CCG pushing community-based resource management onto the agenda. (The MZWP, in its promotion of a large-scale water project, could be seen as working with government against the global trend.) Policy formation is perhaps the area where NGOs have least influence on environmental policies. This is certainly the case in Botswana, where policy formation is the province par excellence of the politico-administrative elite. In Zimbabwe, however, where the new environment ministry lacks technical capacity, so the formation of policy on questions like EIAs is subject to a great deal of consultation with NGOs. What status such policy will have when it cuts across established practices of more powerful line ministries is not clear. It is when policies reach the implementation stage that there is most chance of NGO involvement. In Botswana this is the only stage at which the government officially sees a role for NGOs, though that role would preferably be one of helping to explain policies and helping local government officials to make the details of policy work, rather than actually making any changes in response to NGO representations. It is also the stage at which policies become public, so that there is opportunity for opposition, which, as in the SOIWDP case, occasionally succeeds in preventing certain projects from going ahead as planned. However, where NGOs have played more of a role in agenda-setting or policy formation, as in the two Zimbabwean stories, one sees that they typically suffer even more from lack of capacity than does the government. Implementation is rarely something that NGOs can do alone, once it goes beyond small numbers of localised projects. 2.6 CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR DEMOCRATISATION AND FOR NGO STRATEGY The first conclusion is that democratisation does indeed assist NGO influence. One must go beyond the simple idea of a normal process of policy development from which NGOs are excluded, plus some possibilities for NGO influence on peripheral matters such as the details of particular projects. The first three hypotheses suggest ways in which different aspects of democracy affect the ability of NGOs to achieve direct influence. To a large extent the stories reinforce the hypotheses. However, some additional points have emerged: the importance of international networking; questions about the capacity and autonomy of a particular state, above all, the idea of policy development as a process combined with the fact that different issues have different degrees of political and economic centrality in different countries. Thus, it may be relatively easy for an NGO to effect a short-term reversal of a specific decision on the implementation of a policy of relatively peripheral importance; it is much more unlikely, and a greater test of democracy, for a


government to be open to NGO influence on the formulation of policy, particularly on questions of central importance. There is a possibility, however, of a virtuous circle between democratisation and NGO influence. First, one of the features of democracy allows NGO influence in some form. Then the exercise of that influence, so long as it is not done in such a way as to provoke a backlash, may in turn reinforce democratisation. For example, in the Zambezi pipeline case, although the government eventually restricted the MZWP, it was obliged to act through another institution (MZWT), effectively pluralising the political context a little more. Implications for NGO Strategy Choice Even where, as in Botswana, confrontation may appear to be potentially effective, NGOs cannot choose it as a constant strategy. This is because their interests often coincide at least partially with those of decision makers in government and elsewhere. However, if there is clear conflict between policy about to be implemented and interests represented by NGOs, the above stories tend to show that, in a multi-party system, outright opposition may be more likely to get results than trying to collaborate and hoping for agreed modifications. Advocacy built on complementary activities requires considerable capacity on the part of an NGO. In turn, it is likely to be effective where the state has limited capacity, as well as where there are international interests involved. Indeed, international links are probably essential if either of these two strategies is to succeed. Such links clearly work best if there is an international dimension to the particular issue. However, there is the danger of different perceptions of an issue from outside and within a particular country, and also the possibility of an international campaign provoking more effective action on the part of the target decision-making institution in the future. On local issues, indirect campaigning may be more likely to succeed in the long term than attempts at advocacy on a collaborative basis. Real opportunities for NGO activists to enter the policy networks are likely to remain limited, and may carry very strong dangers of cooptation. There may be relatively more opportunity for collaboration where, as in Zimbabwe, there is a somewhat participative national culture, though effective influence is not likely to extend to matters of central economic or political importance like land tenure. Up to now international concern for environment in Africa has mostly related to issues around wildlife and biodiversity. However, the desertification convention is now signed (see Paper 6) and includes reference to community-based sustainable development, the importance of indigenous knowledge and techniques, and the need for independent EIAs on big engineering projects. It may then become possible for NGOs in countries like Zimbabwe and Botswana to invoke this international convention and gain international support at the policy formation or even agenda-setting stage for a broader, more participative approach on environmental issues such as those discussed in this paper.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research on which this paper is based was funded mainly by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its Global Environmental Change Initiative, and partly by the Open University. I am grateful for their support. Research in Zimbabwe and Botswana is being carried out in collaboration with Roger Mpande of Commutech, Harare, Dr Derek Gunby of Planafric Consultancy, Bulawayo, and Dr Onalenna Selolwane of the University of Botswana, and I fully acknowledge their contribution. Much of the information on the role of NGOs in Zimbabwe and Botswana and the four stories comes from interviews carried out in these countries in October 1993, July 1994 and December 1994, and I would like to thank all the NGO staff, officials and others who were so open and informative and to apologise for any misconstructions I may have placed on what they said. A version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on ‘Dryland Advocacy: NGO Influence on Policy on Land Degradation and Sustainable Resource Management in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Milton Keynes, 16 May 1995. My final thanks are to those who attended and whose comments allowed me to develop the ideas further. REFERENCES Annis, S. (1988) ‘Can Small-Scale Development be Large-Scale Policy?’ in S.Annis and P. Hakim (eds.) Direct to the Poor: Grassroots Development in Latin America, London, Lynne Rienner. Charlton, R. (1991) ‘Bureaucrats and Politicians in Botswana’s Policy-Making Process: A ReInterpretation’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, pp. 265–82. Christiansen, L. and Dowding, K. (1994) ‘Pluralism or State Autonomy? The Case of Amnesty International (British Section): The Insider/Outsider Group’, Political Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 15–24. Clark, J. (1991) Democratizing Development: The Role of Voluntary Organizations, London, Earthscan. Cliffe, L. (1969) ‘The Political System’ in K.Svendsen and M.Teisen (eds.) Self-Reliant Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Publishing House, pp. 130–42. Copestake, J. (1993) ‘Zimbabwe: Country Overview’ in K.Wellard and J.Copestake (eds.) Non-Governmental Organizations and the State in Africa, London, Routledge, pp. 15–25. Diaz-Albertini, J. (1993) ‘Non-profit Advocacy in Weakly Institutionalised Political Systems: The Case of NGDOs in Lima, Peru’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 317–37. Edwards, M. (1993) ‘“Does the doormat influence the boot?”: Critical Thoughts on UK NGOs and International Advocacy’, paper presented to NGO study group of the Development Studies Association (DSA), Mimeo. Edwards, M. and Hulme, D. (eds.) (1992) Making a Difference: NGOs and Development in a Changing World, London, Earthscan.


Fowler, A. (1988) Non-Governmental Organizations in Africa: Achieving Comparative Advantage in Relief and Micro-Development, IDS Discussion Paper 249, Brighton, Institute for Development Studies. Fowler, A. (1993) ‘Non-Governmental Organizations as Agents of Democratization: An African Perspective’, Journal of International Development, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 325–39. Gore, C., Katerere, Y. and Moyo, S. (1992) The Case for Sustainable Development in Zimbabwe: Conceptual Problems, Conflicts and Contradictions, Harare, Enda-Zimbabwe/ZERO. Gunby, D. and Mpande, R. (1995) ‘The Campaign for Water from the Zambezi for Bulawayo: NGO Influence on Water Development Policy in Zimbabwe’, unpublished paper for GECOU Workshop, Milton Keynes. Kaunda, K. (1966) A Humanist in Africa, London, Longman. Leftwich, A. (1994) ‘Governance, the State and the Politics of Development’, Development and Change, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 363–86. Molutsi, P. (1993) ‘Botswana’s Democracy: Myth or Reality?’, Southern Africa Political and Economic Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 12 (Sept.), pp. 4–6. Molutsi, P. and Holm, J. (1990) ‘Developing Democracy when Civil Society is Weak’, African Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 356, pp. 323–40. Moyo, S. (1991) ‘NGO Advocacy in Zimbabwe: Systematizing an Old Function or Inventing a New One?’ Paper 2, Workshop on ‘NGO and Development Advocacy’ organised by IRED and NGO/PVP Initiatives Project, Harare, ZERO, mimeo. Moyo, S., Robinson, P., Katerere, Y., Stephenson, S., and Gumbo, G. (1991) Zimbabwe’s Environmental Dilemma: Balancing Resource Inequalities, Harare, ZERO. Muir, A. (1992) Evaluating the Impact of NGOs in Rural Poverty Alleviation: Zimbabwe Country Study, Overseas Development Institute, Working Paper 52, London, ODI. Ndiweni, M. (1993) ‘The Organization of Rural Associations for Progress and Grassroots Development’, in K.Wellard and J.Copestake (eds.), Non-Governmental Organizations and the State in Africa, London, Routledge, pp. 77–84. OECD (1994) ‘DAC Orientations on Participatory Development and Good Governance’, OECD Working Papers, No. 2, Paris, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Pinkney, R. (1993) Democracy in the Third World, Buckingham, Open University Press. Potter, D. (1994) ‘Democracy and the Environment in Asia’, GECOU Working Paper No. 2, Milton Keynes, Open University. Rasheed, S. (1995) ‘The Democratization Process and Popular Participation in Africa: Emerging Realities and the Challenges Ahead’, Development and Change, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 333–54. ROAPE (1992) ‘Democracy, Civil Society and NGOs’, Editorial Introduction, Review of African Political Economy, No. 55, pp. 3–7. Rose, C. (1993) ‘Beyond the Struggle for Proof: Factors Changing the Environmental Movement’, Environmental Values, No. 2, pp. 285–98. Selolwane, O. (1994) ‘Fencing Botswana’s Commonage: A Recipe for Environmental Disaster or Conservation?’, Paper to Southern African Universities’ Social Science Conference on Environment and Development, 5–9 Dec., Harare, Zimbabwe. Selolwane, O. (1995) ‘Silence of the Lambs? Environmental NGOs on the Fencing of Botswana’s Communal Rangelands’, unpublished Paper for GECOU Workshop, Milton Keynes. Smith, M. (1993) Pressure, Power and Policy: State Autonomy and Policy Networks in Britain and the United States, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf.


Stoneman, C. (1992) ‘Necessary but not Sufficient: Political Democracy and Development in Southern Africa’, Paper for Conference on the New World Order, New England College, Arundel, mimeo. Thomas, A. (1995) ‘Does Democracy Matter?—Pointers from a Comparison of NGOs’ Influence on Environmental Policies in Zimbabwe and Botswana’, DPP Working Paper 31/GECOU Working Paper 4, Milton Keynes, GECOU research group, Open University. Tsie, B. (1993) ‘The Political Context of Botswana’s Development Performance’, Southern Africa Political and Economic Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 12 (Sept.), pp. 35–9. Vivian, J. (1994) ‘NGOs and Sustainable Development in Zimbabwe: No Magic Bullets’, Development and Change, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 167–93. Wellard, K. and Copestake, J. (eds.) (1993) Non-Governmental Organizations and the State in Africa, London, Routledge. Zaffiro, J. (1989) ‘The Press and Political Opposition in an African Democracy: The Case of Botswana’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol. XXVII, No. 1, pp. 51–73.

3 Does North-South Collaboration Enhance NGO Influence on Deforestation Policies in Malaysia and Indonesia? BERNARD ECCLESTON

Papers 1 and 2 in this volume examine the impact of the national political context within which NGOs operate. This paper concentrates on another variable that affects the degree of NGO influence on policy making by looking in particular at the assumption that international collaboration would be more likely to make NGOs influential than if they acted alone. Our starting point with this line of enquiry was based partly on previous research in political science that highlights the additional influence collaboration between conventional political actors can deliver. In studies of environmental politics NGO collaboration is said to provide continuity between periodic global conferences especially through the shrinking of communication space with advances in electronic information transmission. Caldwell indeed has argued that such advances have meant that the ‘organised environmental movement has become truly global’ (1988:19). Similarly, when reflecting on the impact of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) at Rio in 1992 for the long-term development of NGOs, Hinchberger refers to the near-unanimous view that the visibility of networking was one of the most important results (1993:52). Unfortunately, though, there has been little detailed research on how exactly collaboration affects NGO campaigning. As Haufler commented, ‘A weak empirical base hinders extensive theoretical and conceptual development concerning the role of NGOs and transnational coalitions’ (1993:111). This weakness is especially evident as regards evidence from NGOs in the South. This paper examines Southern reactions to the impact of international NGO collaboration that emerged in answers to a series of structured questions raised with groups involved in tropical deforestation campaigns. These responses, gathered in visits to Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan between April 1993 and April 1995, were explicitly directed to elucidate whether collaboration had increased or diminished NGO influence with policy makers. Initially we approached NGOs known from various directories to be engaged in advocacy work on tropical forestry and this was then supplemented by suggested local contacts. Wherever possible we also attempted to interview others involved in forestry issues such as government

Bernard Eccleston is Social Sciences Staff Tutor, the Open University.

64 NGO INFLUENCE ON DEFORESTATION POLICIES

agencies, research institutes and the local representatives of Northern donors and foundations. In addition to over 50 interviews in Asia, another 15 meetings were later held with NGOs in Europe who campaign on Asian forestry issues which allows us to assess both sides of the collaborative process. What generally emerged from these interviews was confirmation that collaboration with NGOs from the North had indeed allowed Southern NGOs to widen the political space within which they campaign. Collaboration had also enabled them to mobilise additional resources in terms of information, finance and expertise. At the same time almost every interview in Asia produced some comment on the way collaboration had the potential to diminish NGO influence on policy makers and we were given examples where this had actually happened. Sometimes NGO influence was diminished because of problems in the internal management of the system of collaboration. In addition, there were cases where the potential of North-South collaboration was so threatening to Southern government interests that already limited domestic political space for NGOs was curtailed even further. This latter cause of diminished influence I will elaborate later as a factor external to, but in some ways linked with, the way collaboration was managed by the NGO partners. Contrasting perceptions of optimism about the potential offered by North-South collaboration and at the same time awareness of the difficulties this may bring is mirrored in more general literature on global environmental politics. In the next two sections I outline why some scholars are optimistic about the prospects for NGO collaboration and why others have reservations. With such differences in mind I then analyse how differing styles of collaboration have been managed and explain how this sometimes increased but sometimes diminished NGO influence. Comparing Malaysian with Indonesian experience allows me to consider how collaboration affects the domestic political space policy makers allocate to NGOs in more and less democratic systems. In addition, I can contrast the greater potential for combined NGO leverage on Northern donors that Indonesia’s greater dependence on external funding for forest projects allows. Because Malaysia finances forest exploitation from internal sources, NGOs do not have this additional point of leverage and globalising their campaigns is related more to mobilising opposition to domestic forest policies. First, though, what in the current literature of global politics encourages people to be optimistic about the potential power of North-South collaboration amongst NGOs? 3.1 GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY AND OPTIMISTIC EXPECTATIONS FOR NGO COLLABORATION In the past two decades the primacy of nation-states across a host of issues such as nuclear disarmament, social discrimination, consumer protection and


environmental pollution has been challenged in two interlinked dimensions. Internally, a variety of social movements forced concern over these issues onto national political agendas. Externally, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) provide important sites for joint international activity by civil society interests. Both of these trends have encouraged some authors to connect national and international spheres into the disintegration of nation-state sovereignty or the emergence of ‘sovereignty-free actors’ in a global civil society. Though this type of conclusion has been challenged in a number of ways, as I will show later, the perception of a dramatically enlarged global political space for non-state actors has been a source of high expectations. ‘Groups, movements and institutions within global society are making themselves felt within the international state system…[and] we should stop seeing them as intruders’ (Shaw 1992:431). NGOs campaigning on environmental issues have been singled out for special attention in an emergent global civil society because they compensate for the inadequacies of nation-states and play a pivotal role in cementing the contribution of IGOs and the scientific community. The spatial horizons of nation-states are a poor basis for the management of environmental problems which by their very nature cannot be confined within their sovereign jurisdiction. Efforts by nationstates to forge cross-boundary cooperation seem inevitably to fall foul of competition over scarce resources and expectations that some neighbours will be ‘free-riders’ to international agreements. In contrast, environmental NGOs can widen horizons because of their greater global consciousness or their ‘green culture as earth nationalism’ (Deudney 1993). Similarly NGOs can compensate for the shorter time horizons within which nation-states operate. By moving outside the immediate time frame of politicians, NGOs can press the case for intergenerational equity by emphasising that ‘Most environmental problems will outlast the policy makers charged with addressing them’ (Litfin 1993: 100). As participants in a global civil society, NGOs can add the dimension of global responsibilities to encourage states to ‘respond to demands for global environmental management’ (Shaw 1992: 431). To be sure, NGOs are only one element in the process of formulating global responsibilities, but it can be argued that their role is pivotal. While IGOs for instance have played a key entrepreneurial role in establishing a number of institutions for global environmental management, NGOs can perform some functions in such systems that IGOs cannot. Local knowledge can help IGOs identify states that in practice do not comply as fully with international agreements as their official statements imply. By being able to be more critical than either IGOs or other states, ‘The resources and influence of NGOs provide them with the capacity to publicise non-compliance by states, to establish and fund their own monitoring and investigation’ (Hurrell and Kingsbury 1992:30). In the process NGOs work with IGOs to make states more accountable and their policies more transparent in ‘networks over, around and within states that generate the means and incentives for effective cooperation’ (Haas, Keohane and Levy 1993:23).


NGOs also interrelate with scientific communities, which together with IGOs have been important in raising global concerns, thereby placing specific environmental issues on global agendas. NGOs can assist in the diffusion of scientific knowledge between and within nation-states in what have been termed translational linkages. Environmental NGOs ‘inject scientific and earth-centred concerns into political and economic situations which would otherwise relegate such concerns to the margins’ (Princen and Finger 1994: 232). Emphasising the connections between NGOs, IGOs and the scientific community within a global civil society gives a clear sense of optimism that nation-states can be encouraged to cooperate in managing the global environment. Though NGOs may be only one force in this process, optimism about their pivotal position is underpinned by the widely shared perception that they articulate a ‘common bond of humanity’ (Counsell 1994). Leaving on one side for the moment the accuracy of such a perception, how can this ‘common bond’ be used by NGOs to maintain global civil society’s environmental concerns in world politics? At this point we come to the essential importance of international collaboration which binds the decentralised activities of NGOs. Simply focusing on NGOs as ‘diverse and inchoate groups of agencies having no official status…misses the functional relationships among these NGOs and the interactive network they form on many environmental issues’ (Caldwell 1988:25). Breymen echoes these thoughts and sees North-South movement coalitions as ‘A critical component of the globalisation of environmental issues’ (1993: 142). Kamieniecki likewise argues that ‘nongovernmental transnational organisations are frequently able to influence governments through their members and sympathisers within individual nations’ (1991:354). Laferriere goes a stage further to suggest that the greater vulnerability of Southern NGOs to state pressure may be ‘compensated by the political reach of Northern groups’ (1994:105) when they collaborate in global NGO networks. One prominent example of this collaborative process is well documented in the campaign to slow the rate of deforestation in Brazil by targeting Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and the Congress in the US. Although policy makers in Brazil were the obvious target, local NGOs had no access to domestic political networks but in collaboration with US NGOs the campaign was able to exert indirect leverage by targeting Northern donors of project aid. As a joint campaign, NGOs from Brazil contributed local knowledge about the impact of Northernfunded projects on indigenous peoples and their environment. In return US NGOs contributed their access experience at US financial institutions and the World Bank where the dominance of US Government funding gave NGOs an additional source of leverage via Congress. Joint campaigning here was ‘a matter of necessity: the NGOs in the North had insufficient credibility and NGOs in the South had no access’ (Bramble and Porter 1992:348). Potentially, PAN (Pesticides Action Network) is a vehicle for international NGO collaboration because IGOs regulating the trade in hazardous pesticides have institutionalised NGO participation (Paarlberg 1993:345). Trade in restricted


products has to be formally registered by exporters usually from the North, and importers usually from the South. In this case local NGO knowledge from North and South can be used to allow IGO regulators to scrutinise more effectively official returns. Though it is more often than not the Northern NGOs who attend formal IGO sessions, electronic communication improvements mean that Southern responses can be incorporated ‘within minutes’ (Starke 1990:67). In addition to monitoring official statements, collaboration through PAN shows that the work of Southern NGOs can be of value to domestic environmental agencies whose own regulatory capacity is not strong (Haas, Keohane and Levy 1993:402). In such cases the NGO network can also raise the credibility of Southern NGOs, as it is said to do in the organisation of debt-for-nature swaps. These projects involve Northern NGOs, purchasing a country’s foreign debt in return for a Southern government’s agreement to preserve tropical rainforests. For those Southern NGOs involved, access to policy-making circles in the North strengthens their credibility with their local membership and NGO legitimacy with government (Klinger 1994:243). These examples imply an international division of labour between NGOs and suggest that collaboration involves specialisation between local, national and global levels. ‘Single NGOs do not have to make all the connections… But most can be effective via networks and coalitions’ (Princen and Finger 1994:232). Confidence about collaboration is built on good experience with specific campaigns which can then form the basis for more enduring collaboration, as it has arguably done for example in extending the MDB Brazil campaign into a more general ‘greening’ of the World Bank. Optimistic assessments of the continuing importance of international NGO collaboration suggest ‘The ties between varied movements may be seen as the construction of new institutions that both respond to, and deepen, global ecological interdependence’ (Breymen 1993:143). 3.2 INTERLINKED NATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETIES AND GUARDED EXPECTATIONS FOR NGO COLLABORATION There are then a range of factors that encourage a mood of optimism about the potential for international collaboration among environmental NGOs. Nevertheless, many Southern NGOs we interviewed gave only guarded support for the impact of collaboration in their campaigning. To some extent this reflects the fact that optimistic assessments come mainly from Northern sources, which at times appear to accept the emergence of a global civil society too uncritically. In addition, they may exaggerate both the erosion of nation-state power and the increasing influence of NGOs. A clear danger in challenging state-centric theories of international relations because they marginalise non-state actors is implying a zero-sum power game where raising the profile of NGOs, for instance, means minimising the role of


nation-states. This is highly questionable in the tropical forestry debate because states are at the heart of the process given the national property rights they assert. More generally, it is states that enter agreements, sign conventions and accede to regulations, not representatives of civil society. Even the activities of IGOs are deeply affected by the constraints imposed by participating nation-states, who can and do override IGO initiatives to widen NGO access. ‘Although environmental groups have achieved observer status with many IGOs, they have yet to penetrate policy circles’ (Lafferriere 1994:105). Nation-states acting individually may well be insufficient when dealing with global environmental problems, but they are also essential, not least in conforming to agreements. As Rosenau suggests in the wider context of a bifurcation of world politics, the state is ‘both indispensable and inadequate’ (quoted Litfin 1993:96). In addition to being indispensable to environmental management, the state is also crucial in determining the autonomy of civil society and the extent of connections made with other groups in different societies. Thus some states can close off opportunities for external collaboration where this leads to threatening revelations of non-compliance with international agreements. On the other hand, collaboration may be encouraged if this helps to put additional pressure on other states or MDBs when negotiating loan or debt facilities. Quite apart from direct methods of controlling the connections between civil societies, the nation-state has a role to play in the more general sense of confirming the national identity of groups in civil society. In contrast to optimistic expectations about a global civil society, Peterson quite rightly points out that global visions and loyalties may be shared by a few groups but ‘are not yet very widespread’ (1992:377). Indeed it is the absence of well-established common global values, even in the environmental movement, that encourages him to propose not a global civil society, but an international one comprising a range of interlinked national civil societies (Peterson 1992:378). Being cautious about the continued importance of nation-states and the sociocultural differences between national civil societies does not mean rejecting the potential of international linkages between civil societies. Rather it is to accept that they are ‘unlikely to become central to world politics in the short or medium term’ (Shaw 1992:434). Caution in discussing the power of common bonds that link civil societies has become increasingly evident in assessments of collaboration between development NGOs. Many of these assessments have been made by Northern NGOs reflecting on the disappointments of the past decade during which they have become much more involved in joint projects with Southern groups. A special supplement to World Development in 1987 emphasised time and again the need to avoid imposing projects without proper consultation and to be more alert to empowering Southern NGOs. Similarly a report on the quality of Dutch development cooperation talks about patronising Northern interventions using simplistic representations of the South to deliver images more important to fund-raising than effective advocacy (van Dijk 1992:12). Then again, Brown, in a survey of development projects in


Asia, highlights what he calls different traditions among NGOs. Northern groups, he argues, tend to emphasise problem solving by working more closely with whoever makes key decisions. In contrast Southern NGOs were said to be more concerned with empowering the poor, oppressed and disenfranchised (1993). Such different attitudes between NGOs in the North and South have more recently begun to resonate within the environmental movement. In one sense the central theme of the Earth Summit at Rio, by attempting to link environmental and developmental issues, served to make visible differences in priorities between NGOs. Put very crudely, there is a perception in the South that Northern NGOs prioritise the conservation of nature either out of choice or because they need to match the preferences of their Northern constituencies. While not denying a place for these concerns, Southern NGOs are more vociferous in making links between environmental degradation and questions of equity and local livelihoods. Where Southern NGOs choose to join the dominant discourse of the North in order to utilise its greater potential for leverage on policy makers, the way is opened for divisions within the South. While involvement in debt-for-nature swaps may raise the credibility of those NGOs for whom conservation is the more salient issue, ‘It is unlikely that other kinds of NGOs will be energised to quite the same extent’ (Klinger 1994:242). More crucially, such a high profile for just some NGOs can provoke divisions based on jealousies and matters of principle when other NGOs see global debt cancellation as the moral duty of the North. Such divisions also occur over initiatives by Northern NGOs to campaign for a boycott of tropical timber especially by consumers in the North. Southern NGOs can see the potential for such a boycott as a means of galvanising Southern states into more effective forest management. However, they are deeply divided in balancing the impact of uncertain state responses against the immediate threat to livelihoods in countries dependent on timber for export earnings (Eccleston Paper 5 in this volume). At this juncture we can see in clear relief a source of global dissensus on the purpose of international collaboration. For Princen and Finger, linkages to international institutions help forest peoples to ‘ensure their preferred way of life’ (1994:40). Whereas for others, such international linkages between favoured NGOs and state agencies exclude ‘local communities and residents whose role in the overall debate have been limited’ (Hawkins 1993:240). Notwithstanding the impact of international collaboration to confront the threat to Brazil’s rainforests, there are voices doubting the effectiveness of the outcome. Rather than stimulating a real policy shift in Brazil, Arnt argues, the campaign merely meant that the government put on old policies a ‘gloss of scenic and figurative environmentalism’ (1992:22). In the process, policy is still decided over the heads of local peoples. To quote a petition from Amazonian peoples to the community of concerned environmentalists and the World Bank: ‘While we appreciate your efforts on our behalf, we want to make it clear that we never delegated any power of


representation to any individual or organisation within that community’ (quoted in Hawkins 1993:241). Even though the empirical base on environmental NGO collaboration is not extensive, it is becoming clearer that there are optimistic as well as more pessimistic perceptions of the value of this new phenomenon for increasing the influence of NGOs. Optimists see collaboration as a check on veto coalitions of nation-states through a more vociferous global civil society. Pessimists are more guarded about both the declining power of sovereign states and the cohesiveness of global environmental values between civil societies. Such uncertainties among academic researchers is reflected in the views of environmental NGOs in Malaysia and Indonesia as they react to past experience of collaboration in tropical forest campaigns. It is to this particular experience that I now turn. 3.3 CONTRASTING STYLES AND OUTCOMES OF NGO COLLABORATION One major difficulty in analysing reactions to collaboration is the ambiguous and inconsistent way in which the process of coordination between NGOs is labelled. This inconsistency is also apparent in the literature where labels, such as networks, coalitions, alliances or confederations, are used as though there were no difference between them. In fact the different styles of collaboration described in our interviews involved quite different coordination costs to the participants. Together with the different styles were different expectations about what others should contribute and what outcomes might be expected. A broad indication of the escalating costs and expectations of various collaboration styles is shown in Figure 3.1. Networking was the most random style of collaboration depending to an extent on chance personal encounters at global conferences or unpredictable decisions to read reports from other NGOs either in hard copy or in electronic form. Though the quantity of information about environmental issues has increased hugely, the cost constraints on the NGOs we interviewed made them fairly passive users of networking per se. In contrast, being participants of more specific networks was more attractive as information could be filtered through a bridging organisation such as CAN (Climate Action Network) or APPEN (Asia-Pacific Peoples Environment Network). Membership of these organisations helps NGOs by disseminating communications in a format abridged by a trusted secretariat (Brown 1991). Of equal importance, membership of such networks did not compromise independent campaigns, which was crucial to NGOs such as MNS (Malayan Nature Society) who jealously guard their scientific mission. Where specific campaigns were thought to need direct collaboration, coalitions were an instrumental option based on an agreed division of responsibilities and the collaboration was restricted in duration to take account of long-term differences


FIGURE 3.1 GLOBAL COLLABORATION METHODS AMONG ENVIRONMENTAL NGOS

in goals. Campaigning for or against particular policy shifts by MDBs or IGOs were thought to be ideal reasons for coalition activity especially in Indonesia where policy targets in the North have a little more leverage over national forestry projects. In contrast, domestic coalitions were important in Malaysia especially in campaigns to protect designated national parks from unrestricted logging or to ameliorate the environmental impact of hydroelectric dam projects (Eccleston 1995). Coalitions even here reflect short-term interests which, as Diani suggests, do not ‘imply necessarily any sort of continuity beyond the limits of the specific conflictual campaign’ (1992:17). Only very rarely were the outcomes of previous collaboration so positive as to encourage NGOs into a more permanent alliance. This was partly because the expectations were seen as severe on participants but also because managing this style of collaboration requires the biggest commitment of resources. WRM (World Rainforest Movement) was the only example mentioned where dual headquarters in Penang (Malaysia) and in the UK symbolised a commitment to North-South NGO equality around the central importance of indigenous peoples to their tropical forestry campaigns. WRM tries to energise these shared values in methodical communication and at biennial strategy meetings for NGO members from India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, as well as from Europe and the US. A more formal structure of collaboration exists for those NGOs federated to INGOs (International NGOs) such as WWF (Malaysia) or SAM (Sahabat Alam Malaysia) and WALHI (Indonesian Environment Forum), both of which are


members of FOE (Friends of the Earth) International. In one sense, as both INGOs have an international secretariat, albeit with limited resources, they function as networks. But the continuing federal connections incline some analysts to think of INGOs as alliances because of their more enduring relationships. According to our interviewees, though, it remains problematic whether the process of collaboration between national organisations really reflects notions of empowerment and shared values that are perceived to be essential in alliances. Especially within WWF, the tendency of other ‘headstrong WWF groups in Europe’ (Zain 1993) to campaign on Malaysian forestry without purposive consultation inclines WWF (Malaysia) to think that the unpredictability inherent in networking makes it a more appropriate label. This attempt to classify different expectations attached to each style of collaboration is not a matter of academic semantics. Rather it is an attempt to focus on the actual process of coordination and to stress the importance of each collaborating NGO knowing clearly what to expect and what it should contribute. While political scientists like Hinckley have shown that collaboration can increase the influence of political actors, she also stresses that successful outcomes are highly dependent on each partner knowing and following the rules of the game (1981:64– 70). One example where this clearly did not happen came during a campaign in which Austrian NGOs proposed a ban on imports of tropical timber not certified as the product of sustainably managed forests. One factor explaining why this campaign failed in the longer term was, in my view, because Northern NGOs thought they were in coalition with Southern NGOs, whereas NGOs in Malaysia and Indonesia regarded the collaboration as networking. It was Greenpeace (Austria) who succeeded in organising unilateral action by their government to reflect concern over the contribution of tropical deforestation to global warming. The legislation passed in June 1992, raised the import duty on tropical wood and its products from eight to 70 per cent and imposed mandatory eco-labelling to isolate the products of unsustainably managed tropical forests (Chase 1993:761). Southern NGOs were expected to support the legislation, generally as an initiative to slow deforestation, but in particular to assist conservation projects which were to be financed from the revenue gained from the raised import duty. Expectation for such support seems to have been based on little more than an open letter from the European Rainforest Movement which had been agreed and signed by some Asian representatives of NGOs within WRM. In practice the legislation was scrapped within six months, after a massive counter-offensive by producer states led by Malaysia, during which time almost no public support for the Austrian initiative was forthcoming from Malaysian NGOs. Reflecting later on their failed campaign, Greenpeace (Austria) admitted that if the campaign ‘had been better explained to Southern groups, maybe this would have helped to create better understanding especially within FoE Malaysia (SAM)’ (Anderson 1993). In addition, Greenpeace reflected on their failure to


include all unsustainably produced timber in the legislation, not just tropical timber, and on the absence of prior consultation with Southern governments. SAM itself echoes all these sentiments in what was for them an ‘unrealistic campaign which would dissipate valuable and scarce resources’. What was more, if they had been accorded coalition-style consultation rather than ‘sketchy information’ (Chee 1993), they would have been able to point out in advance what Greenpeace concluded in their post-mortem. They would certainly have warned Northern NGOs of their government’s campaigns on the need to treat all timbers equally that had been under way since 1989 (Seda 1992:32; Chase 1993:762). As important, they would have highlighted the forest conservation fund as a ‘token gesture’ (Chee 1993), not least because to produce significant project revenue an 80 per cent import duty would have needed an unrealistically inelastic demand by Austrian consumers. Whereas in the North the campaign was initiated in the belief that Southern partners were part of a global coalition, the whole episode from a Southern perspective was symptomatic of unpredictable networking without agreed ground rules or prior consultation. Other researchers working on national collaboration between environmentalists in the North have also highlighted the importance of careful preparation for effective outcomes. The work of Klandermans in particular provides a useful framework to assess the benefits and costs of partnership campaigns (1990). Building on his research into the Dutch peace movement, Klandermans attempts to bridge the gap between students of NSMs (New Social Movements) in Europe and the US by challenging the assumption of the former that NSMs are characterised by detachment from existing political institutions. This proposition certainly reflects the attitudes of environmental NGOs in Asia who, while they eschew involvement with conventional political parties, certainly aim to penetrate policy-making networks. What for Klandermans is ‘new’ about NSMs is rather the extent of national linkages between them and the political opportunities such linkages offer. In particular, NSM networks pool collective resources in the form of finance, equipment, experience and leadership to create wider opportunities to influence policy. As far as environmental NGOs are concerned, I would add very explicitly the importance of pooling information resources. And when thinking about global as opposed to national linkages, I would add the opportunities these offer to influence international policy makers directly, or for them in turn to exert indirect pressure on individual nation-states. When he assesses the impact of NSM network linkages, Klandermans takes care to stress that policy makers too are part of a network which may well react negatively and oppose the demands of social movements. This type of reaction was also highlighted by Knoke’s work on the US civil rights movement which was opposed by ‘many groups that benefit from contemporary power arrangements who do not want their privileged situations disturbed’ (1990:77). In the case of tropical forestry in South-East Asia, the groups routinely opposing NGO demands would be the interlinked networks of elected politicians, unelected bureaucrats, especially in forestry, energy and economic ministries, together with business


interests in the timber industry. For Indonesia I would also add the military because their political patronage involves allocation of logging concessions. It is essential, therefore, in judging the impact of NGO collaboration, to take into account the way establishment networks can react to impressive campaigns by depriving NGOs of resources and decreasing their political opportunities. In short, establishment networks can make counterproductive the decision of NGOs to collaborate. Klandermans’ analysis, however, does not stop there because, he argues, the reaction of the establishment may be so negative as to solidify the NSM network in the face of such adversity. Examples of a similar process for environmental NGOs are found when authoritarian regimes attempt a degree of repression that raises their plight as an international cause célèbre. At the same time, more overt forms of repression may lead to divisions within the established political order which encourage dialogue in new bargaining institutions. There are signs in Asian forestry campaigns, for example, that bureaucrats in environment agencies are less confrontational and of divisions appearing between civilian and military politicians once campaigns take on a more global focus through NGO collaboration. In the remaining sections I examine our NGO interview responses under the same headings suggested by Klandermans to assess the impact of international collaboration on the influence of NGOs. What has been the impact of pooling resources with foreign NGOs and has this opened up more or less political opportunities? What has been the reaction of established policy-making interests to NGOs campaigning on a more global scale? Has this resulted in more secure long-term political space for NGOs? 3.4 NGO COLLABORATION TO SHARE RESOURCES AND WIDEN DOMESTIC POLITICAL SPACE Our interviews provided a number of references to financial and material support from Northern NGOs being used to supplement the meagre funds of NGOs in the South where lower per capita incomes and weak financial systems limit local fund-raising potential. Sometimes this allowed Southern NGOs to intensify their local campaigning by using documentation supplied by Northern partners (Hadraku and Zelter 1994). Alternatively, it allowed them to participate in overseas meetings such as those associated with CAN (Blacker 1994). More indirect methods of boosting the finances of Southern NGOs come where Northern partners facilitate increased sales of publications produced for example by SAM and related organisations in Penang, Malaysia. More intangible assistance comes in the form of moral support: as one person put it, ‘collaboration helps us to feel less alone and we know that other people are at least listening to us’ (Maezawa 1993). Despite the apparent benefits of foreign financial support, most of the NGOs were reluctant to divulge too much information because of the risk that Southern governments would identify global collaboration as outside ‘interference’ in national affairs. This justification has been noted by others writing about the


harassment of NGOs in Sri Lanka, China and Brazil because of their foreign funding (Hinchberger 1993:51; Hurrell 1992:422). We also heard in Malaysia and Indonesia that being too closely associated with Northern NGOs has often been used as an excuse to limit NGO participation in policy making. Even more serious, during the government crackdown on all civil society groups in Malaysia during 1987, was the imprisonment of environmentalists accused of being agents of foreign interests because of their association with global campaigns on the forests of Sarawak (Means 1991:194). Accepting resources from abroad can, then, reduce the influence of Southern NGOs because of the external reaction by those in power, and equally it can affect the internal dynamics of the NGO partnership. Where a Southern NGO is dependent on funding from Northern partners this can lead to an unwillingness to challenge the campaign emphasis coming from the North because this would put their funding at risk. At best this might make the global campaign inappropriate to the South and at worst it could make it counterproductive if the emphasis on land rights, for example, has to be sacrificed for a broader stance on global warming. In some ways this latter danger then makes local support-mobilisation even more difficult in the South because the global campaign is too distant from local problems. Additional information resources flowing from Northern NGOs are at one level very important to the work of partners in the South. Generally, better access to scientific knowledge through collaboration can raise the status and credibility of Southern NGOs when they have contact with policy makers whose own expertise may well be less than adequate. This seems to have been important in allowing some NGOs more access to domestic discussions in preparations for UNCED at Rio, when collaboration made them much more aware of global issues than many bureaucrats who were drafting papers for politicians. Just as interesting were comments that information from Northern partners about the position taken by their own governments at various global fora allowed NGOs in Asia to find out more than they could have done at home! Similarly, when campaigning against Northern MNCs, the work of NGOs in the South is made more effective where they can use examples of environmental damage inflicted by such companies elsewhere in the world. In a related way, information from Northern partners can compensate for the inability of NGOs in the South to know whom, for instance, in MDBs to target most effectively in their campaigns. Once again, though, our interviews highlighted problems in realising the potential of information flows. Every single NGO—North and South— mentioned the huge effort involved in trying to assimilate messages coming by post, fax or, if they possess the equipment, on electronic bulletin boards. When experience, cultures and languages are so spatially diverse, the opportunity cost of employing specialist staff to verify incoming information flows means, to poorly financed NGOs in the South, reducing the staff available to organise actual campaigns. As one very experienced global campaigner put it, ‘Northern NGOs appear very glib about the power and potential of IT and e-mail, when in fact its use is terrifyingly ad hoc’ (Colchester 1993).


Failing to understand just how difficult it is for Southern NGOs to access information coming in a different language was another reason why the Austrian labelling campaign failed to produce the coordinated response expected. The intricate details of the campaign were complex—‘far too technical for us to have time to absorb’, was the verdict of an NGO in the UK (Hadraku and Zelter 1994). More significantly, information about the campaign was transmitted to NGOs in Malaysia and Indonesia in a manner that appeared to leave no room for critical comment. The contact then appeared to be merely telling the South what was happening rather than empowering NGOs to be full members of the campaign. Improving the techniques and quantity of information that flows between NGOs is certainly a factor in translating collaboration into enhanced influence on policy making. But by itself the ability to transmit information will not have the desired result if reciprocal empowerment is not embedded (Lipschutz 1992:412). This helps to explain why collaboration is not universally related to increasing the influence of NGOs on environmental policy making. 3.5 NGO COLLABORATION TO OPEN UP GLOBAL POLITICAL SPACE Where information flows in the opposite direction, it is very clear that having access to the Northern media provides NGOs in Malaysia and Indonesia with an opportunity to circumvent domestic media restrictions. The global campaigns around the plight of forest peoples in Sarawak, for example, raised the issue of deforestation in a way which forced the local state to at least address local NGO campaigns (Ngidang 1993). A similar transmission of information allowed Northern NGOs to use their own media in targeting the First Boston Bank in the US as part of the campaign opposing Indorayon’s pulp factory in North Sumatra. Similarly, potential City of London investors in the flotation of shares by the Barito Pacific logging company were also targeted (Potter 1996). However, many NGOs in Asia did point out to us that there are uncertainties in such campaigns, principally because they have little control over how that information is used in the North. If the form of collaboration does not include alliance-style reciprocity, a more unilateral Northern campaign can have negative consequences for NGOs in the South. So, instead of sharing credit in a wellcoordinated campaign, Southern NGOs are forced to share blame bestowed by their governments for a poorly coordinated one. Prompted by global publicity about Sarawak, a direct action initiative by Earth First! in Malaysia during 1992 weakened the position of local NGOs working on tropical forestry who were ascribed guilt by association. Such uncoordinated Northern initiatives have been used by government as the pretext for criminalising the activities of Southern NGOs. Collaboration can improve the quality of information to Northern NGOs, but the unpredictability of its use can make the impact on the influence of NGOs in the South equally unpredictable.


In addition to better access to the global media, Southern NGOs can also use Northern partners to facilitate their participation in global political processes. I have referred earlier to examples of collaboration improving access to the World Bank for NGOs campaigning on Brazilian deforestation, and Indonesia offers similar examples. Where deforestation projects are financed through multilateral banks or consortia of Northern governments, the ability to collaborate with NGOs whose base is in the North seems to increase the influence of Southern NGOs beyond the normal constraints of their domestic political system. Similarly, the work of US NGOs around human rights conditionality on US trade and investment opens up a target of influence at the US Congress which again can be a substitute for the lack of political space inside Indonesia (Colchester 1987). Such possibilities are much more difficult for Malaysian NGOs because forestry projects are more often financed locally or are the product of closed bilateral deals with Japan. In addition the main global forum where Malaysian policies can be challenged is the International Timber Trade Organisation (ITTO) where it has been much more difficult to break the hegemony of tropical timber producing governments (Humphreys 1995). Nevertheless as a route to less constrained policy targets, collaboration means for Southern NGOs ‘activating allies with substantial political resources’ (Klandermans 1990:127). In so doing, NGOs in the South attempt to take advantage of the relatively more secure civil society status of their Northern NGO partners. Despite the potential advantages of global collaboration, past experience has meant that Southern NGOs have become circumspect about ‘going global’. Sometimes this reticence is connected to fear of losing control of campaigns to Northern partners who, for reasons related to their own image amongst their membership, may stress different aspects of the environmental issue. Arnt, writing about Brazil, accused US NGOs of taking control of campaigns to the exclusion of local NGOs in a wave of so-called ‘green imperialism’ (1992). I recorded similar feelings amongst small NGOs in Sarawak who also believe that, once the forest issue became global through collaboration, they were marginalised. This marginalisation then diminished their influence, not least because they were associated with campaigns that prioritised the plight of one group of hunter gatherers, the Penan, to the exclusion of the 37 other ethnic groups affected by logging. Similar divisions of emphasis between NGO partners emerge over whether forest campaigns should centre on preservation, conservation, land rights, equity or climate change, as the divisions between Northern and Southern NGOs at UNCED illustrated. Quite apart from feeling as though they were treated as secondclass participants at Rio, some Malaysian NGOs felt that Northern NGOs were more interested in positions which would improve their own fund-raising capacity than in the real problems facing people in the South. What seems at issue here is that collaboration may well open up political space for Southern NGOs in global fora, but this space may be conditional on them following an agenda set by Northern NGOs.


Having made such criticisms, however, there are NGOs who feel that their own tenuous existence has been preserved by being part of a global network. Rather than emphasising the importance of NGO collaboration for more influence on policy makers, people at SKEPHI in Indonesia seem to rely on the support of global friends to prevent even more harassment than they currently suffer. Similar impressions of the impact of global support networks in guarding what little domestic political space NGOs have exist also in Malaysia (Stesser 1991). But there are potential difficulties where highly visible NGOs in the South are singled out for ‘protection’ by Northern partners. First, this may also single them out to their own government’s security services for infiltration, telephone tapping and state surveillance because of their public connection with foreign NGOs. Secondly, the work of smaller less well-known NGOs can be ignored by NGOs in the North who almost assume without question that a famous NGO is in some sense a leader of the national network in that country. As a national force, then, it is arguable that Malaysian NGOs campaigning about forests in Sarawak have experienced diminishing influence because of internal divisions over the leadership of SAM whose global presence is so much more dominant. 3.6 REACTIONS TO NGO COLLABORATION FROM POLICY-MAKING NETWORKS In certain respects—and undoubtedly an unintended consequence—the very global visibility of the forest campaigns in Sarawak has served to diminish NGO influence in that state because the global campaigns galvanised opponents into a more effective defence of logging. International publicity exposed the Malaysian and Sarawak governments to ridicule and ‘with such a loss of face…[their]… reaction was to salvage pride through defiance’ (Rubeli 1989:52). Using the backdrop of environmental colonialism, policy-making insiders put together a counter-movement to the NGOs based on the sovereign right to resource-based economic growth. Having much more power and many more resources, the Federal government was able to resolve its differences with the local Sarawak elite and establish a timber industry organisation to counter NGO campaigns both inside Malaysia and, more especially, in the global arena (Porter and Brown 1991: 102; Banuri 1993:56; Paper 5 in this volume). In the process they skilfully exposed the Achilles’ heel of NGOs, the fact that they are neither representative nor electorally mandated, which in turn undermined the participation of NGOs even in informal policy making. In regional terms this more concerted reaction to NGO campaigning actually led in 1990 to an ad hoc coalition between ASEAN governments designed to undermine Northern campaigns to restrict trade in tropical timber (Lee 1990: 45–6). Thinking specifically about Sarawak, policy makers were able to use their more substantial political resources to diminish substantially the influence of local NGOs. It is true that global collaboration between NGOs exposed the consequences of


Sarawak forest policies to a much wider public audience, but the way such collaboration was managed by Northern NGOs paid too little attention to the power and integration of local political elites. In many ways this reflects an all too hasty assumption that the power of the nation-state has been reduced by the appearance of global institutions, a global polity or global civil society. The experience of NGOs in both Malaysia and Indonesia shows just how misplaced this assumption is, and how much more sensitive Northern NGO partners must be to political constraints in the South (Eccleston and Potter 1996). Partly as a result of negative reactions to previous collaborative campaigns, there are signs of Northern NGOs becoming more reflective about the way their campaigns affect partners in the South. Certainly there is some appreciation of the very personal risks taken by people who continue to work on environmental campaigns in places like Malaysia or Indonesia. Signs that this may be affecting the process of collaboration were evident for instance in the Kuala Lumpur meeting of WWF National Organisations in 1993 that attempted to establish ground rules which could signal more of an alliance than a network. In one sense then adverse experience with previous forms of collaboration may, as Klandermans suggests, solidify NGO networks in the longer term (1990:128). On the other side of the divide there are also indications that policy-making networks in Malaysia, and to a limited extent in Indonesia, may not be as united as they appear. Many NGOs operating in these countries are aware of, and use, divisions between bureaucrats by forging closer relations with officials especially in environment agencies. Exogenous factors have assisted this process as the environmental degradation of everyday life in Kuala Lumpur or Jakarta undermines confidence in econocentric development strategies. UNCED at Rio also helped to bring NGOs and government closer together as we can gather from the postRio conference in Malaysia where Dr Mahathir told the NGOs ‘you are no longer our enemies’. Thereafter new bargaining institutions emerged that provided more political space for NGOs to participate in policy formulation or simply, in the case of Indonesia, on occasion to supply expertise on environmental issues. NGOs in these countries are also adept at exploiting public differences that arise between, say, federal government and local states in Malaysia, or the military and civilian politicians in Indonesia. Some of these positive signs are related to the position local NGOs hold in global collaboration systems which carry with them additional resources of expertise. But I stress that Northern NGOs have to be aware of the national context within which Southern partners operate before they choose to campaign on Southern issues. New bargaining institutions have emerged in the South since Rio, but the participation of local NGOs is often made contingent on them distancing themselves from Northern NGOs whose priorities are represented by Southern governments as serving only Northern needs. Even where new institutions of participation do emerge, the benefits to NGOs of getting closer to policy makers may have costs in terms of being incorporated into government agendas. In addition there is the related question of relative power within national bureaucracies as


between environmental and other agencies whose priority lies with the economy. For example, 1993 saw a revival of the Bakun Dam project in Sarawak which involves clearing 695 square kilometres of forest to make way for the biggest reservoir in South-East Asia. Despite support from environmental bureaucrats, NGOs have been excluded from the policy network that is driving this project and have had enormous difficulty even in pressing for the public release of the project’s environmental impact assessment. To make campaigns even more difficult, the Bakun project is being privately financed from Malaysian sources which neutralises NGO leverage on public sector targets or on overseas donors (Eccleston 1995). 3.7 CONCLUSION: CHOICES ABOUT FUTURE NGO COLLABORATION The wealth of evidence produced by our research shows very clearly how uncertain are the outcomes of international collaboration between NGOs. Even though it is difficult to imagine NGOs wishing to campaign entirely in isolation from one another, their previous collaborative experience makes them acutely aware of the need to choose carefully between different forms of collaboration. Such choices involve assessing the possibility of securing additional political opportunities at the cost of committing already scarce resources. It may well be that international contacts can add material support for their campaigns, but the effort involved in managing the structures of collaboration inevitably diverts staff time from their local activities. Equally important is the uncertainty over how existing policymaking networks will react to more overt contacts with overseas NGOs. Part of the unpredictability associated with collaboration is related to the unrealistic representation of the environmental movement, and its constituent NGOs, as a homogeneous collective bound together by a common bond of humanity. Our own research has signalled differences between NGOs along a North-South dimension, others have identified differences within the North (Diani 1990), while our own research has yielded evidence of tensions and jealousies within the South. As a group, NGOs are therefore no different from other political interests which are divided in terms of basic missions, strategies and tactics, all of which makes the management of their collaborative ventures so time-consuming. Joint campaigning involves elements of competition over who leads, whose name or logo takes priority, whose membership sees most visibility from their own organisation, all of which has an impact on the subsequent recruitment of new members or the retention of existing ones. ‘Turf wars’ between NGOs are being more publicly acknowledged (Colchester 1993), and past experience is a crucial variable not just for the choice of NGO partners but also for the ground rules for the particular form of collaboration. The ability to have more control over international connections means that Southern NGOs are now prioritising alliances with other NGOs who have explicitly agreed missions confirmed by the experience of working with specific individuals. These priorities, though, while making


internal management more predictable, do limit the scope of potential partners and may mean collaborating with NGOs who do not have as much leverage in the North. The dilemma here lies in balancing the need for better internal control against a potentially weaker global impact. Ultimately the objective of NGOs is to open up more opportunities to influence policy makers, and some consider international connections to be vital given their weak position in their own domestic political context. SAM in Malaysia feels that despite the damage that global collaboration has done in the past, the risk may be worth taking (Chee 1993). In contrast, MNS has informal rules that, if an international dimension is used at all, it should be confidential and involve only individuals with personal conservation experience of Malaysia (Rubeli 1989:40; Salleh 1993). Both cases begin with a recognition of the relatively weak position of NGOs in their domestic context but they differ in their evaluation of how dominant policy-making interests will react to the involvement of foreign NGOs. Similarly, in Indonesia SKEPHI seems determined to maintain some international links with specific partners whereas WALHI is more pragmatic. SKEPHI apparently feels that international collaboration is one reason why the government does not close them down. WALHI on the other hand is more concerned that internationalising a campaign might solidify the policy-making network and constrain their opportunities to exploit differences within that network. Choices in these examples are based on differing perceptions of the current range of political opportunities and evaluations of what might happen in the future if international collaboration is invoked. Opportunities may be widened if external donors in the North can be more effectively involved to encourage changes in forest policies. But opportunities may be restricted if, as in the case of Malaysia, the role of external donors is much less significant and a forceful national elite reacts negatively to what they represent as outside interference. This is not to say that elites in Indonesia, for example, do not react in a similarly negative fashion, but rather that the possibility of leverage through external donors may make an NGO more likely to risk a more explicit international campaign. One conclusion suggested by the comparison between Malaysia and Indonesia is that the possibility of external leverage through Northern donors would encourage NGOs in the South to persevere with international partnerships despite the domestic political uncertainties. On the whole, the absence of external leverage opportunities in campaigns to preserve Sarawak’s forests in particular would help to explain why Malaysian NGOs appear more circumspect about the political opportunities offered by international collaboration. Even with more international campaigning, the experience of Indonesia, like Brazil (Hurrell 1992), raises the question of whether external leverage by donors can actually deliver enough emphasis to the concerns of local forest peoples. In choosing whether to continue with collaborative ventures, Southern NGOs are more mindful of the reactions of elite political networks in their own nation state than vague promises about the value of support from a global civil society or, what Wapner calls, the new era of world civic politics (1995).


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this paper was funded mainly by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its Global Environmental Change Initiative, and partly by the Open University. I am grateful to both institutions for their support. This paper is based partly on a series of interviews conducted between 1993 and 1995 with NGOs and academic researchers in Asia and the UK. I am grateful for the cooperation of the following Malaysian NGOs: EPSM, MNS and WWF Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur; SAM in Penang. Frank Yong, a researcher at ISIS Kuala Lumpur, also gave me the benefit of his experience as an observer of the NGO scene. Unfortunately no government officials responded to my interview requests. The only reply I ever received was from Professor Bruenig at the Forest Department Sarawak who said that in view of ‘the recent limelight, people here feel that visits and interviews are becoming too much of a burden’ (Fax communication 21 June 1994). Therefore, for official views, I have had to rely on secondary sources. The responses of NGOs in Indonesia are based on my reactions to the interview notes provided by David Potter from his meetings with campaigners at SKEPHI, WALHI, WIM, Konphalindo and LBH. In Japan, a number of NGOs campaign on South-East Asian forests at a distance and my thanks are due to FoE Japan, WWF Japan, JACSES, JATAN and the SCC. UK interviews given to me and my colleague Annie Taylor by the following people were invaluable: Marcus Colchester at WRM, Simon Counsell FoE UK, Francis Sullivan WWF UK, James Lochhead EICMAS and Tigger Hadraku and Angie Zelter, Coordinators of the UK Forests Network. None of these people or their organisations are in any way responsible for the way I have interpreted their notes, ideas and suggestions. REFERENCES Anderson, P. (1993) Greenpeace International, fax communication 8 Dec. Arnt, R.A. (1992) ‘The Inside Out, The Outside In: Pros and Cons of Foreign Influence on Brazilian Environmentalism’ in H.O.Bergesen, M.Nordergaug and G.Parmann (eds.) Green Globe Yearbook 1992, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Banuri, T. (1993) ‘Landscapes of Diplomatic Conflicts’ in Wolfgang Sachs (ed.) Global Ecology London, Zed Books. Blacker, L. (1994) ‘Climate Action Network: A Practical Experience of South-North Cooperation after Rio’ (unpublished) paper, New Actors in the Global Dialogue Conference, CDR Copenhagen, October. Bramble, B.J. and Porter, G. (1992) ‘NGOs and the making of US International Environmental Policy’ in A.Hurrell and B.Kingsbury (eds.) The International Politics of the Environment, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Breymen, S. (1993) ‘Knowledge as Power’ in R.Lipschutz and K.Conca (eds.) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press.


Brown, L.D. (1991) ‘Bridging Organisations and Sustainable Development’, Human Relations, Vol. 44, No. 8, pp. 807–31. Brown, L.D. (1993) ‘Social Change through Collective Reflection with Asian Nongovernmental Development Organisations’, Human Relations, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 249–73. Caldwell, L.K. (1988) ‘Beyond Environmental Diplomacy’ in J.E.Carroll (ed.) International Environmental Diplomacy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Chase, B.F. (1993) ‘Tropical Forests and Trade Policy’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 749–74. Chee, Yoke Ling (1993) SAM, author’s interview, 28 Oct. Colchester, M. (1987) ‘The Indonesian Transmigration Programme: An Update’, The Ecologist, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 35–43. Colchester, M. (1993) WRM; author’s interview, 6 July. Counsell, S. (1994) FOE, London; interview with Annie Taylor, 24 March. Diani, M. (1990) ‘The Network Structure of the Italian Ecology Movement’, Social Science Information, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 5–31. Diani, M. (1992) ‘The Concept of Social Movement’, The Sociological Review, Vol. 40, pp. 1–25. Deudney, D. (1993), ‘Global Environmental Rescue and the Emergence of World Domestic Politics’ in R.Lipschutz and K.Conca (eds.) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press. Eccleston, B. (1995) ‘Lessons from environmental NGO campaigns around the Bakun Dam development project in Sarawak’ (unpublished) EUROSEAS Conference, Leiden, June. Eccleston, B. and Potter, D. (1996) ‘Environmental NGOs and Different Political Contexts in South-East Asia: Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam’ in M.Parnwell and R.Bryant (eds.) Environmental Change in South-East Asia, London, Routledge. Haas, P.M., Keohane, R.O. and Levy, M.A. (1993) Institutions For The Earth, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. Hadraku, T. and Zelter, A. (1994) Reforest the Earth, interview with Annie Taylor, 8 June. Haufler, V. (1993) ‘Coming between Public and Private: International Regimes and Nonstate Actors’ in V.Rittberger (ed.) Regime Theory and International Relations, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hawkins, A. (1993) ‘Contested Ground: International Environmentalism and Global Climate Change’ in R.Lipschutz and K.Conca (eds.) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press. Hinchberger, B. (1993) ‘NGOs: The Third Force in the Third World’ in H.O.Bergesen and G. Parmann (eds.) Green Globe Yearbook 1993, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hinckley, B. (1981) Coalitions and Politics, New York, Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich. Humphreys, D. (1993) ‘The Forests Debate of the UNCED Process’, Paradigms, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 43–54. Humphreys, D. (1995) ‘Ideological Hegemony and the ITTO’ in J.Vogler and M.Imber (eds.) Environment and International Relations, London, Routledge. Hurrell, A. (1992) ‘Brazil and the International Politics of Amazonian Deforestation’ in A. Hurrell and B.Kingsbury (eds.) The International Politics of the Environment, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hurrell, A. and Kingsbury, B. (1992) ‘Editors’ Introduction’, The International Politics of the Environment, Oxford, Oxford University Press.


Kamieniecki, S. (1991) ‘Political Mobilisation, Agenda Building and International Environmental Policy’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 44, No. 2. pp. 339–58. Klandermans, P.B. (1990) ‘Linking the “Old” and “New” Movement Networks in the Netherlands’ in R.J.Dalton and M.Kuechler (eds.) Challenging the Political Order, Cambridge, Polity Press. Klinger, J. (1994) ‘Debt-for-Nature Swaps and the Limits to International Cooperation on Behalf of the Environment’, Environmental Politics, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 229–46. Knoke, D. (1990) Political Networks, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lafferriere, E. (1994) ‘Environmentalism and the Global Divide’, Environmental Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 91–113. Lee, W.C. (1990) ‘Loggers Unite to Fight Greens’, Far East Economic Review, 19 Jan., pp. 45–6. Lipschutz, R.D. (1992) ‘Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society’, Millennium, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 389–420. Litfin, K. (1993) ‘Ecoregimes: Playing Tug of War with the Nation-State’ in R.Lipschutz and K. Conca (eds.) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press. Maezawa, E. (1993) WWF Japan, author’s interview, 30 Nov. Means, G.P. (1991) Malaysian Politics: The Second Generation, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Ngidang, D. (1993) ‘Media Treatment of a Land Rights Movement in Sarawak’, Media Asia, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 93–101. Paarlberg, L. (1993) ‘Managing Pesticide Use in Developing Countries’ in P.M.Haas, R.O.Keohane and M.A.Levy (eds.) Institutions For The Earth, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. Peterson, M.J. (1992) ‘Trans-national Activity, International Society and World Politics’, Millennium, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 371–88. Porter, G. and Brown, J.W. (1991) Global Environmental Politics, Boulder, Westview Press. Potter, D. (1996) ‘NGOs and Environmental Policies’ in A.Blowers and P.Glasbergen (eds.) Environmental Policy in an International Context: Constraints and Opportunities, London, Edward Arnold. Princen, T. and Finger, M. (1994) Environmental NGOs in World Politics, London, Routledge. Rubeli, K. (1989) ‘Pride and Protest in Malaysia’, New Scientist, 26 Oct. Salleh, M. (1993) MNS, author’s interview, 18 Oct. Seda, M. (1992) Environmental Management in ASEAN, Singapore, ISEAS. Shaw, M. (1992) ‘Global Society and Global Responsibility’, Millennium, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 421–34. Starke, L. (1990) Signs of Hope: Working Towards Our Common Future, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Stesser, S. (1991) ‘A Reporter at Large: Logging in the Rainforest’ New Yorker, 27 May, pp. 42–68. van Dijk, M.P. (1992) ‘Cooperation between North-South NGOs’ (unpublished), PanEurope Development Studies Conference, Heidelberg. Wapner, P. (1995) ‘Politics beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics’, World Politics, Vol. 47, pp. 311–40. Zain, S. (1993) WWF Malaysia, author’s interview, 26 Oct.

4 Regime Theory and Non-Governmental Organisations: The Case of Forest Conservation DAVID HUMPHREYS

In order fully to comprehend the roles of NGOs an understanding of the international political context in which they operate is necessary. It is an appreciation of this context with respect to forest conservation that this paper aims to provide. The paper also provides a critique of regime theory. Contemporary regime theory has principally a statecentric focus and the role of NGOs has, for the most part, been neglected. This, it will be argued, is an omission that requires rectification for three reasons. Firstly, even if it is accepted that states should remain the principal focus for regime theorists, attention should be paid to how NGO advocacy work may encourage states to undergo normatively based behavioural shifts thus inducing them to help create or join a regime or, alternatively, to block the creation of or refrain from joining a regime. Secondly, it will be argued that in the ‘environmental age’ states cannot act in isolation from national and international civil society if they are to ensure the maintenance of environmental quality; the cooperation and participation of NGOs is also essential. Thirdly, it will be argued that the regime theorist should also consider regimes that are purely nongovernmental in nature. The paper first provides a brief summary of contemporary regime theory literature. Attention is then paid to some of the functions that NGOs have performed in international forest politics. Finally it is argued that regime theory should broaden its range of enquiry to include NGOs and other non-governmental actors. 4.1 REGIME THEORY Ruggie was the first international relations scholar to use the term ‘international regime’. In 1975 he defined a regime as ‘a set of mutual expectations, rules and regulations, plans, organisational energies and financial commitments, which have been accepted by a group of states’ (1975:570). However, the most frequently cited

David Humphreys is Research Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences, the Open University.

86 REGIME THEORY AND NGOS

regime definition is that regimes are ‘sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner 1983:2). This is a consensus definition agreed upon by the contributors to a special edition of International Organization edited by Stephen Krasner in 1982. Despite definitional consensus, there is no single coherent regime theory, and the available literature on the subject is best seen as a set of analyses that seeks to explain how and why norm-governed international cooperation emerges. For the purposes of this paper, these analyses can be divided into three headings: power-based theories; interest-based theories; and cognitive theories. Insufficient space exists here for other than a very rudimentary coverage of the literature. Power-based explanations focus on the economic capabilities of state actors and see regimes reflecting existing power structures in the international system. The classic such formulation is Keohane’s notion of hegemony, defined as a preponderance of resources, namely ‘raw materials, control over sources of capital, control over markets and competitive advantages in the production of highly valued goods’ (1984:32). Keohane argues that a hegemonic power may act as a political entrepreneur and supply a regime if it estimates that the anticipated gains will exceed the costs of supplying the regime (1983:155). Webb and Krasner (1989) have found that empirical data is not consistent with the hegemonic stability thesis, and it is now widely accepted that the entrepreneurial role of supplying a regime need not necessarily be filled by a hegemon. Snidal (1985) has argued that collective leadership by smaller states may also fill an entrepreneurial role, a point that Keohane later acknowledged (1993:34). Litfin (1993:99) has argued that there is no hegemonic power for environmental issues, although many analysts would argue that the US remains a hegemon for global security and global economic issues. Peter Haas has introduced the notion of issue-specific hegemony whereby a state may exercise power on one issue, although not necessarily on others (Haas 1993a:165). However, there is no evidence of an issue-specific hegemon for the issue of forest conservation. While there are some very important forested countries, such as Brazil and Zaire, both of which would undoubtedly be important members of a global forests conservation regime, neither of these countries has the power to supply a global regime to the international community. However, although there is no overall hegemon or issuespecific hegemon, power-based factors are a central part of any proper understanding of global forest politics. The countries of the South possess an important economic capability, namely tropical forests, from which they produce, either directly (for example, tropical timber) or indirectly (for example, carbon sinks), goods demanded by international society. The possession of such capabilities effectively empowers the governments of important tropical forest countries to block the creation of a global forests conservation regime by joining a veto coalition. A veto coalition is a group of states whose cooperation is necessary for agreement on a particular issue, and which has the power to block regime creation if it so chooses (Porter and Brown 1991:70). Meanwhile the North has control


over international markets and a comparative advantage in international trade and consequently the North has the economic power to agree to or, alternatively, to veto the demands that the South has linked to the forests issue, such as financial and technology transfers. Interest-based theories focus on the institutional bargaining stage of regime creation, and in particular on the relative costs and gains that may accrue to state actors. Actors will have an incentive to cooperate if they predict that regime participation will result in mutual gains for all concerned. Osherenko and Young distinguish between two types of bargaining in regime creation, namely integrative and distributive bargaining, although bargaining is ‘seldom wholly integrative or distributive, but rather constitutes a hybrid involving both types’ (Young 1989a: 238). With distributive bargaining, issues are defined in jurisdictional terms, that is actors seek to demarcate geographical or functional boundaries within which authority may be exercised (Young 1989a:176–7). Distributive bargaining occurs where an actor concentrates on devising tactics to procure the best possible outcome for itself, whereas integrative bargaining seeks to develop ‘new opportunities for mutually beneficial relationships’ (Young 1989a:178) and where ‘a search for mutually beneficial solutions assumes a prominent place in the [bargaining] process’ (Osherenko and Young 1993:13). However, and as Osherenko and Young note (1989:264), bargaining is a mixed-motive activity, and even when actors engage in a search for mutually beneficial provisions, they may still seek to maximise relative gains. Cognitive theories of regime creation focus on the role of consensual knowledge in determining actors’ perceptions and belief structures. To Ernst Haas, a ‘claim to knowledge becomes consensual whenever it succeeds in dominating the policymaking process’ (1980:370). Peter Haas has drawn attention to the role in regime creation of epistemic communities defined as ‘Transnational networks of knowledge-based communities that are politically empowered through their claims to exercise authoritative knowledge and motivated by shared causal and principled beliefs’ (1990: 349). Haas emphasises that epistemic communities are a new form of international cooperation. They are not composed of individuals from a single organisation, or even a single type of organisation. An epistemic community can be seen as an invisible transnational knowledge-based college, the membership of which is drawn from, and cuts across, a large variety of organisations and institutions world wide. Epistemic communities contributed to the formation of regimes for the protection of the Mediterranean sea (Haas 1989) and of the ozone layer (Haas 1990). What is the application of the regime concept with respect to forest conservation? An international regime may be said to have come into existence when a group of actors adheres to a commonly accepted norm which subsequently shapes and defines actor behaviour with respect to the issue or issues in question. Here it is necessary to note that regimes may be issue-specific or they may be issuedense. For example, the newly created World Trade Organisation (WTO) should be seen as an issue-dense regime dealing with a multitude of trade and trade-related


issues, although this does not preclude the negotiation of issue-specific regimes nested within the framework of the WTO. Adopting the distinction between issuespecific and issue-dense regimes, it is possible to distinguish between two possible applications of the regime concept with respect to forest conservation. Firstly, the term may be applied to a global forests conservation regime where actors adhere to norm-governed behaviour with respect to all the issues necessary to ensure that, world wide, there is no net loss of forest cover. The second possible application of the regime concept to forest conservation is more issue-specific; regime theory may be applied to norm-governed forms of governance that address some, but not all, of the issues that may be expected to be encompassed within a global forests conservation regime. In the next sections consideration is given to NGO influence in four international processes. The first is the Tropical Forestry Action Programme (TFAP). Donnelly would see the TFAP as a weak declaratory regime for tropical forest conservation as it has issued international guidelines (Food and Agriculture Organisation 1991), but the interpretation of the guidelines takes place at the national level of tropical forest countries (Donnelly 1986: 603). Secondly, we consider the International Tropical Timber Organisation which may also be seen as a weak declaratory regime as, like the TFAP, it has issued international guidelines (International Tropical Timber Organisation 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993), but once again interpretation of the guidelines takes place at the national level. The ITTO also seeks to ensure that the trade in internationally traded tropical timber will come from sustainable sources by the year 2000. Thirdly, we consider the forest negotiations that took place prior to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). These negotiations may be seen as a failed attempt to conclude a global forests convention. Here it is necessary to emphasise that a convention should not be equated with a regime (Keohane 1993: 28), although the former may provide a framework within which the latter may emerge. At present there is neither a global forests convention nor a global forests conservation regime, although the TFAP and the ITTO may be seen as regimes that address some of the issues that a global forests conservation regime may be expected to address. Finally we consider the negotiation of the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1994. These negotiations saw government delegations from the developing South seek unsuccessfully to broaden the scope of the ITTO so as to deal with non-tropical timbers. 4.2 NGOS AND THE TROPICAL FORESTRY ACTION PROGRAMME There are two roots to the Tropical Forestry Action Programme (known as the Tropical Forestry Action Plan until 1990). The first originates within the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In October 1985 the FAO published the Tropical Forestry Action Plan (Food and Agriculture Organisation 1985) which


elaborated five action programmes designed to halt deforestation in the tropics.1 In the same month the World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington-based NGO, published the report of a taskforce convened the previous year. Entitled Tropical Forests: A Call for Action (World Resources Institute et al. 1985), the report had adopted the FAO’s five action programmes as its guiding framework. There was thus a conceptual linkage between what were then two separate, but complementary, initiatives. The two processes formally came together at a meeting in Bellagio, Italy, in 1987 when the TFAP was relaunched with four co-founders, namely the FAO, WRI, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The fact that an influential and respected international NGO played a prominent role in formulating the TFAP subsequently affected the direction the initiative took with respect to the participation of other NGOs, especially those at the national and local levels. The WRI views forestry management as a process that should be driven by local peoples rather than by international agencies, and it has persistently promoted the participation of local NGOs in national forestry programmes (Hazelwood 1987, Lynch 1990, Cort 1991). At WRI’s insistence the Bellagio meeting emphasised the importance of NGOs to the TFAP process, and an updated version of Tropical Forestry Action Plan published in 1987 stressed that Local communities must be involved in managing and utilising the forests, and be convinced that this is in their interests. In this respect NGOs, working at the grass roots level, have an important role to play (Food and Agriculture Organisation et al. 1987:3) Some prominent international NGOs and NGO networks had been invited to the Bellagio meeting, and a joint NGO statement made at the meeting noted that ‘NGOs are prepared, and express their strong desire, to participate fully in the Tropical Forestry Action Plan. We demand equal responsibility and participation in all stages of implementation’ (NGO Statement at Bellagio Strategy Meeting 1987). The WRI has lobbied hard since for increased local NGO participation in National Forestry Action Programmes (NFAPs) drawn up under the auspices of the TFAP. To name just one example, in 1990 the WRI criticised the Indonesian NFAP on two counts: firstly the NFAP was oriented towards the timber industry; and secondly Indonesian NGOs were excluded from the NFAP planning process. Noting these problems the WRI launched a strategy to improve Indonesian NGO coordination and to ‘strengthen the NGO position through a combined and systematic research effort utilising the strengths of both grassroots and international NGOs’ (World Resources Institute 1990). In 1990 the TFAP as an international initiative experienced severe difficulties. For example, the WRI and the World Rainforest Movement noted that the TFAP had been unsuccessful in slowing deforestation rates as it had failed to tackle the causes of deforestation which invariably lie outside the forest. They further noted that the views of local communities and indigenous peoples had not been


successfully integrated into the NFAP planning and implementation process (Colchester and Lohmann 1990; Winterbottom 1990). This led to an ebbing of donor support, including the suspending of funding for TFAP activities by two prominent international NGOs. In October 1990 the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) announced that it would not fund future TFAP activities until such time as the TFAP was reformed to yield a greater emphasis on conservation and local NGO participation (World Wide Fund for Nature 1990a). The second NGO to suspend funding was the WRI which in April 1991 announced that it would cease making further financial contributions to the TFAP. The WRI also called for the establishment of an independent consultative group to include representation from all parties concerned with the future of tropical forests, including local communities’ and indigenous peoples’ NGOs (Winterbottom 1990: 27, World Resources Institute 1991). The possibility of establishing an independent consultative group was investigated at length by the FAO. At the time of writing (July 1995) the group has yet to meet, indeed it is far from clear that it will do so. However, in the event that it does, delegates to FAO have decided that it will not be an independent polity, as called for by the WRI, but will instead be an intergovernmental forum established within the FAO bureaucracy. The reason for this is that many tropical forest countries, in particular Indonesia and Malaysia, expressed concern that the sovereignty of states over their natural resources would be compromised if an independent consultative group were to grant voting rights to NGOs (Food and Agriculture Organisation 1992:17). The history of TFAP illustrates that NGOs and other non-state actors—in this case the FAO, WRI, World Bank and UNDP—may assume an entrepreneurial role in supplying a regime. NGOs may also assume an agenda formation role; although the initiative was not adopted in its original form, the idea of an independent consultative group was first placed on the TFAP agenda by the WRI. Overall, NGO participation has been recognised as important and necessary by the FAO, government donors and some tropical-forest governments. The role of NGOs was one of the themes of the Tenth World Forestry Congress which was co-sponsored by the FAO and the Government of France in 1991. The Assistant Director General of FAO’s Forestry Department noted at the Congress that ‘NGOs have demonstrated the contribution they can make to…forestry development, particularly in relation to TFAP’ (Murray 1991:223). Ralph Roberts, then the Chairman of the Forestry Advisers Group, a semi-formal assemblage of forestry experts which has established close relations with the TFAP, stated that the participation of NGOs is ‘essential’ to the TFAP process (Roberts 1991: 326). These remarks found favour with Jeffrey Sayer, then of the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, now known as the World Conservation Union), who observed that NGOs’ impact extends from championing the cause of special or local interests to being major vehicles for the delivery of development assistance and


influential participants in the formation of forest policy at the national and international level. Their importance has been exemplified…by the role they have played both in developing the Tropical Forestry Action Plan and in exposing some of its weaknesses. (Sayer 1991:315) 4.3 NGOS AND THE INTERNATIONAL TROPICAL TIMBER ORGANISATION NGOs have also proved significant in the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) which was created following the negotiations, hosted by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), of the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1983 in Geneva. An IUCN intervention in the negotiations had an important effect on the content of the agreement. The IUCN emphasised the importance of conservation and stressed that an international tropical timber agreement could play a role ‘in alleviating the depletion of natural tropical forest resources’ (United Nations 1982:8). Following the IUCN intervention, delegates agreed that the International Tropical Timber Organisation ‘should give due regard to ecological and other considerations for the effective conservation and development of tropical timber resources’ (United Nations 1982:8). Subsequently the International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1983 contained a clause to the effect that it aimed to encourage ‘sustainable utilisation and conservation of tropical forests and their genetic resources’ (United Nations 1983:8), making it the first UNCTAD-sponsored commodity agreement to contain a conservation clause. Eight years later the IUCN again exercised influence on the ITTO when it was hired as a consultant to prepare the first draft of the ITTO’s Guidelines for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Tropical Production Forests (ITTO 1991:3–4). Representatives from NGOs and timber trading companies are granted observer status at sessions of the International Tropical Timber Council, the ITTO’s highest decision-making organ. In addition, they may also be granted a place on individual national delegations. For example, the WWF has served on the national delegations of the UK, Malaysia and Denmark, while a representative from IUCN-NL has served on the delegation from the Netherlands. NGOs have sought, with varying degrees of success, to influence the ITTO’s agenda. The idea of a labelling system to promote the international trade of sustainably produced timber was first placed on the ITTO’s agenda in 1989 by the British delegation following a proposal by Friends of the Earth (ITTO 1989). This proposal was blocked following objections by Malaysia and Indonesia (Colchester 1990:169). As will be seen below, the failure of the ITTO to take action on the labelling issue has led some NGOs to promote their own scheme outside the ITTO.


4.4 NGOS AND THE UNCED FOREST NEGOTIATIONS Certain governments from the North, in particular the group of seven developed countries (G 7), had advocated that a global forests convention (GFC) should be opened for signature at Rio in June 1992 to complement the conventions on climate change and biodiversity. The FAO also supported the negotiation of a GFC. Such demands were strenuously resisted by the group of 77 developing countries (G 77) which feared that a GFC could serve as a mechanism for Northern control over the South’s tropical forests. At PrepCom 2, the second preparatory committee meeting of the UNCED process (18 March-5 April 1991), delegates agreed that there would be no legally binding GFC, although a non-legally binding statement of forest principles should be completed by the end of the UNCED. This agreement represented the lowest common denominator between those who wanted a convention (the North) and those who did not (the South). While the statement of forest principles agreed upon in Rio is ambiguously worded in places, it is significant in that it represents the first global consensus between governments of North and South on the forests issue, Realising the salience of the issue to Northern governments, the G 77 pressed throughout the UNCED forests debate for financial and technology transfers from the North to assist them in forest conservation. The forests issue was one where North and South established little common ground with the result that the political space within which NGOs could operate, especially towards the end of the negotiations, was severely restricted (Humphreys: 1993). Nonetheless NGOs forwarded their views vigorously throughout the debate, and below it will be argued that they did achieve a modest level of influence. The scale and scope of NGO activity during the UNCED process was unprecedented. Although UN General Assembly Resolution 44/228 provided only for the participation in the UNCED of relevant NGOs in consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), UNCED PrepCom Decision 1/1 (United Nations 1991a:22–3) allowed for any NGO to receive accreditation to the PrepComs following successful presentation of its credentials. Decision 1/1 was endorsed by the General Assembly at its 45th Session. At its 46th Session, the General Assembly agreed that all NGOs accredited by the end of PrepCom 4 should be invited to participate as observers at the Rio conference (United Nations 1991b). NGO activity on the forests issue, as with other issues, took the form of multiple formal, semi-formal and informal channels of communication. There is no single channel by which NGOs can influence either policy makers or each other, and the result is a dynamic and dense interconnecting network, with the national and international levels inextricably intertwined. Despite the density of NGO networking, to a large degree it is possible to disentangle NGO activity as NGOs exhibit a higher level of openness and transparency than the political and economic elites they seek to influence. However, assessing the impact of NGOs is inevitably


a more difficult task. Below, brief attention will be paid to NGO activity on the forests issue in the USA, in the UK, within WWF and in the newly emerging NGOs and NGO networks in the South. In the USA, a World Forest Agreement Working Group was established in September 1990. This group included NGO representatives and US Senators and Congressmen. The group worked on the assumption that, although its precise format was unknown, negotiation of a global instrument on forests, which would deal with both tropical and non-tropical forests, would take place. According to Gareth Porter of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute who established the group, its purpose ‘was not to try to reach consensus but to clarify positions and, in the process, stimulate NGO and Congressional staff positions on the issue’ (Porter 1992). This group met on several occasions between September 1990 and October 1991. At the same time another US NGO process, the Global Forest Working Group, initiated by Francis Spivy-Weber of the Audubon Society, was taking place. At that stage the Audubon Society was one of six members of a NGO network, Consortium for Action to Protect the Earth ’92 (CAPE ’92), with the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth-US, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club being the others. CAPE ’92 had made an intervention at PrepCom 1 (6–31 August 1990) demanding a guarantee of land rights for indigenous and other local peoples (Barratt-Brown 1991). The Audubon Society initiative drew heavily, but not exclusively, from individuals in the CAPE ’92 network. In October 1991 the World Forest Agreement Working Group, without Senators and Congressmen and now consisting solely of NGOs, joined forces with the Global Forest Working Group to become the US Task Force on Global Forests (Porter 1992). According to the categorisation of NGO coordination methods presented in Figure 3.1 in Paper 3 of this volume, the US Task Force on Global Forests, like the two groups from which it was created, should be considered a coalition: the Task Force was created to run a campaign, namely to influence the UNCED forests debate; NGOs within the Task Force engaged in a division of labour; and the limited life of the coalition was recognised. The Task Force sought to influence US Government policy in the UNCED forests debate, to lobby at the PrepComs and to network with other NGOs. Meanwhile in the UK, the secretariat of UNEP-UK, based at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, gathered NGO views on all aspects of the UNCED process and summarised them in a single report. It should be emphasised that the UNEP-UK report was not intended to be ‘a consensus document’ (Thomson 1992:1), either on forests or other issues, and the document did report different, occasionally conflicting, views. Much UNEP-UK NGO activity took the form of seminars, consultations and conferences convened and organised by a diverse range of NGOs and other organisations. According to the categorisation of NGO coordination methods in Paper 3, this model is clearly a


network, with UNEP-UK acting as the coordinating secretariat, and with regular and active exchange of information enhanced by regular personal contacts. Many NGOs based in the North favoured a GFC, provided that it contained certain features. The case of WWF is interesting. In the two years prior to Rio, WWF held several meetings of its Forests Working Group, composed of WWF Forest Conservation Officers working at the national level and chaired by the Senior Forest Conservation Officer of WWF International, to consider inter alia the subject of a GFC. Throughout the UNCED process, WWF advocated a GFC if it contained recognition of the interests of forest-dwelling peoples, a centralised monitoring system for forests world wide, and an international programme for tracing and authenticating sustainably produced timber (World Wide Fund for Nature 1991:3). Friends of the Earth also offered qualified support for a legally binding instrument which addressed inter alia social equity considerations, community access to benefits from forest conservation, the role of TNCs and the root causes of deforestation (Friends of the Earth 1991:4). Meanwhile, NGOs in the developing South were also active in the UNCED forests debate. Some Southern NGOs offered strong arguments against a GFC, most notably the Indian ecological NGO, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain of the CSE opposed both a GFC and the role of UN agencies in forest conservation, which they claimed would disempower local people and establish ‘a supercentralised system of global decision-making and governance’ (Agarwal and Narain 1991). The CSE pursued this line of argument up to and including Rio. Some disagreement therefore existed between NGOs from the developed North and the developing South on the forests debate and indeed on other issues during the UNCED process. For example, the African branch of the Southern Networks for Development (SONED) alleged that Northern NGOs had been ‘coopted’ by Northern governments and TNCs (White 1991:1). Most Southern NGOs disagreed with the support of some Northern NGOs for a GFC, while other Southern NGOs charged that Northern NGOs had a disproportionate influence on environmental policy making in Southern countries as a result of their ability to pressure international agencies such as the World Bank (Pearce 1992:40). Ian Rowlands considers that North-South tensions among governments were ‘paralleled’ in the NGO community, despite the latter’s ‘best efforts to present a united front’ (1992:217). Towards the end of the UNCED process the divisions between NGOs in the forests debate sharpened, with two separate initiatives appearing. The first initiative emerged at PrepCom 4 (2 March-3 April 1992). A group of 39 NGOs, chaired by Bill Mankin of the Sierra Club and a member of the US Task Force on Global Forests, circulated a rewording of the statement of forest principles according to four key concepts: effective forest protection and expansion; indigenous peoples to be accorded full control and legal authority over their traditional territories; participation by all relevant groups in decision making; and the adherence to basic ecological and sustainable management practices (NGO Statement at PrepCom 4


of UNCED: 1992). The 39 NGOs that signed the Mankin paper were split approximately half each between NGOs from North and South. It is apparent that although NGO disagreements on forests did emerge at Rio, and although a certain North-South dimension to this debate is discernible, it is not the case that disagreement was strictly polarised along North-South lines, as the Mankin initiative had succeeded in achieving a broad consensus between NGOs from North and South. The second initiative emerged at Rio where a group of 25 NGOs, led by Anil Agarwal of the CSE, circulated a statement opposing the future negotiation of a GFC (NGO Statement at UNCED: 1992). With just three exceptions, all of the 26 NGOs that pledged support for the Agarwal initiative were from the developing South.2 The Mankin and Agarwal initiatives, each of which Eccleston in Paper 3 would see as a coalition, had different objectives. The former aimed to insert clauses on environmental sustainability and guarantees for forestdwelling peoples into the statement of forest principles. However, the latter was solely concerned with the post-UNCED agenda, and attempted to use NGO influence to block any proviso for a post-Rio GFC. It is noticeable that with one exception (namely the Environment Liaison Center International, Kenya), NGOs that put their name to the Agarwal initiative did not support the Mankin initiative, and vice versa. Those NGOs pressing for a GFC to be opened for signature at Rio were unsuccessful in their efforts. Nonetheless, NGOs did achieve some successes in inserting points of principle into the UNCED statement of forest principles, and there are indications that the NGO community achieved their greatest successes early on in the forests debate. Here it is necessary to return to PrepCom 3 (12 August-4 September 1991). Following the agreement at PrepCom 2 that the UNCED process should produce a non-legally binding statement of forest principles, the G 77 introduced to PrepCom 3 a draft proposal for such a document. The G 77’s draft was subsequently used by the UNCED Secretariat, along with other documents and comments, to produce a draft for subsequent negotiations by all delegates. Many of the clauses in the first UNCED Secretariat draft were not contained in the G 77 draft proposal. It is noteworthy that these include clauses on the importance of forests for ecological, cultural and spiritual human needs, the participation of local communities and indigenous peoples and the importance of secure land tenure for sustainable forest management. All of these clauses survived the remaining negotiations and appear, sometimes in a modified guise, in the final statement of forest principles agreed at Rio (United Nations: 1992). Due to the frequently informal and invisible nature of the interactions between NGO representatives and government delegates, assessing the impact of NGO activity is not an easy task. Nonetheless, it is argued here that the inclusion of these clauses can be attributed to NGO pressure on Northern governments and on their UNCED delegates. Such an assertion should be justified and is made on the following grounds. Firstly, given that these clauses did not appear in the G 77 draft proposal, it is reasonable to assume that they were inserted into the first UNCED Secretariat draft by Northern delegates. Secondly, the clauses are not ones that


Northern delegates, acting purely in their perceived national interests, would be expected to insert. However, it is known that the issues contained in these clauses are sources of concern for NGOs. Furthermore, there is evidence that NGOs lobbied both Northern governments and the UNCED PrepComs on these concerns, with some NGOs making statements to the PrepComs on the issues of local community participation, land reform and indigenous people’s rights.3 Hence the conclusion here is that NGO pressure in the early PrepComs, either directly or indirectly via Northern governments, did affect the language of the final statement of forest principles. However, it is necessary to note that NGOs are not an undifferentiated group of actors as, firstly, very real differences of opinion frequently arise between them and, secondly, it is frequently the case that the larger Northern-based NGOs achieve more influence than the smaller local peoples’ groups from the South. The success that NGOs did achieve in the UNCED forests debate was largely the result of the lobbying of the larger established groups on issues that the majority of NGOs could easily agree upon, such as the participation of local communities and the need for security of land tenure. Many NGOs following the UNCED forests debate advanced their concerns on the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples throughout the negotiations.4 However, the NGO community was unable to achieve any significant successes in the forests debate after PrepCom 3. With the forests issue mired in North-South disagreements there was no political space for the introduction of innovative ideas from the NGO community. One of the figures involved with the Mankin draft circulated at PrepCom 4 concedes that the NGO community was unsuccessful at this stage in inserting any of its recommendations into the UNCED statement of forest principles (Juniper: 1992). Nor does it appear that the Agarwal initiative influenced Southern governments which had made clear their opposition to language in the statement of forest principles on a future GFC prior to the circulation of the Agarwal paper. This is not to say that the Agarwal initiative did not register with Southern government delegates at Rio, but it is to say that there is no evidence of a causal relationship between the initiative and the position taken by those delegates. This section has argued that some of the clauses in the final UNCED statement of forest principles are the result of NGO pressure. Both the timescale and the type of negotiations seem to be central determinants of NGO influence. With respect to timescale, the textual changes NGOs did succeed in winning were the result of their activities up to and including PrepCom 3. After PrepCom 3, NGO successes are progressively more difficult to detect. It appears that if NGOs are to exercise influence in a negotiating process such as the UNCED forests debate, this is most likely to be achieved at an early stage in the negotiating process. With respect to the type of negotiations, it appears that NGO influence becomes progressively more difficult where states are divided on their objectives. The opportunities for NGO influence are also reduced where definitions and priorities differ, both between government delegations and between government delegations and NGOs.


Possibly the greatest contribution of the UNCED process with respect to NGOs lies in the precedent it has set for the future. Not only will the links and networks developed during the UNCED process continue to play an important role in monitoring governmental and UN activity in the post-Rio era, but the NGO arrangements within the UNCED process are now being used as a precedent for post-Rio NGO activity in the UN system. This precedent takes two forms. The first involves the recognition that all NGOs that attended the UNCED may also apply to participate in subsequent environmental activity in the UN system. An interesting case concerns the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) created after the UNCED. As the CSD is a functional commission of the ECOSOC, all NGOs which already have Category I, II or Roster status with the latter automatically are accredited to the former. In addition, the ECOSOC has decided that any NGO accredited to the UNCED could apply for and expect to be granted Roster status for the work of the CSD. Other NGOs could also apply. Eventually a total of 552 NGOs applied for Roster status with the CSD, all of which were approved by the ECOSOC in 1993. In July 1994 the rights of participation for the UNCED NGOs were improved still further when the CSD’s Roster list was formally merged with the main ECOSOC list, thus increasing the number of ECOSOC NGOs by more than 50 per cent (Willetts 1996). Secondly, the arrangements for NGO participation in the UNCED process have been referred to, at the time of writing, in six post-Rio UN General Assembly resolutions establishing UN conferences.5 To date the precedent has been used only with respect to environmental, or environmental-related, UN conferences. It remains to be seen if the institutional arrangements for the UNCED will be used as a precedent for non-environmental UN conferences. 4.5 NGOS AND THE NEGOTIATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL TROPICAL TIMBER AGREEMENT, 1994 The negotiations for the International Tropical Timber Agreement 1994 (ITTA 1994) were significant in that most of the NGOs that lobbied the negotiations, including WWF, Friends of the Earth, TRAFFIC International and the Sierra Club, adopted a common policy line. This is not to suggest that NGOs attending the ITTO are to be seen as an homogenous group, nor that no disagreements existed between these NGOs. As Pearce has documented, disagreements have arisen both between and within NGOs inter alia over the question of whether sustainable management of tropical forests was possible (1991:187–8). However, at sessions of the ITTC NGO unity has been preserved, for the most part, with joint positions agreed upon behind the scenes, and statements made to the ITTC by a prearranged spokesperson acceptable to all NGOs. Furthermore, the policy position pursued by NGOs at the negotiations for the ITTA 1994 led to NGOs effectively forming a negotiating coalition with the producer caucus.


The negotiations were the first to take place on a forest-related issue since the UNCED. All NGOs that had at some stage registered for ITTC sessions were permitted to attend the negotiations for the successor agreement, as were all NGOs with consultative status at the UN’s ECOSOC. The negotiations began with a PrepCom that ran parallel to the ITTC’s 13th session in November 1992. Consensus on the text of the new agreement was reached in January 1994 after four substantive negotiating sessions hosted by the UNCTAD. During the negotiations the ITTO’s consumer caucus advocated that the successor agreement, like the ITTA 1983, should deal solely with tropical timber. However, the producer caucus argued that the scope of the new agreement should be expanded to include all timbers, with the producer/consumer distinction replaced by a developing/developed country distinction. Like the producers, most NGOs also advocated an expansion of scope to cover all timbers. However, disillusioned with the ITTO’s poor record on conservation, the NGOs favoured a contraction of the mandate of the new agreement to deal only with trade and trade-related issues. By the time the negotiations began, most NGOs did not view the ITTO as a feasible conservation mechanism and favoured instead other initiatives, such as the Forest Stewardship Council (see below). NGOs advocated that funding for ITTO timber processing and conservation projects should be scaled down in line with the new trade-related mandate. The producers, however, favoured a broader scope, with increased funding from the developed countries for projects in the developing countries. Despite this not insubstantial difference, the producers and the NGOs had sufficient common ground between them to establish what was in effect a coalition during the negotiations. Meanwhile, the consumers received support for their position from the timber traders. Eventually after four negotiating sessions, the producers conceded that the new agreement should deal solely with tropical timber. This concession was part of a compromise formula whereby the consumers agreed to establish a new ITTO account for projects in producer countries (Humphreys 1994). The producers also successfully inserted into the new agreement clauses on new and additional financial resources and the transfer of technology ‘including on concessional and preferential terms and conditions as mutually agreed’ (United Nations 1994:7). 4.6 THE ROLE OF NGOS IN REGIME CREATION Some scholars have recognised the role that NGOs may play in regime creation and change (Young 1989b:364, Willetts 1989). However, for the most part, and as Rosenau notes, ‘although the early work on regimes allowed for the participation of NGOs, subsequent inquiries slipped into treating regimes as if they consisted exclusively of states’ (1995:29). This section will argue that the role of NGOs can no longer be omitted from regime theory. Attention will turn first to power-based explanations of regime creation.


Power-based, or neo-Realist, explanations hold that a state’s influence in a given issue area is a function of the economic capabilities it possesses in this issue area. Two weaknesses to this view are presented here. Firstly, states are not the only actors that may possess capabilities in a given area of international economic activity; attention should also be paid to private companies and transnational corporations. Secondly, influence can be achieved by actors who do not possess economic capabilities pertinent to the given issue area. The case of the WWF is illustrative. In the UK the WWF has established a close working relationship with the Timber Trade Federation (TTF) and its member companies. The TTF has agreed to cooperate with the WWF with the intention of ensuring that timber imports to the UK will come from sustainable sources by the end of 1995. This policy shift provides an empirical challenge to the neo-Realist view; WWF has been able to influence an area of economic activity, namely the international timber trade, despite the fact that it possesses no direct stake in this area of activity. However, companies within the TTF that do have an economic stake in the timber trade have been prepared to modify their policies following WWF lobbying. In short, in the case of forest conservation, NGOs have been able to exercise influence derived solely from the strength of their moral position and from the normative force of their arguments. Influence has been achieved by the projection of normative and principled beliefs onto other actors. Such norm transmission may play an important role in regime creation. It was noted earlier that the entrepreneurial role for regime creation need not be filled solely by a hegemon, and that smaller states may also fill such a role. This paper has demonstrated that NGOs and other non-state actors may act as political entrepreneurs. It was noted above that one of the two roots to the TFAP was provided by a NGO, namely the WRI. A further example may be cited, namely that of the WWF in the foundation of the Forests Stewardship Council (FSC) which was created following NGO disillusionment with the poor conservation track record of the ITTO. The WWF, like many other NGOs, had been prepared to offer qualified support to the ITTO in the hope that it might play a positive role in forest conservation. In 1988, when it perceived that the ITTO was slow to act on forest conservation, the WWF signalled its disillusionment when stating that if ‘the ITTO fails to actively promote tropical forest conservation…the conservation organisations will have to seek other mechanisms to achieve this’ (World Wide Fund for Nature 1988:10). The WWF carried this threat into effect following the ITTO’s rejection of Friends of the Earth’s proposed labelling scheme in 1989. In November 1992 WWF withdrew all their forest conservation officers from national delegations in protest at the ITTO’s poor conservation record, although WWF forest conservation officers have continued to attend ITTC sessions as observers. Meanwhile the WWF had shifted its support from government-backed labelling schemes to the advocacy and promotion of a global private-sector scheme. This initiative originated from a meeting hosted by WWF in Washington DC in March 1992. After a series of meetings and workshops, agreement was reached to found a Forests Stewardship Council (FSC). In October 1993 the Founding Assembly of


the FSC was held in Toronto, Canada. This reached agreement on an innovative institutional format, namely a General Assembly, constituting the FSC’s supreme authority, divided into two chambers. The first chamber, consisting of social, environmental and indigenous peoples’ NGOs, holds 75 per cent of voting rights. The second chamber, consisting of individuals and private companies with an economic stake in the timber trade, holds 25 per cent of voting rights (Elliott 1993). Participants at the Founding Assembly voted that the FSC should be legally constituted as an ‘independent non-profit, non-governmental, membership organisation’ (Jeanrenaud and Sullivan 1994:3). The principal focus of the FSC is on activity at the forest-concession level as opposed to the intergovernmental level. FSC membership is voluntary. The FSC will authorise national certifying authorities to issue certificates to individual forest-concession holders that adhere to the FSC’s nine principles of forest management (Forest Stewardship Council 1994). As all the actors that have established relations with it are either private companies or non-governmental organisations, the FSC represents an interesting example of a pure non-governmental regime. The Founding Assembly elected a Board of Directors composed of four environmental representatives, two social representatives and two representatives of those with an economic interest in the timber trade, with equal representation between North and South.6 The case of the FSC illustrates that while governments may be unable to agree among themselves on a given issue, this does not preclude other actors from reaching agreement on the same issue. It was noted above that governments in the ITTO have been unable to agree on a labelling scheme, and that in the UNCED forests debate there was deep disagreement between governments from the North and the South on the forests issue. Yet despite the positions of governments in the ITTO and the UNCED process, the FSC initiative has achieved a widespread consensus between NGOs and private sector companies in North and South. Of course, the long-term effectiveness of the FSC remains to be judged. It would also be wrong to surmise that the FSC has achieved universal approval among NGOs. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth decided not to take part in the initiative in protest at the decision to allocate voting rights to companies and other actors with an economic stake in the timber trade. Other campaigners oppose labelling schemes —although not explicitly the FSC—as marketing gimmicks that provide little genuine environmental protection (West 1995). Notwithstanding these criticisms, the point holds that a non-governmental regime on a given issue may be possible where governments disagree. Policy makers and regime theorists should be sensitive to this fact. The FSC brings together an unlikely coalition of timber traders, forest concession holders, conservation NGOs and local community groups. The FSC is not yet fully operational, but its activities aim in the long term to modify the behaviour of actors with a stake in the timber trade around the norm that traded timber should come from well-managed sources, and should be labelled to this effect according to globally agreed upon criteria. If the FSC succeeds in doing this it would qualify as a private regime. Virginia Haufler has previously defined a


private regime as ‘one in which cooperation among private actors is institutionalised, and in which states do not participate in formulating the principles, norms, rules or procedures which govern the regime members’ behaviour’ (Haufler 1993). With regard to how NGO activity may affect interest-based theories of regime creation, NGO campaigns have the function of highlighting the potential benefits of regime creation that states may have missed or underestimated. NGOs may also act as facilitators by clarifying the costs of regime defection. NGOs may seek to draw attention to those economic costs of deforestation that states may have overlooked, including non-timber forest products such as fruits and nuts. The promotion of environmental economics by some, but by no means all, NGOs is nothing less than an endeavour to shift the methodology by which states and other actors calculate their costs and pay-offs. NGOs may also highlight the noneconomic costs of deforestation, such as watershed management. NGOs can thus encourage states to demand international environmental regimes. The normatively based arguments of NGOs may induce states to move from pursuit of the perceived self interest (distributive bargaining) towards pursuit of the common interest (integrative bargaining). The demand for environmental regimes may be seen as arising from a shift in state-society relations. The post-war economic order was determined in large part by the demand expressed by societies in the developed world for domestic social and economic stability (Ruggie 1983). However, the demand for global and domestic ecological security now competes with that for social and economic stability (Humphreys 1995). As Litfin argues, only rarely have states taken a lead in global environmental conservation ‘without pressure from social movements and other non-state actors’ (1993: 101). States, at least in the developed world, can no longer pursue their own perceived interests without consideration of the possible environmental consequences of their actions. Governments may present to domestic public opinion their participation in, or demand for, environmental regimes as proof that they are pursuing global ecological security. This shift in state-society relations is also transmitted to international institutions, including regimes, so that, as Keohane, Haas and Levy argue, ‘the key variable accounting for policy change [in international institutions] …is the degree of domestic environmentalist pressure in major industrialised democracies, not the decision-making rules of the relevant international institution’ (Keohane, Haas and Levy 1993:14). In short, social pressure is forcing both states and international institutions to reappraise and reconceptualise their objectives. NGOs have been, and will continue to be, instrumental in this process. Turning now to cognitive theories, NGOs may fill two roles with respect to epistemic communities. Firstly, NGOs may contribute to epistemic community formation (Haas 1993b:188). NGOs may employ trained scientists to undertake research, thus making a direct input to epistemic community formation. Individuals from, or employed as consultants by, NGOs have helped to establish the linkage between deforestation and global warming (Bunyard 1985, Bunyard 1987, Markham 1990, World Wide Fund for Nature 1990b, World Resources Institute


1992:118–19). Forests, when left undisturbed, act as a sink for carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the main greenhouse gases. However, when deforestation occurs, and in particular when forests are burnt, the forests become a source of carbon dioxide. NGO campaigners have also noted that not only does deforestation contribute to global warming, but that global warming will, in turn, pose a renewed threat to nature conservation (Rose and Hurst 1992). In a report commissioned by Friends of the Earth, Myers estimates that ‘the share of global warming attributable to tropical deforestation could now be at least 18 to 19 percent’ (Myers 1989:44). Myers’ estimate includes both carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide. According to Porter and Brown (1991:97), estimates of the carbon dioxide component of the burning of tropical forests in greenhouse gas emissions vary between ten and 30 per cent, while the Worldwatch Institute notes a range of 20 to 30 per cent (Brown 1991:80). In short, NGOs have contributed to the broad-based epistemic consensus on the relationship between deforestation and global warming, although there is a margin of disagreement on the precise quantification of this relationship. Secondly, where NGOs contribute to epistemic community formation, their experience in advocacy work renders them well versed in the lobbying techniques best fitted to communicate the community’s findings to government and other policy-making elites. In this respect they can play a role that the other professionals in an epistemic community—such as lawyers, academics and scientists, who will usually be less familiar with effective advocacy work—are not so well equipped to play. However, it is emphasised that an epistemic community is not an NGO or any other type of interest group. As Haas notes, unlike members of an interest group, members of an epistemic community would withdraw from a policy debate ‘[i]f confronted with anomalies that undermined their causal beliefs’ (1992:18). 4.7 CONCLUSIONS The importance of NGOs at the local, national, regional and international levels with respect to environmental conservation is growing. The central argument of this paper has been that there is a need for regime theorists to pay greater heed to the roles of NGOs in international environmental regime creation for three different reasons. Firstly, NGO lobbying can result in behavioural shifts by states in the international system. It has been argued above that a perceived global environmental crisis has resulted in a shift in state-society relations. This has resulted in the articulation by states of a new demand in the international system, namely the demand for domestic and global ecological security. NGOs have been central to this shift in state-society relations which in turn has been instrumental to the demand in recent years for international environmental regimes. This paper has also documented two examples of how the IUCN has influenced the development of an intergovernmental regime, namely the ITTO. Firstly, the IUCN intervention


during the negotiation of the ITTA 1983 represents an example of an international NGO making a significant impact upon an intergovernmental negotiating process. This in turn affected the qualitative nature of the ITTO as a regime. The ITTO is not purely a trading regime; it is also one with a conservation mandate. Secondly, the IUCN’s role in the drafting of the ITTO’s biodiversity guidelines is also significant. Where NGOs are commissioned to draft such guidelines they can play a significant role in the shaping of the norms and principles to which states, nominally at least, adhere in international environmental regimes. It has also been noted that, notwithstanding the differences that may arise between them, NGOs are prepared to form coalitions with government delegates at intergovernmental negotiations. In the negotiations for the ITTA 1994, although the producers’ and the NGOs’ coalition failed in their overriding objective of expanding the scope of the agreement, it is nonetheless significant that the former were prepared to establish a coalition with the latter. The coalition is indicative of the increasing seriousness with which NGOs’ views are now treated at international environmental negotiations. With many governments according NGOs increasing respect, the capacity of NGOs to affect the nature of regimes that may emerge from intergovernmental negotiations is correspondingly increased. However, it is necessary to add a note of caution here: the case of the TFAP illustrates that some governmental delegations will act to constrain NGOs’ rights of participation where they fear such rights may conflict with the sovereignty of states over their natural resources. States need not necessarily be the only, or even the main, type of actor participating in international environmental regimes. Hence a second reason why it is necessary for regime theorists to consider the role of NGOs is that NGOs can be seen as central actors in effective environmental policy implementation. According to this view, regime membership should be seen as open to all actors, and regimes are best understood as jointly sponsored mechanisms ‘sustained by the joint efforts of governmental and non-governmental actors’ (Rosenau 1995:29). Local and national NGOs have important roles to play with respect to policy design and implementation. In the case of the TFAP it has been shown that where governments have been reluctant to include NGOs in the planning process, influential international NGOs such as the WRI have been prepared to assist them in order to ensure that their views are heard by government. Ultimately, however, it remains the case that if an intransigent government is not prepared to accord NGOs an input in the policy-making process, in the final analysis there is very little the latter can do. Thirdly, it is necessary for regime theorists to consider non-governmental, or private, regimes. While governmental actors in the ITTO have proved unable to agree upon a timber labelling system, the WWF has been central to establishing a new institution, namely the FSC, that has attracted the support of NGOs and companies from both North and South. When the FSC is fully operational, it will qualify as an international private regime if there is evidence that it has modified actors’ behaviour. Such regimes may provide a seam of empirical material for future


research by regime theorists, and they may also become an important framework for future environmental cooperation, especially where, as is the case with forests, North-South disagreements have so far inhibited the creation of a global intergovernmental forests conservation regime. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author acknowledges the support of Science and Engineering Research Council quota award number 9130262X which he received at City University, London. Much of the research funded by this award has contributed to this article. The support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its Global Environmental Change Initiative and of the Open University is also gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks are due to Peter Willetts for his many helpful and constructive criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper. NOTES 1. The five action programmes are: (1) Forestry in Land Use, namely the integration of forestry into agricultural systems leading to a more rational use of land; (2) Forest-based Industrial Development which aims at promoting appropriate forest-based industries; (3) Fuelwood and Energy which aims at restoring fuelwood supplied in those countries affected by shortages; (4) Conservation of Tropical Forest Ecosystems which aims at conserving, managing and utilising tropical plants and wild animal genetic resources, and (5) Institutions, which aims at strengthening the institutional capacity of public forest administrations and related government agencies. See FAO, World Bank, WRI and UNDP 1987:8. 2. The three NGOs from the North to support the Agarwal paper were the Institute of Development and Environmental Management (Netherlands), the Anti Racist Centre (Norway) and the Asian Environment Society (Japan). 3. Published statements include World Rainforest Movement (1991) and Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations of the Amazon Basin (1991). An unpublished statement made to PrepCom 2 was Martin Khor Kok Peng, ‘Resolving the Forest Crisis: North-South Dimensions and UNCED’s role’, Geneva, March 1991. Two unpublished statements made to PrepCom 3 were: Mutang Urud, ‘Statement to the Third Preparatory Committee meeting of UNCED on the issue of forests’ (Urud is a member of a Sarawak forest tribe); and Friends of the Earth International, ‘Saving the Tropical Rainforests: Is UNCED to be a Wasted Last Chance?’. 4. A statement was made to PrepCom 4 by representatives from indigenous peoples, nomadic pastoralists, peasants and environmental organisations, signed by 22 individuals. This is published in Colchester and Lohmann (eds.) 1993:333–6. 5. The six conferences are: the World Summit for Social Development; the International Conference on Population and Development; the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II); the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on


Desertification; the Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island States; and the Conference on Straddling and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks. 6. Individuals elected to the FSC’s Board of Directors came from the following NGOs and private companies:

North, Environmental North, Environmental South, Environmental South, Environmental North, Economic South, Economic North, Social South, Social

World Resources Institute, USA WWF-International, Switzerland Grupo de Trabalho Amazonica, Brazil Martha Nuñez, Ecuador LSA Associates, USA Brazilian Silvicultural Society Cultural Survival, USA Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), Colombia.

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White, Jennifer (1991) ‘North “controls the UNCED agenda”’, Crosscurrents, PrepCom 3, No. 1, 12–13 Aug., p. 1. Willetts, Peter (1989) ‘New Wine in Old Bottles’ in Rosenau and Trompe (eds.) (1989). Willetts, Peter (1996) ‘Social Movements, NGOs and the Impact of the Earth Summit on the United Nations System’, Review of International Studies (forthcoming). Winterbottom, Robert (1990) Taking Stock: The Tropical Forestry Action Plan After Five Years, Washington DC, World Resources Institute. World Rainforest Movement (1991) ‘NGO version of an effective forest statement’ (circulated at PrepCom 3), Third World Resurgence, Nos. 14/15, Oct.-Nov., p. 52. World Resources Institute (1990) ‘WRI Memorandum to Participants in the NGO effort to prepare for the Indonesian NFAP Roundtable III, 23 September 1990' (unpublished). World Resources Institute (1991) ‘World Resources Institute Statement on the Future of the Tropical Forestry Action Plan, November 25, 1991’ (unpublished). World Resources Institute (1992) World Resources 1992–3, Oxford, Oxford University Press. World Resources Institute et al. (1985) Tropical Forests: A Call for Action, Washington DC, World Resources Institute. World Wide Fund for Nature (1988) ITTO: Tropical Forest Conservation and the International Tropical Timber Organization, Position Paper 1, Gland, Switzerland, WWF International. World Wide Fund for Nature (1990a) Reforming the Tropical Forestry Action Plan: A WWF Position, Gland, Switzerland, WWF International. World Wide Fund for Nature (1990b) Climate Change, WWF Position Paper 5, Gland, Switzerland, WWF International. World Wide Fund for Nature (1991) Action for UNCED, Gland, Switzerland, WWF International. Young, Oran R. (1989a) International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press. Young, Oran R. (1989b) ‘The Politics of International Regime Formation: Managing Natural Resources and the Environment’, International Organization, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 349–75. Young, Oran R. and Osherenko, Gail (eds.) (1993) Polar Politics: Creating International Environmental Regimes, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press.

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5 NGOs and Competing Representations of Deforestation as an Environmental Issue in Malaysia BERNARD ECCLESTON

Paper 4 in this volume highlights the active role NGOs have played in pressing for the formation of cooperative environmental regimes to conserve tropical forests. Despite the activities of NGOs and other agencies, there is currently no intergovernmental or private regime in place. This paper, using Malaysia as an example, examines why the development of shared principles, norms and rules that would be enshrined in a forests regime is so difficult. It is now widely appreciated that human interference has altered the physical environment in forest areas. There is even, as I show in section 1, some agreement that the environmental degradation of soils or water supplies, for example, is unacceptable and requires remedial action by governments. In the language of policy-making literature (Haas, Keohane and Levy 1993:11), it appears that forest problems are an issue on the agenda for change which should lead to the development of alternative policy options, followed by the selection and implementation of preferred policy choices. A critical stage in this policy process comes when an environmental issue is incorporated into a policy making agenda because this tends to see a redefinition of ‘problems to make them amenable to policy options’ (Breyman 1993:137). It is at this agenda-setting stage that differences between those in the policy process become most apparent, because to move from problem to solution requires an evaluation of priorities. The removal, depletion or conversion of forests is in practice related to not just one environmental problem but many, and this leads to competing representations or frames of the overall issue (Liberatore 1995). If the issue is framed as a problem of conserving biodiversity or maintaining the traditional livelihoods of forest dwellers, priority will be given to preserving pristine forests. If the issue is framed as a problem of limiting negative externalities while expanding the production and trade in tropical timber, the priority will be managing forest depletion. Other priorities would follow from frames emphasising the impact of forest loss on local and global climate change, the loss of land rights and access to culturally significant areas for indigenous peoples, or transboundary air and water pollution. The significance of these differing frames at the agenda-setting stage is that they lead to

Bernard Eccleston is Social Sciences Staff Tutor, the Open University.

112 NGOS AND DEFORESTATION IN MALAYSIA

conflict over definitions of the environmental problem which in turn leads to major differences over appropriate policies. Political scientists point to a range of methods used by policy makers to cope with differences in priorities and values when setting agendas. Privileging access to policy networks for those who share a common definition of the problem and common ideas on feasible policy options is the most usual (Smith 1992:59–62). Where global environmental issues in international institutions are concerned, however, such exclusionary tactics are not as easy to apply. The persistence of competing representations of forest problems is one reason why a global regime is so difficult to construct, especially as these representations are deliberately linked in joint bargaining over possible conventions on biodiversity, climate change and forests. The complexities encountered in considering the different ways in which forest environmental problems are framed seems likely to weaken the ability of NGOs to exert influence on policies whether at national or global levels. Where this complexity leads to competing and contradictory definitions, it is much harder for NGOs to influence the development of policy if their priority concerns have been defined away by those who control agenda setting. What is also significant is that NGOs themselves have divided interests, which means that the unity of those proposing alternative priorities is broken. With these assumptions in mind, part of my field research in Malaysia focused on whether there were features of forest environmental problems that strengthened or weakened NGO influence on policy makers. Generally I concluded that NGO influence was weakened and the reasons were similar to the problems faced by NGO forest campaigns elsewhere in the world. The main blockage to increased influence derives from the conflicting ways in which forest problems are framed and the subsequent conflict over appropriate policies. To illustrate this theme I will relate each of the following sections towards key words in a baseline statement of the overall problem as: the environmental consequences of over-rapid depletion of natural tropical forest resources. 5.1 MULTIPLE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF FOREST CONVERSION Local and Regional Environmental Degradation By using the term forest conversion, I want to delay until Section 3 consideration of the relative impact of different sources of land use changes. Here, I group together the overall environmental impact of converting natural forests for permanent agriculture, timber production, population resettlement, hydroelectric projects and plantations of oil palm and rubber. My examples are drawn principally from the East Malaysian state of Sarawak and to a lesser extent Sabah, because these


FIGURE 5.1 MAP OF MALAYSIA

are the places where NGO campaigning has been most prominent in the past decade. This is mainly due to the enormous increase in natural resource exploitation in these states when compared to the more diversified economy of Peninsular Malaysia. Adverse environmental change was noted as early as 1978 by the Sarawak Department of Agriculture: ‘incalculable damage must result from soil erosion and degradation, pollution of waterways and the air, siltation of waterways, damage to fish spawning grounds and down river flooding’ (Sarawak 1978:10). Similarly, a German scientist who works with the Sarawak Forest Department confirmed the 1970s and 1980s as an era of ‘heavy and lasting damage to soil, water bodies and


forest stands’ (Bruenig 1993a: 4). By 1986, the Federal Five Year Plan estimated that 59 per cent of Sarawak’s rivers were polluted with soil erosion and siltation as the main problem (Malaysia 1986:285). Since then, not only has yet more natural forest been converted, but more mechanisation has dramatically increased soil degradation. The conversion of hill forests in particular has accelerated soil run-off to add yet more river sedimentation. Independent research, often undertaken by NGOs, has attempted to assess the impact of water pollution as it affects drinking, washing and fishing (WWF Malaysia reports quoted in Primack 1991). Other research has examined the downstream effects of hill forest conversion which increase the pace of underground water flows and heighten the risk of flooding (Douglas et al. 1993 and on Sabah, Murtedza and Chan 1992). The human impact of environmental degradation is felt immediately by those in rural Sarawak who depend on natural forests and nearby water supplies for their livelihoods. Local studies of such communities reveal adverse implications for diet and health. Deteriorating fish stocks and declining availability of meat from forest animals saw protein intake in some areas decline by 66 per cent (Colchester 1990: 168). In turn malnutrition has increased and resistance to disease decreased, especially for those who depend on the forest for food (Hurst 1990:87; Wee Chong 1995:138). It is also becoming clearer that local adaptation to the increasing pace of environmental degradation has unintended consequences that accelerate degradation in a downward spiral. As men from rural communities have to travel further searching for scarcer supplies of wild game or for paid employment, women are left to carry multiple burdens. Inevitably, productivity in subsistence farming falls with less labour available to clear and burn swidden sites, and fallow periods may be shortened which further disturbs the forest ecology and reduces yields. Dual environmental pressures appear therefore on both food collection and cultivation. There is some evidence that one local response is to increase family size so that child labour may be used to replace the reduction in men’s time available for subsistence food production (Heyzer 1995:44). All this happens as water supplies continue to deteriorate thus increasing vulnerability to water-borne diseases which, with more malnutrition, accelerates the process of declining health standards (King 1996). To cope with declining stocks of fish and meat, there is evidence of an increasing tendency to use more mechanical methods such as fishing by electrocution and chemical poisons or using guns to kill wild game. Thus the exigencies of adapting to environmental degradation may mean that local communities ‘speed up rather than reduce the rate of natural resource depletion’ (Parnwell and Morrison 1993: 28). The sheer size of forest areas in places like Sarawak and the distances involved for researchers assessing the impact of environmental change among widely scattered communities, inevitably means that data are patchy. Even more significant is the fact that uncertain information is subject to major disputes over causation


when changes occur simultaneously. For example, there are widely held perceptions of a serious decline in supplies of wild game in the forests with serious implications for food collection as well as loss of biodiversity. But disputes abound about whether this is caused by increased provision of food for logging camps, whether the noise and disturbance of mechanical methods of forest clearance is driving animals away or whether mechanical methods used by all types of hunters is diminishing wildlife (Primack 1991:127). Therefore, those NGOs attempting to exert influence on policy makers by providing more research on local environmental change face a real problem: their evidence may well be interpreted in different ways according to differing frames of the forest problem. I come back to this point in Section 3 where I highlight the dispute about the relative environmental impact of local shifting cultivation practices versus logging. A related problem of uncertainty comes in trying to separate the impact of change induced by human as opposed to natural forces. One reading of power disruptions and black-outs due to sedimentation at Sabah hydroelectric power stations would emphasise hill forest conversion for logging. Another would stress the natural rate of erosion of upriver rocks. Detailed research is limited even on current problems let alone a previous baseline against which to judge the pace of change. What research there is on increasing stream sediment yields after forest conversion reveals hugely different estimates, from a twofold to a fifty-twofold increase (Douglas et al. 1993:247). Paucity of information, uncertainty over causation and unpredictability of interpretation offer extensive opportunities for those with competing frames of the forest issue to find evidence that support alternative policies. Similar uncertainties are found when trying to assess the transboundary impact of tropical forest conversion. That water pollution crosses national boundaries is illustrated by the visibility of muddy plumes of sediment moving offshore from every river mouth in the region (McDowell 1989). Transboundary air pollution in the region is evident from the effects of forest fires; 1982–83 saw the most dramatic instance when unusual wind and drought conditions combined with extensive forest fires to destroy over three million hectares of forest in Borneo including nearly a million in Sabah. Many ecologists suggest that these natural variations were exacerbated by the effects of forest conversion that left much more deadwood and combustible litter than in undisturbed forests (Repetto and Gillis 1988:134). Disturbed forests in the 1983 catastrophe in Sabah made up 85 per cent of the area destroyed because this allowed the fires to burn with greater intensity over longer periods. Particularly dangerous, according to King’s extensive survey, were the new forest access roads that acted as wind tunnels where the presence of dead wood produced an ideal basis for fire highways (1996). Less dramatic than the 1983 fire, but becoming worryingly regular, are seasonal reductions in air quality across South-East Asia. Prevailing winds in September have seen the city skylines of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore blanketed as ‘a surreal shadow beneath a blotted-out sun’ (Jayasankaran 1994:66). In both countries the air quality index was 40 per cent higher than the hazardously


unhealthy level. Uncontrolled burning of converted forests in Indonesia has been officially blamed, but the increase in burning urban garbage and pollution from traffic adds problems of simultaneous causation. Climate Change Scientific uncertainties and simultaneous causation problems also bedevil assessments of the impact of forest conversion on climate change. When this has a global focus, North-South geopolitical disputes magnify the complexities. The effects of forest conversion on local and regional climate change revolve partly around reduced evapotranspiration which, by returning less incident rainfall to the atmosphere, could make tropical climates drier and warmer. In complete contrast, some scientists suggest that reducing the density of vegetation cover would mean more solar radiation is reflected which would then exert a cooling effect. As yet, the evidence linking forest conversion to local climate change is ‘more anecdotal than based on empirical information so the effect remains in doubt’ (Grainger 1993:163) Moving to global climate change we find that the contribution of science is similarly uncertain. Models do predict that forest burning and the additional rotting of vegetation after conversion increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. In addition, forest burning also produces other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide, ozone and methane, while conversion of forests to rice paddies or cattle ranching thereafter sees even more methane emitted. But in moving from observations about an increase in greenhouse gases to predictions about global warming, we pass through a series of stages where scientific knowledge is uncertain and disputed because the way CO2 is ‘stored or cycled round the planet is not fully understood’ (Grainger 1993: 170). Despite uncertainty about both the mechanisms of global climate change and the contribution tropical forest conversion makes to greenhouse gas production, various estimates have been incorporated into the international discourse. Humphreys referred in an earlier paper in this volume to the role of NGOs in establishing the linkage between global warming and deforestation and he noted that estimates of additional CO2 caused by burning tropical forests range from ten to 30 per cent. What is remarkable is how often the higher of these two figures has been quoted without any qualifications about measurement problems. J.G.Speth, then President of World Resources Institute (WRI), boldly asserted, for instance, that tropical forest conversion accounted for ‘one third of all CO2 produced by human activity’ (1990:16). As significant was the 1991 league table produced by WRI and UN Environment Programme which placed countries in the South alongside the US, USSR, Japan and the EU as the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gases. In the dispute that followed over incorporating scientific uncertainty into precise league tables, countries in the South portrayed the whole exercise as yet another example of the North attempting to shift responsibility from ‘the “luxury”


emissions of the rich…[to]…the “survival” emissions of the poor’ (Hawkins 1993: 235). Although countries in the South like Malaysia deeply resented this particular representation of the link between global climate change and tropical forests, they did seize the opportunity to maintain a connection. G 77 countries, led by Malaysia, made their willingness to discuss any kind of Forests Convention contingent upon the North acknowledging fully its own responsibility for climate change. In addition, they demanded resources to assist the reduction of Southern greenhouse gas emissions in the future. As neither responsibility nor resources were reallocated by the North, all efforts to conclude a Forests Convention at the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development (UNCED) failed (Humphreys 1993). For NGOs in Malaysia as well as in other tropical forest states, the way that local problems were incorporated into geopolitical debates gave rise to serious dilemmas. To a degree, Malaysian NGOs could agree with the Sarawak Minister of Environment that ‘tropical forest loss has been blamed for global climate change out of all proportion compared to agricultural and industrial pollution from industrialised countries’ (Wong 1992:30). But neither did they wish to accept the government’s nor Wong’s more general defence of forest policies. Equally problematic was how far they should criticise Northern NGOs who initially contributed to the process of linking global warming to tropical deforestation. In a polity where their position is insecure, Malaysian NGOs had in the past gained some strength from the support given to them by Northern colleagues (Eccleston Paper 3 in this volume). When Northern NGOs appear to push local environmental problems of land and livelihood degradation in Malaysia into the background in favour of a global discourse, they illustrate that commonality within the global environmental movement may be more imagined than real (Hawkins 1993:231). Biodiversity Loss As if the problems of linking two global environmental issues were not bad enough for Southern NGOs seeking to influence forest policies, the debates around UNCED in Rio brought yet another link to a biodiversity convention. Whilst acknowledging that much remains to be known about global biodiversity, tropical forests are thought to have the world’s densest network of species, genetic and ecosystem diversity. The sheer numbers of species found for instance in one of the planet’s few remaining dipterocarp forests in Sarawak make them ‘floristically the richest of all the world’s forests’ (Brookfield and Byron 1990:42). Many NGO campaigns do focus on the threat of forest conversion to species diversity especially to the existence of charismatic mammals, although these are but a tiny fraction of all plant or animal species. A real difficulty in assessing the threat to species diversity overall is uncertainty over how many species there are; while it is speculated that


there may be as many as 30 million, thus far only 1.4 million have been recorded (Grainger 1993:149). Genetic diversity focuses on variations within species, and apart from being a key resource for the pharmaceutical industry, wild forest plants hold the key to the development of new disease-resistant seed strains. The threat of forest conversion to the loss of ‘gene banks’ is critical to the potential of modern agriculture in developing new plant varieties, because current reliance on genetic uniformity makes food production highly vulnerable to new diseases and pests. By being so crucial to the commercial prospects of mainly Northern biotechnology companies, a focus on genetic diversity again means that the basic environmental issue becomes quagmired in geopolitical disputes. In this case the disputes centre on Northern intellectual property rights versus Southern ownership rights. The final element of the biodiversity problem concerns the threat to the diversity of ecosystems. This emphasises the interaction between diverse species and their environment which is central to the provision of naturally stabilising ecological services. Essentially, these are the very services that, as I mentioned earlier, are being most rapidly degraded in Sarawak. Forest conversion means degrading the ability of the tropical ecosystem to regulate rainfall release, reduce water pollution, maintain and replenish soil fertility and stabilise atmospheric chemistry. Translating concern over the loss of biodiversity from forest conversion into specific policy options that NGOs can prioritise is not helped by mixed and uncertain messages coming from scientists. While species extinction, for example, is a real fear because habitat loss in tropical forests is faster than any other ecosystem, currently recorded extinction rates in such forests is surprisingly low (Swingland 1993:123). Indeed, one forest scientist suggests that tropical forests are not even ecologically unique (Whitmore 1993:119). The broader background to the contribution of science seems marked by sufficient uncertainty over measuring or monitoring the loss of biodiversity that NGOs have few unequivocally positive policy options to follow. NGO campaigns to preserve the survival of certain animals are popular with members especially in the North, but these are rarely extended to include the plight of that 80 per cent of the world’s insects which inhabit tropical forests and have such a crucial effect on forest ecosystems. Highlighting the threat to genetic diversity by emphasising the need to keep the forest’s natural capital intact effectively means preserving them from encroachment by local peoples as well as developers. This then raises problems over traditional access rights, not to mention who compensates Southern countries for leaving resource potential untouched. In the latter case, NGO campaigns are then drawn into geopolitical debates about regulating the trade in plant breeding genes to prevent Northern biotechnology companies exploiting their control of what they term the ‘common human heritage’. As I will show in Section 5, another problematic dimension of biodiversity for some NGOs is how to insert into their forest campaigns a denial of prior global or national claims on forest products, prioritising instead the ownership rights of local forest peoples.


Amidst the labyrinth of environmental problems that follows forest conversion, NGOs face difficult choices over which aspects to emphasise most. Even though I have argued that there is less disagreement about the extent of local environmental degradation, choosing between policy options to resolve degradation requires some agreement on who or what is causing the degradation. It is in moving from the identification of the environmental problem to the development of policy options that we find major conflicts between NGOs and Malaysian policy makers. 5.2 DISPUTING RESPONSIBILITY FOR OVER-RAPID DEPLETION OF TROPICAL FORESTS Deforestation and Degradation The principal dispute about the causes of forest loss in Malaysia and South-East Asia revolves around the share of responsibility allocated to commercial logging compared to subsistence farmers. Local and international policy-making networks emphasise especially the extent of forest clearance by shifting cultivators (Bruenig 1993b:253), making the tropical timber industry a less significant contributor (Barbier 1993:219). Redefining forest environmental issues in this way and then building policy options around such a definition makes it exceedingly difficult for NGOs with competing priorities to influence policy making. Shifting a major share of responsibility for tropical deforestation away from commercial timber production has been common to a variety of agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, international NGOs like WRI and national governments (Ecologist 1987:131). Part of this tendency is related to the very way deforestation is often measured as the near-complete clearance of forest cover. Measuring deforestation in this way means it is much easier to monitor especially from aerial photography and remote satellite sensing. However, unlike the removal of Northern temperate forests which clears uniform stands of trees, selective removal of say ten particular species out of a diverse range of 300 is common practice in tropical areas. Selective extraction, while not as devastating as wholesale clearance, does result in residual damage to unwanted trees and degrades the density and structure of the forests. While forest degradation as opposed to deforestation is much more difficult to detect even with satellite sensing (Brookfield and Byron 1990:46; Grainger 1993:46), both processes have to be considered when assessing responsibility for forest depletion. Recent studies have shown striking differences in the sources of forest land-use changes if both deforestation and degradation are considered. Using the narrow clearance definition makes conversion to agriculture responsible for 80 per cent of total tropical deforestation compared to only two per cent from commercial forestry. But when degradation is added by assessing the extent of forest modification, the proportionate shares of responsibility are just about reversed


(Barbier 1993:220–21). The significance of including degradation as well as deforestation for South-East Asia is that not only does this make commercial forestry more culpable, but it also reduces the responsibility attributed to shifting cultivators who make up a higher proportion of all farmers than in Brazil, for example. Where NGOs attempt to influence policy makers to include degradation in policy agendas, they are forced to confront serious data uncertainties. The extent of residual damage to trees not required by loggers has clearly increased with more mechanised extraction methods. Sarawak timber production, for example, doubled in the decade after 1981, but to extract another eight million cubic metres from ever more remote, inaccessible and species-diverse forests required road construction as well as mechanical logging. However, estimates of the consequent impact on newly opened forests, some of which come from NGOs, vary significantly. A general figure quoted for South-East Asia as a whole suggests one tree damaged for every two cut (Walker and Smith 1993:389). The peculiar conditions in Sarawak produce much higher estimates; from five damaged when one tree is cut (Pearce 1994:31) to 17 damaged for every tree removed (Nectoux 1987:185). With such wide variations it is easy for Sarawak officials to doubt the credence of these estimates and continue claiming that ‘selective harvesting does little damage’ (Pearce 1994:31). Other difficulties confront NGOs who stress degradation which is the indirect consequence of logging. As well as leaving forests degraded once official logging operations cease, the roads constructed into previously inaccessible areas remain. This then allows other waves of forest exploitation which further degrades loggedover areas so recently damaged by mechanised timber extraction. Although this process of logging deforestation feedback is common in selective extraction (Grainger 1993: 115), the fact that the official concessionaires have left the area allows the Sarawak Government to absolve commercial logging per se of responsibility. Instead, encroachment into logged-over forest areas is portrayed as yet another example of illegal and unacceptable deforestation by subsistence cultivators and hunter gatherers. Scavenging Tenants or Managing Stewards? Conflicting portrayals of forest peoples as either scavengers or stewards of the environment symbolises the extent of disagreement in the forests debate. Negative attitudes towards Sarawak forest dwellers have in essence become embedded into policy makers’ ideology. ‘Indigenous people practice slash and burn and vast tracts of forests have been completely obliterated [whereas] logging of selected trees allows the forests to regenerate quickly’ (Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, quoted in Stesser 1991:53). For similar reasons Sarawak Environment Minister James Wong suggested that ‘their swidden lifestyle must be stamped out’ (quoted in Scott 1988:45). Such basic beliefs are not confined to Malaysia but extend throughout South-East Asia where forest peoples are viewed as ‘backward and


irrational’ (Colchester 1992:11) and are officially condemned as primitive cultivators who are destroying the forests (McDowell 1989:312). It is hardly surprising that global policy initiatives which integrate the interests of forest peoples so frequently fail to develop (see Paper 4 in this volume). From the earliest colonial days onwards, official attitudes towards traditional farming systems in Sarawak cumulatively filtered out references to their ecologically balanced and sustainable qualities. After independence these judgements were passed from British to Malay elites, but in the process the critique escalated from simply being primitive and therefore inefficient to being environmentally degrading (Cramb 1988:122; Colchester 1993:167). In 1978, for instance, a government workshop concluded that ‘shifting cultivation represents probably the greatest single threat to the integrity of Sarawak’s natural resources’ (quoted in King 1988: 271). Similar beliefs prevail about those who do not slash and burn but subsist by gathering forest produce and hunting wild game. The Penan in particular are identified as requiring assimilation as settled farmers to facilitate the emergence of a ‘modern’ economy (Heyzer 1995:42). The sheer longevity of negative attitudes is one source of their strength to the econocentric ideology of elites. An additional element is the incorporation into policy networks of professional expertise to legitimise beliefs about traditional farming systems. The research of foresters, forest scientists, ecologists and anthropologists is drawn together to make such beliefs appear credible especially to international audiences. Professor Bruenig, for example, who is Chair of World Forestry at Hamburg, has played an important role in coordinating the network between Asia and Europe, as well as being a long-time consultant with the Sarawak Forest Department. Opposing international regimes that take a more positive view of forest peoples means using rival expertise in ‘scientific politicking to delay regime creation’ (List and Rittberger 1992:104). More positive studies of the Penan as foragers (Brosius 1991) have been linked to more general academic judgements of gatherers as ‘intelligent guardians capable of being the most important asset for future sustainable and profitable use of tropical forests’ (Swingland 1993:122). Such alternatives develop in part from NGO research that challenges dominant representations. The Penan’s ‘precise knowledge of the location of resources (sago and rattan), their communal ownership and conservation strategies’ (WWF(M) 1989:39) offer a sharp rejoinder to those who deny the Penan have the intellectual apparatus to be able to manage a complex forest ecosystem. Equally, NGOs can challenge the view that shifting cultivators only ever slash and burn virgin forest by showing that, from as early as 1848, alternative preferences existed for returning to old plots which need less effort to clear than virgin forest. Overall, the aim of this rival knowledge network is to show that negative attitudes to shifting cultivation are less rooted in empirical reality than dogma (Cramb 1988:139). As important are opportunities to exploit inconsistencies in statements by Sarawak’s political leaders. When Chief Minister Taib claimed, for example, that ‘shifting cultivation is on the decline, it is almost


finished now’ (quoted in Pearce 1994:32), NGOs could quite publicly ask how therefore can it remain such a grave environmental threat? There is no doubt that Malaysian NGOs have continued to participate in the challenge to dominant views about who and what is responsible for forest environmental problems. But there is little evidence that they have dented the power of privileged expertise which continues to blame indigenous farmers and gatherers. Some NGOs like Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) have withdrawn and/ or been excluded from Sarawak forest policy networks, preferring to use global networks to exert indirect influence (Ngidang 1993; Paper 3 in this volume). Others such as WWF(M) or the Malayan Nature Society (MNS) try to cope with competing values by targeting local officials working in the forests who are more approachable than their political masters. As a result, different NGO strategies are in play, as they are over the vexed question of whether sustainable forestry is possible at all, and if so, how sustainable policies can be implemented. 5.3 COMPETING CONCEPTIONS OF SUSTAINABLE FOREST DEPLETION There is much debate over the general issue of sustainable development (Blowers 1993). When applied to tropical forests, the term sustainable is applied variously and amorphously to timber yield management (sustainable profits), timber production (sustainable output), sustainable forestry employment and sustainable forests as a whole ecosystem. For each of these four dimensions there is scientific uncertainty over whether sustainability is technically feasible. Consequently, those involved in the tropical forests debate are divided over which dimension of sustainability to stress, providing yet another reason that delays the formation of a global forests regime. Within Malaysia NGOs are divided over the ultimate objective of their campaigns about commercial logging. Environmental Protection Society Malaysia (EPSM) does not oppose logging per se, only ecologically unsound logging (Singh 1993). Others like SAM oppose all logging, because they believe ecologically sound logging is impossible (Chee 1993). Such differences reflect the wider question of whether any human-made capital can provide substitute services for those lost in depleting a forest’s natural capital. EPSM would argue that some substitution is possible, whereas SAM would say it is not, because logging involves an irreversible reduction in the unique stock of nature’s wealth. When sustainability is framed as bequeathing an undiminished stock of natural assets to the next generation, any depletion of tropical forests is to be opposed (Pearce 1992:61). Features of tropical forests deemed non-substitutable are those ecological services preventing soil degradation, managing water systems and regulating climate. For a sensitive tropical ecosystem to function effectively, species diversity is critical, whereas for a commercial system to work effectively only certain commercially valued species are needed. When some ecologically essential tree species are


redefined as weeds from an industrial materials viewpoint (Shiva 1987:36), this crystallises the disagreement over sustainable logging. At this very basic level NGOs are divided within the North and the South over their incompatible frames of forests as an integrated ecosystem or forestry as an industry. SAM and their allies among Northern NGOs whose campaigns emphasise sustainable forests press for an end to commercial logging and trade in tropical timber (Pearce 1990:187–8). In the process, they follow the judgements of those like Talbot, a World Bank environmental officer, who argue that ‘no commercial logging of tropical forests has proven to be sustainable from the standpoint of the forest ecosystem’ (quoted in Colchester 1990:168). Others involved in forest policy making deny that commercial and ecological objectives are incompatible, emphasising instead natural forest regeneration and reforestation. Sarawak Environment Minister Wong claims natural forests are so resilient that selective cutting and silviculture means that five years after an area is logged it is indistinguishable from primary forest (The Star, Malaysia, 5 Sept. 1987). In other words, effective management plus local confidence that hill dipterocarp forests regenerate quickly (Pearce 1994:30) ‘ensures that the forest is maintained as a vital commercial resource’ (Wong 1992:25). Such confidence, however, does not sit easily with other views about uncertain scientific knowledge of regeneration processes (Grainger 1993: 87), or that reforestation is virtually impossible in the moist tropics (Ecologist 1987:133). Neither do sanguine expectations of forest regeneration in Sarawak accord with experience elsewhere. Budowski from the Costa Rican Forest Institute, for instance, argued, ‘it is time to dispel the myth that tropical rainforests can be successfully managed because there is a lack of evidence or good case studies’, a view echoed by Martin, a forest researcher in West Africa (both quoted in Shiva 1993:78). Duncan Poore has done more research than most in developing sustainability criteria especially for the International Timber Trade Organisation (ITTO), and his progress reports reveal two things. First, up to 1989 less than oneeighth of one per cent of tropical moist forest was sustainably managed (1989: 252). Second, ‘it is not possible to demonstrate conclusively that any tropical forest anywhere has been successfully managed for the sustainable production of timber’ (quoted in Grainger 1993:90 italics added). The absence of successful forest management which Poore identified relates to profitability. This observation has led some external funders to conclude that ‘we could not make commercial sense of forest management, unless it involved replacing felled indigenous species with fast growing species; principally eucalyptus’ (quoted in Middleton 1993:78; similar views from Goodland at the World Bank quoted in Colchester 1990:169). Where reafforestation by exotic plantations replaces reforestation with indigenous trees, the outcome may be commercially viable, but ‘it makes no positive contribution to the local economy or ecology’ (Shiva 1993:79). Others argue more forcefully that Eucalyptus especially is ‘inimical to other forms of life’ (Pearce 1990:197) and has adverse hydrological effects


because it consumes huge volumes of water relative to indigenous species (Carrere 1993:4). In progressively redefining sustainability to mean establishing monoculture plantations, some NGOs and forest scientists stop at stage one. They reject the feasibility of anything that cannot preserve intact the forest’s biodiverse natural capital. Others accept the technical feasibility of sustainable yield management, but doubt whether even this more limited objective can reconcile commercial profits with environmental protection. Those who are left cling to the belief that it is only poor implementation of local management systems that prevents sustainable management of timber yields. Policy makers in Malaysia, NGOs like MNS or WWF(M) and global agencies like ITTO are among those who link currently unsustainable forest practices to defective policy implementation. In 1989–90 a special ITTO mission (which included Poore) reviewed forest management in Sarawak. Despite the controversy surrounding its terms of reference (Primack 1991), forest officials apparently accepted some of its conclusions (Vatikiotis 1993). According to Bruenig, reasonably adequate scientific knowledge and practical experience led the ITTO mission to report ‘high professional standards, but that implementation in the hill forests of Sarawak fell short of targets’ (1993b: 256–7). Other research confirms problems of illegal logging and weak enforcement of legislation (WWF(M) 1989; Wong 1992: 7–11; Pearce 1994; Heyzer 1995), The essential problem identified by WWF(M) was how to encourage loggers to limit external costs when cutting inaccessible forests with low stocking densities. Then, the problem was to get loggers to improve external benefits by restoring or replanting after timber had been harvested. Measures needed to force loggers to consider externalities have also been identified in more general research using decison-making models of concession logging. This suggests that negative externalities may be limited by improving the rate at which those who refuse to comply with regulations can expect to be detected. Similarly, positive externalities can be incorporated into the decisions of loggers if they are promised contract renewal following satisfactory performance (Walker and Smith 1993). NGOs could play an important role in monitoring performance and WWF(M) has offered its services. But both private supplementation and strengthening official implementation capacity needs the political will of federal and state leaders if the horizons of loggers are to be widened towards external costs and benefits. It is on this question of political will that doubts are raised by those who still retain the belief that sustainable forest management can be made effective. First, given uncertain knowledge about forest regeneration processes, there are worries about forest officials being able to meet an ecological challenge which may ‘extend beyond what many foresters regard as their responsibility’ (Hurst 1990:63). Secondly, the need to improve existing practices is apparently not a priority for politicians in Sarawak who already label timber as manufactured from sustainable resources (Pearce 1994:28). Therefore, even those with a narrower definition of


sustainable logging diverge from the government over the need for independent certification. This question of who monitors the certifiers is currently delaying agreement to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) regime that Humphreys described in Paper 4 in this volume. In addition, there are broader issues of ensuring that all sources of timber are included and not just tropical ones. Thus the formation of a global forests regime is delayed by differences over the vexed question of sustainability and pressures to treat all forests equally. 5.4 SOUTH-NORTH CONFLICTS OVER TROPICAL FOREST DEPLETION Global environmental politics are marked by North-South competition over responsibility for causing and correcting environmental degradation. Tropical forest campaigns mirror this tendency as Southern tropical timber producers confront Northern consumers, and Northern states stress the role of Southern forests in climate change and biodiversity conservation. As I explained in Section 3, many measures of deforestation focus quite narrowly on areas that are completely cleared and, as clearance is most characteristic of Northern forests, Southern states can claim they have caused only a small proportion of global deforestation. In addition, the South can pointedly ask why the North does not prioritise their own forest management and protect their own biodiversity (Speth 1990:19). A related dimension to this debate was noted in Paper 4 when Humphreys referred to the unsuccessful efforts of the South to press for the mandate of the International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA) to be expanded to include all timbers. At these negotiations the Malaysian government played a significant part in attempting to widen the mandate; in the UNCED debates they also sought to force the North to recognise its own forest responsibilities. Both these arenas allowed Malaysia to divert attention away from her own forest problems especially in Sarawak which had been at the centre of global NGO campaigns. ‘Why’, asked Sarawak Forests Director Chai, ‘should we be the focus of global attention when our forests are but one per cent of the world’s total and when sixty per cent of our country is under forest cover?’ (New Straits Times, Malaysia, 22 Oct. 1993). In asking later how many Northern countries could claim that level of cover, Energy Minister Lim had in mind the 5,000 years of forest destruction in the North leading in the UK to current forest cover of less than ten per cent (Business Times, Malaysia, 21 May 1993). Particular reference is made in public presentations by Sarawak officials of narrow deforestation measures which allow them to claim that, unlike in the North, no clear felling is practised in Malaysia (Stesser 1991:58). Equally, when confronting charges of defective policy implementation, Sarawak officials can point to much worse outcomes after a millennium of government forest protection in the UK. As far as trade is concerned, Malaysian representatives constantly remind audiences


that less than one-sixth of traded timber comes from tropical sources and that if global forests have to be safeguarded, the North should be subject to more scrutiny (Hurrell 1992:406, notes similar reactions in Brazil). These arguments were influential in PrepCom sessions for UNCED at Rio. Eventually, Southern states meeting in Kuala Lumpur in April 1992 agreed to make cooperation over any kind of international convention conditional on including all forests (Shiva 1993:81). In addition to problems over linkages with conventions for climate change and biodiversity, the attempt to include all forests in a convention led to stalemate on creating a new regime. NGOs in Malaysia face some dilemmas in widening campaigns to include Northern forests. Yes, they resent ill-informed campaigns about tropical forests by Northern NGOs who campaign too little about their own forests. But, siding more openly with their own government can delay still further global action to slow the speed of forest depletion in Malaysia. In turn, Malaysian NGOs then have to face government claims at global fora that Malaysia’s forest problems are relatively unimportant compared to the North. A second strand to Malaysia’s geopolitical role was to insist on the principle of national sovereignty over forest policies rather than any notion of the forests as a common global resource. For NGOs, this raises a major problem of confronting competing frames of property rights over forest resources. 5.5 COMPETING CLAIMS TO OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL OF FOREST RESOURCES With all environmental problems, those attempting to reverse degradation have to convince people who currently gain to make sacrifices. In urging slower rates of forest depletion, NGOs face so many powerful interests who gain so much that their campaigns become enmeshed in political conflict over who should control tropical forest resources. Overall, this conflict is about competing claims to ownership and control at global, national and local levels. Global Claims The past decade has seen increasing Northern pressure to make the depletion of tropical forests a global issue, ostensibly to halt the loss of biodiversity and to conserve sinks of CO2. By linking these three environmental issues, the North attempted to include in the UNCED agenda for a Global Forests Convention the notion that Southern states should take on resource stewardship responsibilities for present and future generations. This was seen by Southern governments and NGOs as a means to allow the North to claim management rights over Southern property. Notwithstanding claims on tropical forests as part of the global commons, Southern NGOs already felt that Northern control over marketed forest products was partly to blame for high rates of depletion. In the buyers’ market for tropical


hardwood, the power of Northern consumers accedes to the undervaluation of traded timber where neither the external costs of logging, nor foregone external benefits, are fully reflected in prices (Barbier 1993:218). The Japanese construction industry is quite content to use tropical hardwoods as cheap and dispensable concrete moulding, while ignoring the impact of selective logging on the ability of forest dwellers to gather non-marketed subsistence foodstuffs. Conceding yet more control over industrial raw materials from the forest’s genetic diversity would allow Northern biotechnology companies to continue collecting resources for the manufacture of drugs which are then resold at high prices to those in the South who can afford them. Similarly, conceding the role of tropical forests as a carbon sink is seen as something which would induce more delay in reducing Northern use of fossil fuels. What particularly concerns NGOs about globalising forest problems is that the interests of local peoples would be ignored. NGOs already have sufficient problems reclaiming local rights from Southern governments without the added burden of reclaiming them from international bodies (Shiva 1993:76). Past experience with other Northern forest initiatives like debt-for-nature swaps or special reserves for plants and people shows how often these ignore local access rights (Hawkins 1993: 227; Hecht and Cockburn 1990:228; Peluso 1993:47). It is not surprising, then, to find similar centralised global schemes rejected by Southern NGOs, as noted in Paper 4 in this volume. National Claims In the event, the Malaysian Government played a pivotal role in removing the notion of stewardship from the UNCED forests agenda by reasserting the sovereign right of states to exploit their own resources (Humphreys 1993: 49). Sovereignty could be asserted because, while forests may function as commons for the global ecology, property rights over their use are divisible and states can exclude others from ownership (Hurrell 1992:401). For the Federal Government, the forests in Sarawak represent one 01 the last remaining sources of unexploited potential for exports, as well as an internal source of materials for timber processing in Peninsular Malaysia. In exerting national ownership rights over forest exploitation, Malaysia (like other governments in Asia) follows colonial precedents to allow state governments to control local access rights and erode communal property rights (Colchester 1992:8). Such policies, as I argued in Section 3, continue to be legitimised by beliefs that traditional communal property rights perpetuate practices such as shifting cultivation which are said to cause forest destruction (Shiva 1987:24). The reassertion of national control over forests does signal the importance of the Federal Malaysian Government as the site to target NGO campaigns. In NGO experience it is not a propitious one. For the Federal Government to slow forest exploitation, economic sacrifices are required not least in reducing the ability of Sarawak to service Peninsular Malaysia as a dependent supplier of cheap raw


materials (Wee Chong 1995:80). Then, if NGOs campaign on the prior claims of forest peoples, they find the Federal Government as dismissive of local rights as the Sarawak Government. Neither are campaigns stressing local environmental degradation likely to provoke any immediate response from a government so committed to an econocentric ideology. This involves following Japan’s experience to stress that economic growth is needed first to generate the ability to clean up the environment later (Teranishi 1992). It is also doubtful whether the federal politicians have the political will to exercise more control over Sarawak policies, because they are reluctant to offend a state government which is part of the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition that rules Malaysia. Indeed the Federal Government claims that, constitutionally, it does not have the authority to override the jurisdiction of local states in matters of land and forests (Aitken and Leigh 1986:173). Evidence of such jurisdiction problems can be seen in the difficulties the Federal Government has in encouraging the Sarawak Government to effect the logging reductions the ITTO mission requested. Despite apparently being able to force this ITTO investigation on a reluctant state government (Colchester 1993:171 and Pearce 1994:32), federal forest officials concede to Sarawak’s non-compliance. The mission recommended a longer regeneration period of over 40 years between logharvesting cycles but, ‘If Sarawak tells us that twenty four years is sufficient, we take their word for it’ (Pearce 1994:31). Federal authorities do have strong, if indirect, control over Sarawak’s forest policies through their ability to control foreign trade. A federal ban on log exports, for example, would sharply reduce timber production in Sarawak. Such indirect controls have yet to be used for Sarawak although a ban was imposed on Sabah in 1992 when, coincidentally, that state government was in conflict with the BN leadership (Wee Chong 1995:23). As far as the depletion of Sarawak forests is concerned, NGOs find federal politicians unwilling to make economic and political sacrifices for what they consider to be insignificant gains. Local State Claims For leaders of the Sarawak Government, control over forest resources is not simply a matter of being custodian of the state’s public interest. Such control is a significant source of personal power and wealth. In fact, the forest authority is so valued that it has been a jealously guarded part of the Chief Minister’s portfolio since timber production began to expand rapidly in 1985. As well as overseeing the distribution of long-term titles to forest property, the Chief Minister also allocates short-term property rights in the form of logging concessions. The important place of timber in Sarawak’s economy is reflected in its 32 per cent share of her exports (Tsuruoka 1994:70) and the fact that, from the later 1980s, the sector contributed nearly one-half of government revenue (Wee Chong 1995: 22). Coming under local jurisdiction means that forestry is a much more significant source of revenue than petroleum, where federal control means that the royalties Sarawak eventually receives are less than a quarter of timber revenues. In theory,


this more independent source of revenue can be used to promote local economic growth which, with about ten per cent employment in the timber sector, is seen as providing compensation for curtailing local land rights and provides an existence ‘preferable to traditional livelihood by subsistence farming’ (Bruenig 1993b:265). What surprises many is that public revenues from timber are so small. Export royalties, for example, are less than half the rates imposed in Sabah or Indonesia (Repetto and Gillis 1988:147). Lower duties and royalties mean a smaller rent capture for public revenues and higher returns for private rentiers and loggers. Together with lax policing of harvesting regulations and reforestation rules, this means less external costs to internalise and higher profits for the logging industry. The opportunity to earn high profits explains the scramble to seek concession property rights that are given free under the Chief Minister’s remit. Not surprisingly, in the vagaries of Sarawak politics, the ability to dispense rights to extract timber is used to build political support networks across ethnic divisions. Concessions are initially allocated to Malay bumiputera companies, and concessionaires in turn lease to Chinese contractors rights to provide basic logging infrastructure for local subcontractors who fell and transport the timber. Personal wealth for the Chief Minister and his associates is enhanced because when concessions are given, a financial interest in logging is retained through involvement with these same bumiputera companies. The extent of this involvement was revealed in the 1987 election campaigns which were the outcome of political disputes between Taib and his uncle, who was his predecessor as Chief Minister. As each side exposed the other’s timber interests, it emerged that companies associated with them and their respective families held concessions to over half the total area available for logging in Sarawak (Scott 1988:45; Hurst 1990:104; King 1993:241). Given this extensive association with the timber industry, official support is forthcoming to assert individual over communal property rights and promote further restrictions on forest access rights. To maximise the exploitation of timber resources and to minimise costs, traditional rights to cultivate and gather forest products have to be superseded. The additional transaction costs involved in distinguishing compensation claims in complex tenurial systems inhibit loggers just as it does government officials promoting forest conversion for agricultural development (King 1986:31). Having influential allies in government to minimise such transactions’ costs is as valuable to loggers as it is unavailing to NGOs. Interpenetration between vested economic and political interests grossly limits the political space NGOs might occupy. Conventional models of democracy which separate such interests are misleading here. Interpenetration also removes from already marginalised forest peoples responsive political representatives to whom they could protest the erosion of their customary rights of access.


Local Community Claims These politically marginalised communities are the very ones who are most exposed to the effects of local environmental degradation, as I outlined in Section 1. A key economic difficulty for such peoples across Asia is the impact of forest degradation on diminishing supplies of food and materials available from the forests. Because such livelihood sources do not enter commodity markets, their loss is not reflected in the full social cost of logging and is in any case deemed unimportant as it benefits only small minorities (Repetto and Gillis 1988:12). Declining subsistence supplies in the forests are in turn compounded by the erosion of customary access rights to the forests. Some customary rights to cultivate the forest were recognised in the 1958 Sarawak Land Code, though not as ownership rights but on a 99-year lease from the state (Colchester 1993:168). As this code applied only to land cleared for cultivation prior to 1958 gatherers like the Penan have no customary land because up to 1958 most of them did not farm (Primack 1991:127). Even codified customary rights may be withdrawn in changes which legalise beliefs that shifting cultivation wastes forest resources. Lengthy fallowing periods, for example, have been taken as a reason to extinguish customary rights on the grounds that land is not under continuous cultivation, so is deemed ‘abandoned’ (Hasegawa 1993:65– 6). In announcing a new policy on this in 1994, Chief Minister Taib explained ‘such idle native lands will be developed to ensure a sufficient supply of logs’ (quoted in Pearce 1994:31). Giving priority to industry over local subsistence needs accords with wider policy objectives to modernise what are said to be primitive ways. Indigenous cultural practices are thereby marginalised by denying the role of local knowledge for forest management within a wider context of denying the place of local cultural traditions. Even the very term indigenous is disputed. According to a member of Malaysia’s ITTO delegation, ‘unlike the Brazilian Indians we are all indigenous as bumiputera Malays’ (Roslan 1993). Officially, Dayak indigenous people in Sarawak did have a special constitutional position, but after 1971 they were submerged within the general preferences accorded to Malays, as opposed to Indian or Chinese ethnic groups (Wee Chong 1995:6). Adding cultural to political and economic marginalisation gives the campaigns of those NGOs who stress the impact of forest depletion on local communities both human rights and environmental dimensions. Such an integrated focus is sufficient to make more scientifically conservationist NGOs like the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in the North, or MNS in Malaysia fight shy of the political conflict this brings. Campaigns about the plight of Sarawak’s most forest-dependent minority, the Penan, highlights such divisions between NGOs. For the government, gatherers like the Penan are prime targets for resettlement into modern lifestyles. In any case, there are only 9,000 Penan among 700,000 Dayaks. Confirming the limited scale of the problem, MNS identify just 300 Penan who are fully nomadic, and even they are said to have


sufficient forest access for their nomadic lifestyle (MNS President quoted in Woon and Lim 1990:13). For SAM, however, the particular restrictions used to control the traditional lifestyle of the Penan for the sake of the timber industry symbolise how Dayaks in Sarawak are disempowered (Ngidang 1993). These contrasting attitudes from just two of Malaysia’s NGOs underline the complexity bestowed by competing frames of tropical forest depletion as an environmental issue. Where the campaigning of SAM echoes Northern NGO concerns over the interests of local communities in global forest initiatives, they meet recalcitrant policy makers. NGOs like MNS take a narrower conservation focus which, they argue, allows them to retain some access to the policy process. But they also have to tailor their campaigns to take account of the way those in control of policy use forest resources to build economic and political power. It is understandable, therefore, why so many NGOs find the context of this environmental problem one that weakens, rather than strengthens, their influence on policy makers. 5.6 CONCLUSION The difficulties encountered by Malaysian NGOs in influencing, or even getting access to, the forest policy agenda, offers some pointers to the absence of a global forests regime. I have stressed at various points the way environmental problems associated with forest depletion are linked to global initiatives on climate change and biodiversity. This may have the advantage of establishing the interdependence between local, transboundary and global environmental degradation. But issue linkages can delay the resolution of problems as ‘parties are loath to make concessions on one issue out of concern that this may affect negotiating posture on others’ (Young 1989: 356). Being nested alongside two other issues embracing North-South geopolitical disputes seems to be one reason why global forest initiatives have so far failed. A second general problem relates to the view that the formation of global environmental regimes is enhanced by the emergence of an epistemic community generating consensual understanding. Indeed it has been argued that for ‘acid rain precipitation and deforestation…consensus exists and members of the epistemic community have been mobilised in national and international fora’ (Haas 1992:52). My earlier discussion of scientific uncertainty on climate change, the functioning of forest ecosystems or forest sustainability suggests this view is absurdly optimistic. Rather, I would see epistemic dissensus as another reason for the absence of a forests regime. There is consensus within elite policy-making networks in Malaysia and Indonesia about the blame to be attributed to traditional farming methods in destroying tropical forests (Dauvergne 1994:499). It is also apparent that these networks recruit scientific expertise whose views often coincide with the assumptions of agencies in the North such as the World Bank or WRI. But,


Malaysian and Indonesian experience also shows the extent of entrenched political and economic interests that lie behind elite networks that label the victims of forest depletion as perpetrators. Such powerful gatekeepers deny political space to NGOs and others who campaign on behalf of the powerless, thereby maintaining their rewards from exploiting the forests. In addition, vested interests at national level can use their power to delay the emergence of a global regime which would mean substantial personal economic sacrifices for long term environmental benefits. Paper 6 of this volume shows how the speedy formation of a regime to combat desertification was facilitated because it did not require big sacrifices from powerful interests. The contrast with tropical forests is marked. The structure of powerful winners and powerless losers in current patterns of resource exploitation would be challenged by a global forests regime. Occasionally, as in Brazil, overseas NGOs are able to exert indirect pressure to alter the pattern of forest exploitation using leverage on foreign donors at times of debt or loan renegotiation (Hurrell 1992:416). Malaysian NGOs have no such opportunities as rapid economic growth has reduced dependence on multilateral donors. This independence gives the government the capacity to organise what is in effect a veto coalition within the South to prevent a global forests regime. As Northern interests are equally intransigent over related issues of debt redemption and compensating resource transfers, global initiatives on tropical forests are thwarted. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this paper was funded mainly by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its Global Environmental Change Initiative, and partly by the Open University. I am grateful to both institutions for their support. This paper is based partly on a series of personal interviews conducted between 1993 and 1995 with NGOs and academic researchers in Asia and the UK. I am grateful for the cooperation of the following NGOs. EPSM, MNS and WWF Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur; SAM and TWN in Penang. Roslan, Woon and Lim at FRIM and Yong at ISIS Malaysia also helped me to get closer to the views of policy makers. Unfortunately no government officials responded to my interview requests. The only reply I ever received was from Professor Bruenig at the Forest Department Sarawak who said that in view of ‘the recent limelight, people here feel that visits and interviews are becoming too much of a burden’ (Fax communication 21 June 1994). Therefore, for official views I have had to rely on secondary sources and press coverage of the statements of government representatives. In Japan, a number of NGOs campaign on Malaysian forests at a distance and my thanks are due to FoE Japan, WWF Japan, JATAN and the Sarawak Campaign Committee. UK interviews given to me and my colleague Annie Taylor by the following people were mvaluable: Marcus Colchester at WRM, Simon Counsell


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6 Does the Definition of the Issue Matter? NGO Influence and the International Convention to Combat Desertification in Africa SUSAN CARR and ROGER MPANDE Environmental issues are inherently complex, involving many uncertainties. There is thus far greater ambiguity associated with their definition than is generally acknowledged, especially by natural scientists (Grove-White and Szerszynski 1992). To a striking extent, such definitions are malleable and culturally shaped (Douglas 1975, Wynne 1982). Indeed, it has been suggested that part of the reason that particular issues gain prominence on the environmental agenda may be because of their resonance with deeper tensions in society as a whole, over and above concerns about their more obvious environmentally harmful effects (Grove-White 1992). This line of thought has been taken further by Conca and Lipschutz (1993), who suggest that the ‘global environment’, apart from being a complex geobiophysical system, is also ‘ultimately, a social construction, through which individuals and groups derive and define competing notions of authority, legitimacy, and sovereignity’. Desertification is an example of an environmental problem that involves more complexity and uncertainties than most. Although desertification is now firmly on the global environmental agenda, there is still considerable debate and a surprising lack of clarity about the extent and nature of the problem. Explanations of its causes range from local mismanagement of land exacerbated by unreliable rainfall, to global imbalances in trade and global climate change. Cultural and ideological influences have played an important part in shaping these explanations (Adams 1990). Often the way in which certain groups promote particular explanations and definitions of an issue to further their interests, whether unintentionally or deliberately, goes unnoticed, so taken for granted is their authority and so unquestioned their expertise. But in intergovernmental negotiations, the normal within-country acceptance of the views of established sources of authority and expertise no longer automatically applies. The existence of competing definitions becomes more obvious because cultural differences throw them into relief.

Susan Carr is in the Faculty of Technology, the Open University, and Roger Mpande, formerly of Zimbabwe Environmental Research Organisation, is now of Commutech, Harare.


Governments and other actors have to negotiate openly within a different political structure to try and reimpose their own definitions, so that underlying motives for promoting one definition rather than another may become more apparent. This paper summarises the differing definitions and explanations of the problem of desertification, examines the extent to which competing definitions were exploited to further particular interests in the negotiations for the International Convention to Combat Desertification, and discusses the effect this had on the opportunities for NGOs to influence the negotiations. The main emphasis of the paper is on Africa, because the convention, although international, gives priority to action in Africa, and African governments and African NGOs played a prominent part in the debate. In the discussion, interest-based regime theory is used to explore why, despite the uncertainties surrounding the desertification issue and in marked contrast to the forestry issue, international agreement on the text of a Convention to Combat Desertification was relatively easily achieved. 6.1 DEFINING THE PROBLEM OF DESERTIFICATION Expressed simply, desertification is land degradation in dry areas (Grainger 1990). In the Convention to Combat Desertification, it is defined more fully as ‘land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities’ (UN General Assembly 1994). The convention goes on to define land degradation as ‘reduction or loss… of the biological or economic productivity and complexity’ of such land. Taken at face value these definitions appear relatively straightforward, but any attempt to unpack their meaning reveals how open to interpretation they are. Not only is there an absence of reliable data on which to base an assessment of the extent of the problem, and different ways of defining such parameters and indicators as have been studied, but there are also differing perceptions of the nature of the problem, and even a questioning by some people of whether or not a problem actually exists, at least of the type and on the scale that is claimed. Explanations of the causes of desertification range from the local to the global. They include natural, social, political and economic factors, and have been reviewed by Adams (1990), Grainger (1990), Mortimore (1993) and Toulmin (1993), amongst others. In particular, the review by Adams (1990) highlights the way in which differing perceptions and cultural influences have shaped the debate, and how perceptions have changed over time. It is on the review by Adams that the rest of this section is largely based. When the term desertification was first used, by Aubréville in 1949, it was in a slightly different context from that in which it is generally used today. It referred to the conversion of tropical and sub-tropical forests into savannas, involving severe soil erosion, changes in soil properties and invasion by dryland plant species (Aubréville 1949, quoted in Adams 1990). Since then, perceptions of the problem,

DOES THE DEFINITION OF THE ISSUE MATTER? 139

its causes and effects, have evolved and become steadily more complex, although not more certain. Explanations concerning the local mismanagement of land originate from the period of European colonisation. For example, in the early decades of British and French colonial rule in West Africa there was concern that the southern limit of the Sahara Desert was moving inexorably forward. Shifting cultivation, burning, grazing and browsing, leading to removal of the natural vegetation cover, were initially seen as the main contributory causes, with variable rainfall as a subsidiary factor (Stebbings 1935, quoted in Adams 1990). When subsequent research found no evidence of either desert encroachment or a permanent reduction in rainfall (Jones 1938, quoted in Adams 1990), the emphasis shifted to a more general concern about soil erosion, a concern fuelled by stories of the American Dust Bowl. The main causes of soil erosion, at least in East Africa, were seen as continuous cropping without replacing nutrients, overgrazing, and increases in population forcing more intensive use of land that was marginal for agricultural production. With the severe drought in the Sahel region during the early 1970s, and again during the 1980s, the issue of desertification was brought into international focus. The same concerns as before were voiced, this time at the international level: that there was a steadily deteriorating situation caused by local mismanagement (overgrazing, overcropping), exacerbated by a decline in rainfall and rapid increases in population. These explanations were revised, extended and challenged in the light of contemporary perceptions and evidence. Old meteorological data and other evidence were examined for signs of trends and patterns. While the evidence that the Sahara Desert had been more extensive in prehistoric times was undeniable, there was no clear evidence of progressive desiccation over the past 100 years. Instead, the records showed the variability of annual rainfall, with intermittent periods of exceptionally wet years (especially between 1875 and 1895, and again in the 1950s) and of drought. Since the early European colonists arrived at the end of an exceptionally wet period, this is likely to have heightened their perception of a progressively deteriorating situation. Similarly, the relatively wet years of the 1950s may have made the impact of the drought in the late 1960s and early 1970s all the more marked. Some studies found evidence of weak oscillations between wet and dry periods, but the evidence was contradictory, and an attempt to predict the end of the Sahelian drought of the 1980s on the basis of previous patterns was unsuccessful. The use of aggregate data, in the form of annual rainfall records, to check for patterns was in any case criticised as meaningless in the context of the impact of drought on people. It could conceal a lack of rain at a period critical to plant growth, which might result in crop failure and famine even though the year overall was wet. Explanations for the variations in rainfall included making links with global climate models and their component factors, such as worldwide sea temperatures and currents, with implications for corresponding links with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the issue of global warming.


Other explanations of rainfall variation focused on more local causes. For example, it was suggested that the loss of vegetation in degraded dry areas increases the reflectance, or albedo, of the ground surface, so that the ground is less warm, less warm moist air rises, and fewer rain clouds form. But the evidence was inconclusive; for example, it was claimed that in some places the albedo of the natural desert vegetation was greater than that of bare ground. In addition, it was difficult to separate out the effects of vegetation on albedo from its effects on other factors such as soil moisture that would also affect soil temperature, convection currents and rainfall. Previous perceptions of mismanagement were challenged. For example, the concept of overgrazing was questioned on the basis that judgements about the land’s carrying capacity for stock are subjective. Carrying capacity has to be judged in relation to management objectives. A high stock density, although it may result in poor productivity per animal, can give greater productivity per unit area. It was suggested that administrators have tended to have an inbuilt bias against nomadic herding, since nomads cannot easily be controlled and taxed. In practice, indigenous pastoral systems may be well adapted to uncertain rainfall and dryland conditions. For example, herds often include browsing animals such as camels as well as grazers such as sheep and cattle, to take advantage of whatever vegetation is available, and in dry conditions herds are moved to where vegetation is more plentiful. Not all forms of so-called overgrazing are serious; some are easily reversed once conditions become more favourable. In some instances development solutions may have aggravated rather than ameliorated the problem of land degradation. For example the installation of bore wells encourages cattle to congregate in large numbers in their vicinity and disturbs traditional patterns of herd migration. Fencing the land and replacing natural vegetation with sown pasture can lead to a less resilient system, more susceptible to drought conditions. More political definitions of the problem blame the inequities involved in land tenure, international trade and Third World debt. Where powerful groups hold much of the better land, the options for people in more marginal areas as populations grow are restricted. They may be forced to practise continuous cropping instead of leaving some ground fallow for a period to allow it to recover. When export demands encourage farmers to devote more of their land to cash crops rather than to maintain a diverse cropping system, the farmers become more vulnerable to bad seasons and to crashes in commodity prices. Thus the doubts and debate that continue to surround the nature of the desertification problem, its causes and possible policy responses, allow plenty of political space for negotiation.


6.2 THE LEAD-UP TO THE CONVENTION The severe drought and resulting loss of life in the Sahel in the 1970s prompted international action to address the desertification problem, which was seen as one of the most pressing environmental issues at that time. At a United Nations Conference on Desertification held in Nairobi in 1977, a Plan of Action to Combat Desertification was adopted, and responsibility for its coordination assigned to the newly established United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP’s role was to stimulate regional and national action, assist in project design, suggest strategies for project finance, and promote research and training. The plan required national governments to establish or designate a government authority to combat desertification, assess desertification problems in their country, establish national priorities for action, prepare a national action plan, submit proposals for international support, and implement the national plan. However, a review of progress six years later showed that anti-desertification plans had been completed by only two of the more than 100 countries affected. Over the same six-year period, the amount that had been spent on combating desertification was estimated at about $US 7 billion, much of it being accounted for by infrastructure projects rather than desertification control. The special account established by the UN to receive voluntary donations to help finance anti-desertification projects had received less than $US 50,000. This compared with the $US 90 billion that UNEP had estimated in 1980 would be required to finance the implementation of the Plan of Action to Combat Desertification over 20 years. The Plan of Action was widely perceived to have had at the most only limited success. If anything, the problem of land degradation seemed to have become more serious. A review in 1990 identified the main shortcomings of the plan as a lack of focus, over-ambitious goals and lack of attention to socioeconomic factors (UNEP 1991). Other factors blamed were poor cooperation within the UN system, inadequate funding by governments and donors, and the low priority given to antidesertification measures within affected countries. The rural poor most immediately affected had little political clout, rural projects were difficult to identify, plan and implement and their impact was less visible than major infrastructural projects such as dams and roads. Governments faced more immediate short-term problems. The proposal for an International Convention to Combat Desertification came from the African states in the final run-up to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, otherwise known as the Earth Summit). At the time, Southern Africa was experiencing the worst drought on record, involving not only South Africa and Zimbabwe, but also large parts of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia. There was growing resentment among developing countries at the perceived Northern bias of the Earth Summit’s preparatory discussions, where attention centred on the conventions on climate change and biodiversity and the proposal for a Forests Convention. African


countries in particular protested at the lack of attention given to the environmental issues of most relevance to developing countries, such as desertification, which was repeatedly sidelined to make way for the heated debates about forests. In response to these protestations, the chairman of the working group that addressed both forest and land resource issues, Bo Kjellén of Sweden, agreed to give priority to a discussion of desertification at the last preparatory, or PrepCom, session. During this session, the African countries worked out a proposal for the inclusion of a chapter on desertification in UNCED’s Agenda 21, and subsequently, during the final UNCED negotiations, pressed hard for a Desertification Convention, in the hope that it would bring with it additional donor funding. This proposal was resisted at first by some countries, which argued that desertification could not be considered a ‘global’ environmental issue with causes originating outside the affected countries. But finally it was agreed that Agenda 21 should include a recommendation to the UN General Assembly to initiate international negotiations for a Convention on Desertification, with particular attention being given to Africa. Cynics saw this agreement as a trade-off between North and South, an agreement on desertification for one on forests (Panos 1994), but if so it was not a straightforward trade-off. Although the USA and the EC agreed to a Desertification Convention, there was no reciprocal agreement from the South on a global forests’ convention. At one point the EC did appear to offer support for a Desertification Convention provided that the African states could persuade Malaysia to drop its opposition to a Forests Convention, but this offer of support was subsequently withdrawn. In the end it was the USA that gave way on the desertification proposal first, apparently in response to all the environmental criticism it had received for failing to support the Biodiversity Convention and for holding out against clear dates and targets for stabilising greenhouse gas emissions in the climate change convention (Johnson 1993:110–11). The compromise was widely seen as a gift to the Africans, who had otherwise received little from the UNCED process (Chasek 1994:179). The fact that the Plan of Action to Combat Desertification was perceived to have failed, that the Desertification Convention was the first international agreement to be negotiated after the Earth Summit, and that it was proposed by the developing rather than the industrialised countries, all contributed significantly to the distinctive character of the convention. For example, the criticism of the Plan of Action for not giving sufficient attention to socioeconomic factors meant that they were considered legitimate topics for debate in the negotiations for the convention. Scientific and technical fixes were not as central to the debate as they might otherwise have been. The attention to socioeconomic considerations was reinforced by the principles agreed at the Earth Summit in the Rio Declaration, for example the emphasis on community participation and on eradicating poverty. Because it was a convention proposed by developing countries, questions of the inequalities between North and South, and the argument that environmental protection should not be at the cost of development, were prominent in the debate.


These influences were apparent in the guidelines set out for the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Desertification (INCD) in UN Resolution 47/188. They helped ensure that the debates were open and comprehensive, not dominated by scientific and technical matters. The emphasis was not just on targeting local people and local action, but on involving local people fully in decisions, respecting indigenous knowledge, and recognising the role of women. This local focus did not preclude discussions of broader socioeconomic issues. Questions of poverty, land tenure, international trade and Third World debt were all considered legitimate topics for debate, although some of the developed countries tried to exclude them. The person recommended by the UN General Assembly to chair the negotiations was Bo Kjellén, who had chaired the UNCED PrepCom session where desertification had been discussed. Interviewed before the convention’s negotiations began, he said that the desertification issue ‘is very much an example of the clear link between development and environment and it is an issue where the very notion of poverty is at the centre’ (CCF 1993). Thus the debate was as much about development problems as it was about environmental ones, to the point where some delegates questioned whether it was a legitimate topic for an environmental convention at all. 6.3 NEGOTIATING THE CONVENTION UN Resolution 47/188, passed by the General Assembly in December 1992, set a tight schedule for the negotiations and a deadline for governments to reach agreement on the adoption of a convention within 18 months, by June 1994. Responsibility for administering the negotiations was delegated to a specially appointed Secretariat, answerable directly to the General Assembly, not to the UNEP. This was a reflection of the growing disillusion of developing countries with UNEP, because they perceived it to be increasingly biased towards Northern environmental concerns. Stripping UNEP of a leading role in environmental negotiations and giving overall control to the UN General Assembly theoretically gives greater power to the developing countries, because they are in the majority, and places greater emphasis on development (Porter and Brown 1991:50–51). A preliminary session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee was held in New York in January 1993 to discuss the organisation of the negotiations. Delegates to that meeting elected Bo Kjellén as Chair, adopted the rules of procedure, established two working groups, and set the dates and venues for the five substantive negotiating sessions (the first from 24 May to 3 June 1993 in Paris, the second from 13 to 24 September 1993 in Geneva, the third from 17 to 28 January 1994 in New York, the fourth from 21 to 31 March 1994 in Geneva and the fifth from 6 to 18 June in Paris). A panel of experts was established to assist the Secretariat on technical, legal and other matters. It was multidisciplinary, including not only scientific and technical


experts but social scientists as well. There were 15 on the panel, representing all regions of the world. The panel was scheduled to meet roughly six weeks before each negotiating session. In addition, inter-agency meetings were planned to follow each meeting of the panel of experts. In previous multilateral environmental negotiations, the scope and magnitude of the problem, its primary causes, and the type of international action required to address the problem have been defined before the main negotiations, within a separate conference, within a committee of a UN agency or organisation, or within a special working group (IISD 1993, Chasek 1994). But in this case, for the first time, the information-sharing and issue-definition phase formed part of the first full negotiating session. While the panel of experts, the inter-agency working group and various national governments made suggestions to the Secretariat about possible formats for the convention before the negotiations began, they did not limit the scope of the initial debate. The first phase of the negotiations, identifying and defining the problem, and the second, exchanging statements of initial positions, took up most of the first session and part of the second. The scientific, technical, economic and social dimensions of the problem were all discussed, under seven headings: desertification, drought and the global environment; causes, extent and physical consequences; social and economic dimensions; pattern of existing assistance programmes, including those of NGOs; experience of existing programmes in developing countries; experiences of developed countries; and possible new strategies to promote sustainable development. Some delegations emphasised national and local level approaches to combating desertification such as capacity building. Others emphasised the need to deal with the international dimensions of the problem such as trade, commodity prices and debt. Several governments emphasised the importance of cooperation with NGOs. Although some delegations emphasised the degree of scientific and technical uncertainty surrounding the natural and socioeconomic causes and consequences of desertification, and the difficulties of arriving at adequate definitions, eventually there was consensus that enough was known to provide a basis for the convention’s negotiations. By the end of the first session, consensus was also reached on a number of other issues. There was general agreement on the need to reinforce local participation and action, involve NGOs, encourage the full participation of women, and recognise the contribution of indigenous technology and practices. The idea of national and sub-regional action programmes was also strongly supported, as was the need for improved research and development, data collection and analysis, exchange of information, and transfer and adaptation of technology. The main sticking point at this stage concerned the priority to be given to drafting a regional annex for Africa, relative to annexes for other regions. Some countries, notably Brazil and Mexico, argued that it would be difficult to persuade their governments to accept the convention unless annexes for regions other than Africa were drawn up at the same time, rather than being considered after the main


text of the convention had been adopted. There was also some controversy concerning the extent of international commitments. African countries and some other developing countries argued that the international commitments should be strong, whereas other countries argued that the commitments should come mainly from the countries affected. The second session was mainly devoted to a thorough reading of the ‘Compilation of Government Views, Statements and Drafting Proposals’, prepared by the Secretariat, to identify areas of convergence and divergence. The debate on definitions was brought to a close by agreeing to adopt the definitions to which most governments had already agreed at the Earth Summit. This was not without significance in that, whereas UNEP’s 1991 definition had stressed the role of human activities in causing desertification, the Earth Summit definition explicitly acknowledged the part played by climate, allowing the possibility of introducing arguments about climate change and thus shifting some of the responsibility to industrialised countries, as well as strengthening arguments about the truly global nature of the problem. It put developing countries in a stronger position to demand assistance from other countries, as predicted by Toulmin (1993). The debate about the global nature of the problem continued during the second session. The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) opposed references to desertification as a global problem. The EC wanted the convention to focus on specific desertification problems and to avoid general references concerning the eradication of poverty. The G 77 argued that desertification and drought should be considered a global problem in the broadest sense possible, acknowledging the wider social and economic causes. Eventually a compromise statement was agreed that was sufficiently ambiguous to encompass both positions. Instead of referring to it as a global problem, or saying ‘desertification and/or drought affects all continents and is thus a problem of global dimensions’ as in the first draft, the text said ‘Recalling that Agenda 21, Chapter 12, …recognizes desertification and/or drought as a problem of global dimension, in that it affects one-sixth of the world’s population and one quarter of the total land area of the world and requires a broad response’. In later sessions this was watered down, so that the final text reads ‘Acknowledging that desertification and drought are problems of global dimension in that they affect all regions of the world and that joint action of the international community is needed’. The third phase of the negotiations, negotiating and reaching consensus on the main body of the text (inserting and deleting brackets around contested words and phrases) continued throughout the third, fourth and fifth sessions. Unresolved issues at the end of the third session included the scope of the convention (whether or not it should cover international economic factors such as foreign debt, trade policies and poverty) and obligations and commitments (whether or not to include European Mediterranean countries among those affected, and rapidly developing countries such as Malaysia among the donors). The debate continued about the timing of completion of regional annexes other than that for Africa. There was also


debate about the need for establishing new international institutions to help implement the convention, resisted by developed countries on the grounds of cost. Apart from these contested areas, the negotiations were generally seen as cooperative and positive by delegates. Eventually, at the end of the fifth session, after three successive all-night negotiating sessions to resolve remaining difficulties, an agreed text (including regional annexes for Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the northern Mediterranean) was adopted within a few hours of the original schedule. The final text of the convention includes only the weakest of commitments on the part of donor countries to provide extra funding for combating desertification, and emphasises instead the need for better coordination and more effective use of existing funds. Developing countries have made a commitment to adopt more participative approaches, but there is no indication of how this is to be achieved. No clear targets or measures of progress on combating desertification have been agreed. Contentious issues such as terms of trade, and the links between industrialisation, global warming and drought, although mentioned in the text’s preamble, have not been tackled head on because it was argued that they are already the subject of other international negotiations. The text is thus general enough to allow everyone to sign up to it and vague enough to allow plenty of room for interpretation in its implementation. 6.4 NGOS’ ROLE DURING THE NEGOTIATIONS In agreeing to the proposal for a Desertification Convention, UN Resolution 47/ 188 specifically invited all relevant NGOs, especially those from developing countries, to contribute to the negotiations. NGOs wishing to participate could become accredited to the INCD simply by sending the Secretariat basic information about their organisation: a summary of the NGO’s purpose, evidence that their programmes and activities related to desertification, copies of annual reports, proof of their legal registration as a non-profit organisation, a list of their governing body members with their nationality, and a description of their membership (if any), its number and distribution. At the negotiating sessions, NGOs were provided with their own meeting room and access to computing, printing and photocopying facilities. The procedural rules for NGO involvement in the negotiations were similar to those for the Earth Summit, that is to say, NGO representatives were allowed to deliver statements at plenary sessions, and individual NGOs were allowed to make brief statements in the meetings of the two working groups with the permission of the chair. NGOs were also able to air their concerns and promote their views through a range of informal briefings and other meetings with government delegations and UN officials, and through daily editions of the NGO newsletter ECO. NGOs were allowed to send a representative to the meetings of the inter-agency group, which they did from the second session onwards.


More than 100 representatives from 48 NGOs attended the first session, held in Nairobi. Between the first and fifth sessions, the number of NGOs accredited with the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee almost doubled, increasing from 173 to 300. Many of those actively taking part were from Africa, and they included local grassroots NGOs who had never attended an international negotiating session before, let alone had the opportunity to play an advocacy role in such a forum. Initially Kenyan NGOs took the lead in coordinating NGO activity, not surprisingly, since the first session was held in Nairobi and Nairobi-based NGOs such as KENGO (Kenya Energy and Environment Organisations) and ELCI (Environment Liaison Centre International) are accustomed to working at government and UN agency level. KENGO and ELCI helped arrange accommodation and transport for NGO participants and set up a series of preliminary meetings in advance of the first session to begin to develop a joint NGO position. First KENGO held a meeting of Kenyan NGOs to feed into the preparations of Kenya’s official delegation, then they organised a three-day workshop for NGOs from all over Africa. Immediately afterwards, ELCI organised a two-day meeting with NGOs from both within and outside Africa, which resulted in a joint NGO statement on combating desertification that was delivered at a plenary meeting during the first session. This statement addressed the issues of biodiversity, climate change, the inequitable distribution of resources, and the impact of international trade, external debt and colonialism. It argued that programmes to combat desertification should be community-led, recognise the role of women and involve the use of appropriate technologies based on a mix of indigenous knowledge and modern science. Despite this promising start at developing a coordinated position, the first negotiating session resulted in heated discussions between African and non-African NGOs. Some representatives of African NGOs felt that NGOs from Asia, Latin America and Europe should be excluded from their meetings. When the official negotiations stalled over the priority to be given to the drafting of the different regional instruments, the NGOs divided on this issue along regional lines, with non-African NGOs supporting the position of their own countries. This rift on procedural matters reduced the opportunities for lobbying on more substantive issues and NGOs left the first session feeling that they had made little headway. To provide an opportunity for NGOs to share their experiences and agree concrete proposals before the second session of the negotiations, the INCD Secretariat, with funds from the Dutch Government, set up an NGO meeting in Bamako in Mali, which over 100 representatives from Asia, USA, Europe, Australia and Africa attended. Technical presentations by invited experts helped to brief the NGOs on the problems of drought and desertification, and case studies of NGO involvement in measures to combat desertification in different parts of the world were presented. The issues raised were then discussed in workshops and plenary sessions, which resulted in a set of proposals which formed the basis of subsequent NGO input to the negotiations. However, little attention was given to organisational matters such as developing a coordinated lobbying strategy or work


plan, so that in these respects NGOs attended the second session as ill-prepared as at the first. During the second session the NGOs began to make their presence felt among the official delegates, especially by means of their daily newsletter, ECO. But the lack of coordination remained a source of frustration among some NGOs. Even though the session was held in Geneva, few Northern NGOs attended and it became clear they did not consider the convention a priority, which was disheartening for those who did take part. After the second session the International Development and Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada decided to help NGOs to articulate their points of view more clearly. They organised regional workshops on various themes relating to the negotiations, such as traditional knowledge systems and structural adjustment programmes. These workshops allowed NGOs to share their experiences and position themselves on each of the issues. The third session marked a turning point for NGOs in that they became much better organised. On the basis of their experience gained during the first two sessions and with increased awareness of their shared goals, NGOs were able to agree a programme of action for lobbying delegates. Each NGO was assigned specific tasks to undertake. NGOs met with delegations from various countries and with intergovernmental organisations to put across their views. They attended the regional meetings of the African delegates and the G 77. Meetings with the Chairman and Executive Secretary helped clarify the procedures for NGO participation and gave NGOs the confidence to contribute to the negotiating sessions. On several occasions statements made by NGOs were fully endorsed by official delegations. To keep up the momentum between sessions, NGOs agreed to establish four working groups, one to address each of the major issues on the agenda for the following session. At the fourth session, NGOs felt they were able to make a real contribution to the negotiations. This view was supported by the praise they received for their efforts from several of the official delegations. Their suggestion that national desertification trust funds should be established and managed by representatives from government, donors, researchers and the community, as a way of channelling donor funds to where they were most needed, was picked up by delegates and developed further. During this session, the NGOs began to look ahead to the implementation of the convention and to plan among themselves the creation of an NGO desertification network. A task force was formed to work on ideas for this network for discussion during the fifth session. At the fifth session, NGOs concentrated on lobbying delegates to guard against watering down of the convention in the final stages. Proposals for the NGO desertification network were discussed further by the NGOs, in preparation for a meeting to establish the network to be held later in the year once the convention had been adopted. Overall, NGOs generally felt very positive about the negotiating process and the extent to which they had been able to influence decision making. More than


any previous international treaty, the text reflected a recognition by governments of the importance of involving local communities in designing and implementing environmental action programmes, and of the role that NGOs can play in achieving that involvement. It included more than 30 references to the contribution of NGOs and community-based organisations. NGOs were particularly pleased that their idea for the establishment of national desertification trust funds was mentioned in the final text. Despite these achievements, there was some disappointment among the Secretariat that the NGOs did not achieve more, given that the whole ethos of the convention and the way the issue was defined were made for NGO involvement. The larger international development and environmental NGOs were conspicuous by their absence, and the participation of Northern NGOs was limited. The majority of the NGOs that did attend lacked advocacy experience and it was not until about the third session that NGOs became sufficiently well coordinated to make an impression. Although the broad definition of the issue made it possible for NGOs to raise a wide range of concerns, including, for example, the question of reforms to land tenure, in some ways the vagueness and lack of focus made it difficult to make their voice heard and establish a recognisable NGO position. For the most part, NGOs were supporting the developing countries’ position and were raising points that at least some national delegates were also raising. While some developing countries were not too enthusiastic about increased community participation and NGO involvement in the implementation of the convention, the task of convincing them was made relatively easy by the support of other delegates for the NGOs’ role. Sensitive topics raised by NGOs were not allowed to be dismissed. For instance, when the Kenyan NGO KENGO, speaking on behalf of all the NGOs, raised the issue of land tenure reform, the Kenyan delegation responded with a warning that the convention should not interfere with national government policies. But at a subsequent briefing session, the convention’s executive secretary let NGOs know that arguments about national sovereignty, used to prevent debate about issues fundamental to the convention, demonstrated a country’s lack of commitment to the negotiating process and would be recorded as such. Thus in many ways the NGOs were pushing against an open door. In many respects the more important influence was not that of the NGOs on the negotiations, but the reverse—the influence of the negotiations on the NGOs. Especially for grassroots African NGOs, the negotiating process provided them with a valuable opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences, to establish friendships and networks, and generally to build up their capacity for both coordinated and individual action. The establishment of an NGO desertification network, called RIOD (Réseau International des ONG sur la Desertification), is one tangible outcome of this increased cooperation. With global, regional, subregional and national focal points to help disseminate information, RIOD should help ensure that the interaction and momentum achieved by NGOs during the negotiations are maintained.


6.5 NGOS’ ROLE OVER THE LONGER TERM While a detached assessment suggests that NGO influence on the negotiations was less than it might have been, partly because of the absence of the larger and more experienced international NGOs, this assessment fails to take account of NGO influence over the longer term. It can be argued that NGOs are at least partly responsible for the shift in thinking that distinguishes the Convention to Combat Desertification from the earlier international response, the Plan of Action to Combat Desertification. The whole philosophy underpinning the convention, for example, its emphasis on the need to adopt a more decentralised participatory approach and to build on indigenous knowledge, is one that international development NGOs, amongst others, have been promoting strongly to donor agencies and agricultural research organisations since at least the mid-1980s. It is a philosophy that has been well articulated in an influential series of books and other publications by Robert Chambers, amongst others (see for example, Chambers 1983, Chambers et al. 1989, Farrington 1988). The international NGOs have been able to reinforce this message by publicising the achievements of NGOs and community-based organisations working in the field at the grassroots. As a result, there has been increasing recognition by development banks and agencies of the strengths of NGOs compared with government organisations: for example, their willingness to work closely with local communities under difficult conditions, and the rapport and trust they are able to establish with the people they serve. The panel of experts appointed to advise the Secretariat for the Convention included people who were identified closely with this philosophy. For example, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), an international NGO based in the UK, was represented on the panel. IIED also provided advice and prepared discussion papers for the UK and the EC, as the basis for developing a shared understanding of the issues and establishing common positions. What remains to be seen is whether or not anything changes on the ground as a result of the convention. It is easy to underestimate the scale of organisational change required in many countries before the participation of local communities and farmers in decision making can come into effect. Grassroots NGOs such as those in Africa are now well placed to play an active part in the implementation of the convention. The worry is that far too much will be expected of them. Their resources may be so stretched that they will be unable to meet agreed objectives and thus risk a backlash against the involvement of NGOs. Donors still have to find mechanisms to handle large numbers of small initiatives rather than a few large ones, and may prefer to channel funds through apex NGOs that are not well attuned to grassroots needs. Resistance on the part of some governments to allowing NGOs a greater role still has to be overcome.


6.6 DISCUSSION In overall terms, the drafting of the Desertification Convention followed the formula agreed in UN General Assembly Resolution 44/228 that established UNCED: that developing countries would reorient their economic development policies to be more environmentally sound and that industrialised countries would facilitate this process by assisting with the transfer of technology and financial assistance (Chasek 1994:67). As described in IISD (1994), African countries came to the negotiating table with great expectations, hoping that they would receive additional resources. Non-African developing countries came with varying agendas: to ensure that their country’s desertification problems would be recognised and assistance offered, that agreements reached at the Earth Summit would be honoured, and that they would not be obliged to assist African states. The OECD countries came with the intention of resisting demands for additional resources on the grounds that existing resources could be used more efficiently. The G 77 representing the developing countries splintered into regional groups (Asia, Africa and Latin America) over the question of regional annexes and the priority to be given to Africa. Further splits in the position of the developing countries appeared over the question of whether or not rapidly developing countries such as Malaysia and Brazil should be included with developed countries among the donors. These splits served to weaken the developing countries’ bargaining position over the question of additional financial resources. The principal way in which definitions were manipulated to serve particular interests reflected this central concern about financial resources. This explains the protracted debate, begun at UNCED, about whether or not the problem should be defined as global. Various opinions appear in the literature about the characteristics of an environmental problem that warrant its description as global. Thus Porter and Brown (1991) base their definition on the scope of the environmental consequences and the geographic scope of the actors involved: ‘If the consequences are global, or if the actors in the issue transcend a single region, we consider it global’. Potter and Taylor, in the introductory paper to this volume, use a similar definition. On the basis of this definition, desertification would be considered a global problem. Keohane et al. (1993), while not referring to problems as global, distinguish between two classes of environmental problems that confront the international community. The first are those where direct harm is transmitted from one country to another, either affecting the country directly (a trans-boundary problem) or affecting a common resource (a commons problem). The second are those in which direct harm is only felt within national borders but which require international resources to help resolve them. On this basis, desertification would fall into the second category. Since opinions vary about the use of the term global, and it could justifiably be argued that indirect as well as direct causes and harm should be considered, there was plenty of scope for manipulation of this definition


so as to promote particular interests during the negotiations for the Desertification Convention. Implications concerning financial resources also underlay the debate about whether or not the convention should address possible indirect causes of desertification, such as international economic relations and climate change. Eventually the OECD managed to suppress this debate by arguing that these issues were already covered by other international negotiations. The rapidly developing countries were able to absolve themselves from making financial commitments by getting agreement to a definition of donor countries as equivalent to developed countries, rather than to ‘parties in a position to provide assistance’. Given the uncertainty surrounding the issue of desertification, there was relatively little political manipulation of definitions. Apart from the issue of financial support, generally speaking there were no strong national economic interests to be safeguarded, so there was relatively little to be gained from promoting particular definitions of the problem at the international level. The incorporation of the issue definition stage into the main negotiations during the first week provided the opportunity for a wide range of opinions to be aired, but that done, the proposal to leave definitions to the working group on scientific and technical matters, and subsequently to base key definitions on those used in previous international agreements, seems to have met little resistance. The regional annexes helped to accommodate differences in the way the problem was perceived. International agreement on a Desertification Convention was reached barely two years after the Earth Summit, even though the first proposal for a convention was only made at the final PrepCom meeting before the Summit. By contrast, there is as yet no agreement to begin negotiations on a Global Forests’ Convention, even though such a convention was first proposed two years before the Earth Summit and the proposal was vigorously promoted by developed countries throughout the Earth Summit negotiations. Examination of the literature on general theories of regime formation, as well as that on more specific factors that encourage international cooperation, can help to account for the relative ease with which a Desertification Convention was agreed. General theories on regime formation fall into three categories, those that are power-based, those that are interest-based and those based on cognitive factors, as summarised in Paper 4 in this volume. In the case of the Desertification Convention, straightforward power-based theories do not seem to apply, since it was the African states, which on any measure of power would normally be considered weak, that overcame the resistance of the USA and, to a lesser extent, the European Union to their proposal for a Convention. Even drawing the definition of power-based factors more widely, as Paper 4 does for tropical forests, to include the power that derives from the possession of environmental goods demanded by international society, a commitment to control land degradation on the part of African states confers little bargaining power. Although the biodiversity of dryland areas might have been used in this way as a bargaining device, it did not feature prominently in the negotiations either for the proposal for a convention or


for the convention itself. The attempted trade-off between forests and desertification might be interpreted as involving power-related factors, in which case the lack of power of African states over Malaysia and India might help explain why the attempt failed. Interest-based theories seem to have greater explanatory potential, although still leaving certain questions unanswered. African states certainly saw it as in their interests to negotiate a Desertification Convention, since they hoped it would bring with it a commitment from developed countries to provide them with additional funds. Unlike a commitment to protect forests, a commitment to combat desertification could not be construed by developing countries as a constraint to development and a threat to a sovereign natural resource. However, interest-based theories do not fully explain why the developed countries, especially those little affected by desertification, agreed to cooperate, except insofar as they may have given way in the face of accusations of a strong bias in favour of Northern interests in the overall balance of the outcomes of UNCED. This concession could be interpreted as being relatively harmless to Northern interests and worth making to ease relations with developing countries concerning other environmental issues. Although cognitive theories, ascribing international cooperation to the influence of authoritative knowledge, help to explain the successful negotiation of some international environmental agreements (as described in Paper 4 earlier in this volume), they do not seem to apply to the Desertification Convention, which has been agreed despite a remarkable lack of scientific consensus. Apart from these general theories about regime formation, other more specific factors have been suggested as promoting or hindering international cooperation in the management of environmental problems. These are examined below to see if they add to an understanding of why a Desertification Convention was relatively easy to agree. Several of the factors relate to the interest-based theories already mentioned, but they help account in more detail for the bargaining process. For example, since most international agreements depend on the parties involved reaching a consensus, rather than on a majority vote, a successful outcome depends on the negotiation of a ‘win-win’ situation, where all parties feel they have something to gain. Young (1989) refers to this as integrative bargaining, as opposed to distributive bargaining where each party attempts to get the best deal regardless of the cost to others. Agreement is thus less easy to achieve where there are clearly identifiable losers, for example, where proposals threaten significant economic interests or sovereign rights over natural resources. This helps explain why opposition at UNCED to the proposal for a global forests’ convention was fierce, whereas opposition to a Desertification Convention was relatively easily overcome. It also helps explain why the reform of land tenure was one of the more contentious issues raised during the negotiations for the Desertification Convention. Young (1989) suggests that international agreement is more easily achieved when the problem involves several different issues. These provide opportunities for the negotiating parties to trade off concessions on one issue against those on another.


While this appears to have been a factor at UNCED in the initial agreement to commence negotiations for a Desertification Convention, it was possibly less significant during the actual negotiating process. The main potential trade-off, that between a commitment to combat desertification on the part of the developing countries and a commitment to provide additional financial resources on the part of donor countries, was biased against developing countries since desertification was not one of the donor countries’ main environmental concerns. Young (1989) also suggests that international agreement is more easily achieved when the issue involves uncertainty about potential impacts, both of the problem itself and of alternative solutions. For example, in the case of acid rain it is relatively easy to identify the victims and villains. When there is little overlap between the two there is little incentive to reach agreement about managing the problem. In the case of radioactive fall-out from nuclear accidents, it is not clear in advance who might be affected so that it is in everyone’s interest to negotiate to prevent an accident. In the case of desertification, affected countries are readily identifiable so there is no obvious incentive for unaffected countries to enter an agreement, unless the boundary of the problem and its impacts is drawn more widely to include the potential of poverty and famine to lead to international destabilisation. It is more important that the negotiating parties feel that their concerns have been treated fairly and that the commitments proposed are equitable than that costs and benefits are allocated as efficiently as possible (Young 1989). In the negotiations for the Desertification Convention, the concession that an annex for each region should be drafted simultaneously, rather than an annex for Africa being agreed first and annexes for other regions being agreed after the convention had been adopted, probably helped fulfil this condition. Several authors suggest that international cooperation is more readily achieved if there is perceived to be a crisis, rather than a ‘creeping’ problem (Young 1989, Keohane et al. 1993, Litfin 1993). This is especially so if the impact is highly visible (Litfin 1993). While land degradation is a creeping problem, when redefined as ‘desertification’ it tends to be perceived as a crisis, especially in times of drought and famine. The widespread drought in Africa in the lead-up to UNCED almost certainly contributed to international agreement to negotiate a Desertification Convention. The lack of a similar crisis over the period of the actual negotiations may have meant that fewer concessions were made by donor countries than might otherwise have been the case. Conversely, Chasek (1994) has shown that crises arising over the negotiating period tend to slow negotiations down, presumably because they allow some parties to attempt to strike a tougher bargain than initially envisaged. Agreement is more likely if there is a specific deadline, especially one that is likely to attract politically embarrassing media coverage if it is missed (Chasek 1994, Mintzer and Leonard 1994). This appears to have been an important factor in forcing the USA and EC to agree to the proposals for a Desertification Convention in the final stages of the Earth Summit. It also forced agreement on several contentious issues, especially those relating to finance, in the last few days of the


negotiations for the Desertification Convention, even though the deadline in this case was not so publicly visible. Several authors consider that pressure from non-state actors, particularly environmental groups and transnational alliances of scientists, in conjunction with the media and the public, are of key importance in prompting governments to cooperate on environmental issues (for example, Keohane et al. 1993, Litfin 1993). However, in the case of the Desertification Convention it was the affected states themselves that took the initiative. One further factor in achieving international agreement is the existence of an effective leader and mediator (Young 1989, Chasek 1994). This role may be taken by a state, a non-governmental organisation or an individual. The leader needs to be skilled at brokering the overlapping interests of different parties and at inventing new institutional arrangements. Bo Kjellén certainly seems to have played a key role in overcoming barriers to agreement on the Desertification Convention, setting up informal consultations whenever the negotiations stalled, especially over the issue of the priority to be given to different regional annexes (Chasek 1994:193). In several respects the way the issue was defined provided NGOs with more opportunities to influence the outcome than at previous international negotiations. For example, because the lead was taken by the developing countries, there was far greater emphasis on cross-cutting issues such as trade and poverty than there had been in the conventions negotiated before UNCED. From the outset there was a recognition that the full involvement of local people would be essential to sustainable action to combat desertification. The practical experience of NGOs in working with local people was acknowledged and NGO representatives were invited to participate in the initial information-sharing session. But NGOs failed to take full advantage of the opportunities offered because most of those present lacked lobbying experience and were not well coordinated in the critical early stages. Haufler (1993) suggests that the relation between states and non-state actors in international negotiations tends to be of two forms. In the first, the state is dominant, using NGOs to provide ideas about practices and norms and to help in some aspects of implementation. In the second, the roles are reversed, or states and non-state actors play a relatively equal role in devising and implementing a regime. The NGO role in the Desertification Convention falls firmly into the first category. In part this is because that is the role that governments and intergovernmental organisations prefer NGOs to play (Finger 1994:186), and in part because of the lack of involvement of the large international NGOs based in the North. Finger (1994) suggests that the implicit UNCED model for NGO involvement is a lobbying rather than a consultative one. This favours wellorganised groups with experienced lobbyists and substantial resources such as the World Resources Institute (WRI), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which played little or no active role in the negotiations for the Desertification Convention. It may be that the virtually open-door policy that


operated for NGO participation at the Desertification Convention’s negotiations served the purposes of the official delegates well, since it provided a range of perspectives to draw on but reduced the likelihood of coordinated lobbying by NGOs on any substantive issues other than the need for the greater involvement of NGOs. As Finger (1994) has observed in the case of UNCED, and Rahman and Roncerel (1994:240) in the case of the Climate Change Convention, the main influence was that of the negotiating process on the NGOs rather than the other way round. NGOs that had previously operated in isolation at the local level were forced to forge alliances and acquire lobbying skills. If they can build on this experience, and if they can enlist the support of Northern NGOs and Northern publics, they should be able to use the convention to make progress on some of their main objectives. Working out ways to define the issue in terms that engage the attention and support of people in the North, and through them the commitment of politicians, will be critical to their success. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its Global Environmental Change Initiative and of the Open University is gratefully acknowledged. The information included in this paper about the negotiations for the Desertification Convention is derived from three main sources: attendance at the negotiations and ancilliary meetings, discussions with people involved, and documentation associated with the negotiations. One of us (Roger Mpande) attended most of the negotiating sessions, representing ZERO, as well as the main meetings of Southern NGOs, and drafted the official NGO submission for Southern Africa. The other (Susan Carr) attended the meeting of Northern NGOs held after the adoption of the Convention. We are particularly grateful for helpful discussions about the negotiations with the following people: Sylvia Jampies (UN NGO Liaison Officer), Heinz Greijn (Environment Liaison Centre International, Kenya, which is now designated as RIOD’s global focal point), Camilla Toulmin (International Institute for Environment and Development and member of the INCD Expert Panel), Bukar Hassan (Federal Environmental Protection Agency, Nigeria, and member of Nigeria’s official delegation to the INCD), and Enoch Okpara (NGO participant from the Nigerian Environmental Study/Action Team, which is now designated as RIOD’s regional focal point for West Africa). Documentation referred to includes the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and the NGO newsletters (ECO) published during the negotiations, the first to ninth Circular on Desertification published by ELCI, and draft and final versions of the Convention.


REFERENCES Adams, W.M. (1990) Green Development, London, Routledge. CCF (1993) The Independent Sector’s Network, Number 22, January 1993, Geneva, The Centre for our Common Future, p. 14. Chambers, Robert (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First, Harlow, Essex, Longman. Chambers, R., Pacey, A. and Thrupp, L.A. (eds.) (1989) Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research, London, IT Publications. Chasek, Pamela S. (1994) ‘From Stockholm to Rio: An Analysis of 20 Years of Multilateral Environmental Negotiation in the United Nations System’, Ph.D. thesis, The Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC. Conca, Ken and Lipschutz, Ronnie D. (1993) ‘A Tale of Two Forests’ in Ronnie D.Lipschutz and Ken Conca (eds.) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press. Douglas, Mary (1975) ‘Environments at Risk’ in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 230–48. Farrington, John (1988) ‘Farmer Participatory Research: Editorial Introduction’ (Farming Systems Series—No. 10), Experimental Agriculture, Vol. 24, pp. 269–79. Finger, Matthias (1994) ‘Environmental NGOs and the UNCED Process’ in T.Princen and M. Finger (eds.) Environmental NGOs in World Politics, New York, Routledge, pp. 186– 213. Grainger, Alan (1990) The Threatening Desert: Controlling Desertification, London, Earthscan. Grove-White, Robin (1992) ‘Human Identity and the Environment Crisis’ in Ian Ball, Margaret Goodall, Clare Palmer and John Reader (eds.) The Earth Beneath: A Critique of Green Theology, London, SPCK, pp. 13–34. Grove-White, Robin and Szerszynski, Bronislaw (1992) ‘Getting behind Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Values, Vol. 1 pp. 285–96. Haufler, Virginia (1993) ‘Crossing the Boundary between Public and Private: International Regimes and Non-state Actors’ in Volker Rittberger (ed.) Regime Theory and International Relations, Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. 94–111. IISD (1993) Earth Negotiations Bulletin Vol 4 No. 22, Winnipeg, International Institute for Sustainable Development. IISD (1994) Earth Negotiations Bulletin Vol. 4. No. 55, Winnipeg, International Institute for Sustainable Development. Johnson, Stanley P. (ed.) (1993) The Earth Summit: The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), London, Graham and Trotman. Keohane, Robert O., Haas, Peter M. and Levy, Marc A. (1993) ‘The Effectiveness of International Environmental Institutions’ in Peter M.Haas, Robert O.Keohane and Marc A. Levy (eds.) Institutions for the Earth, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 3–24. Litfin, Karen (1993) ‘Ecoregimes: Playing Tug of War with the Nation-state’ in Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Ken Conca (eds.) The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 94–117. Mintzer, Irving M. and Leonard, J.A. (1994) ‘Visions of the Past, Lessons for the Future’ in Irving M.Mintzer and J.A.Leonard (eds.) Negotiating Climate Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 321–34. Mortimore, Michael (1993) ‘The Sahel’ in Gunnar Sjostedt (ed.) International Environmental Negotiation, California, Sage, pp. 149–70.


Panos (1994) Panos Media Briefing No. 8, updated June 1994, London, Panos. Porter, Gareth and Brown, Janet Welsh (1991) Global Environmental Politics, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press. Rahman, Atiq and Roncerel, Annie (1994) ‘A View from the Ground Up’ in Irving M.Mintzer and J.A.Leonard (eds.) Negotiating Climate Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 239–73. Toulmin, Camilla (1993) Combating Desertification: Setting the Agenda for a Global Convention, London, International Institute for Environment and Development. UNEP (1991) ‘Status of Desertification and Implementation of the United Nations Plan of Action to Combat Desertification’, Nairobi, UNEP. UN General Assembly (1994) Elaboration of an International Convention to Combat Desertification in Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa. Final Text of the Convention. A/AC.241/27, United Nations, New York. Wynne, Brian (1982) Rationality and Ritual: The Windscale Enquiry and Nuclear Decisions in Britain, Chalfont St Giles, Bucks, British Society for the History of Science. Young, Oran R. (1989) ‘The Politics of International Regime Formation: Managing Natural Resources and the Environment’, International Organization, Vol. 43, pp. 349– 75.

Index

accountability, 28, 39, 44, 46, 54 acid rain, 154 Adams, W.M., 136, 137, 138 adat law, 16 Agarwal, Anil, 94; and proposals on UNCED forests debate, 94, 95 agency and structure, 3 agenda setting, 2, 26, 30, 45, 57–57, 109– 17, 136, 141, 142, 143–58; see also policy process agro-ecological potential, 45 albedo, 139 alliances (NGOs), 6, 29; longer term NGO collaboration style, 70; see also coalitions; networking; networks American Dust Bowl, 138 Amnesty International, 10, 11, 41 appropriate technologies, 146 Asahan River, 16, 17, 18 ASEAN: alliance of timber producing states in, 78 Asia, 9, 145, 146, 147, 151 Asian Development Bank, 12, 18 Asian NGO Coalition (ANGOC) Asia-Pacific Peoples Environmental Network (APPEN), 20, as NGO information bridging organisation, 70 Assam, 10 assistance programmes, 144 Aubréville, A., 138 Audobon Society, 93 Australia, 147

Austrian timber labelling scheme, 71–7, 75 authoritarian political context, 4, 9 autonomous organisation(s), 54, 56 Bakun Dam: and exclusion of NGOs from decisionmaking, 79 Bangalore, 29 Bapedal, Indonesia, 19 bargaining, distributive, 86, 101, 153 bargaining, integrative, 86, 101, 153 bargaining power, 151, 152, 153 Barisan Nasional, 127 Batak people, 16 Belcher, M., 12 biological diversity (biodiversity), 14, 59, 141, 142, 146, 152 Bogor, 12 Boro river, dredging, 53 (map) Botswana, 5, 35–62; closed policy network, 57; Department of Water Affairs, 49, 50; diamonds, 49; drought, 141; EC beef quota, 49, 50; fencing, 45, 47–48; New Agricultural Policy, 45, 47–48; paternalistic developmentalism, 47, 55; Tribal Grazing Land Policy, 48; welfare provision, 47 Brazil, 85; and desertification convention, 144, 151; and global NGO rainforest dissensus, 69; harassment of NGOs, 74;

159


local and US NGO joint campaigning, 67, 76, 131 Bretton Woods institutions, 38 Brown, J.W., 86, 102, 143, 151, 158 Bruenig, E.F., 121, 123 Bulawayo, 45, 46, 50–6, 52 (map), 54 bumiputera, 129 business enterprise/capitalist enterprise, 2, 15 campaigning, issue-based, 41 ‘Campfire’ programme/projects, 44, 49, 55, 56, 57; ‘Campfire’ Co-ordinating Group (CCG), 48, 55, 57, 57 Canada, 16 capacity building, 144 carrying capacity of land, 139 cash crops, 140 cattlepost system, 46, 57 Central Investment Co-ordinating Board, Indonesia, 16 Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), 94, 94 Chambers, R., 149, 156 Chasek, P.S., 142, 143, 150, 154, 154, 156 Chile, 28 Chipko movement, 2 Christiansen, L., 41 civil rights, 39, 44 civil society, 2, 37, 43; weak in Botswana, 40, 44, 47 Clark, J., 41 class, 7 Climate Action Network (CAN): as information NGO bridging organisation, 70; financial support for Southern NGOs, 74 climate change, 136, 141, 145, 146, 151, 155, 156, 158; see also global warming; and deforestation, 101–9; and greenhouse gas emissions, 142 coalitions, 6; instrumental NGO collaboration style, 70;

see also alliances, networking; networks collaboration, 5, 41, 42, 43, 47, 49, 57, 58 colonialism, 138, 146 commercial farmland, 45 commercial ranching, 46 commodity prices, 140, 144 commons problem, 126–4, 151 communal areas, 49 communal institutions, 46 communal lands, 45, 46–9, 47–48, 54 communal tenure, 45, 46 communities, forest/indigenous, 14, 16, 21, 29, 70, 130 community-based resource management, 44, 45, 48–2, 57, 57 community-led programmes, 146 comparative advantage (of NGO activities), 42 comparative politics/comparative analysis, vii, 7 complementary activities, 42, 43, 47, 49, 52, 55, 58 complementing the state, 41 Conca, K., 136, 156 confrontation, 5, 42, 44, 47, 50, 52, 55, 58 consciousness-raising, 5, 42, 44 conservationists, 56 Consortium for Action to Protect the Earth ’92 (CAPE ’92), 93 constraints and opportunities, 3 continuous democracies, 39 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 91, 142 Convention on Climate Change, 91 Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD), 6, 59, 136–66; regional annexes to, 144, 145, 151, 152, 154, 154; see also International Negotiating Committee on Desertification cooption, 44; risk of, 41, 58 ‘creeping’ problem, 154 CS First Boston Corporation, 19 cultural influences, 136, 137–6

INDEX 161

Cs, four (collaboration, complementary activities, confrontation, consciousnessraising), 42 De Beers, 50 debt, 140, 142, 144, 145, 146 debt-for-nature swaps: facilitated by NorthSouth NGO networks, 66; and North-South NGO divisions, 69 deforestation, 14; costs of, 100–8; and demand for fuelwood, 21; and global warming, 101–9; see also forest conversion; tropical forests democracy, 35–62; alternative models of, 37; definition of, 4–5; features of, 37–40; liberal democratic model of, 37; multi-party, 37; one party model of, 38; socialist, 37 democratic political context, 4, 9, 28, 29 democratisation, 5, 7, 38, 57 desert encroachment, 138 desertification, 59, 136–66; see also land degradation; soil erosion desertification trust funds, 148 developmentalism, 57 Dharwad District, India, 24, 25 ‘Diamonds are for Death’ campaign, 50 dipterocarp forests, 117, 122 direct advocacy, 41 Donnelly, J., 87 donors, 56, 80–7, 148, 149, 150; donor community, 38; and Tropical Forestry Action Programme, 89, 90 Dowding, K., 41 drought, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 145, 147, 154, 158 drought alleviation, 43 dual grazing rights, 46 Earth First!:

1992 Malaysian campaign, 76 ‘Earth Summit’ see United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Eccleston, B., 55–9; categorisation of NGO coordination methods, 93 Eckholm, E., 21 ECO (NGO newsletter), 146, 147, 156 econocentric ideology, 127 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 6 economic liberalisation, 38 Edwards, M., 41 entryism, 41, 42 Environmental and Energy Study Institute, 92 Environmental Defense Fund, 93 environmental goods, 152 environmental impact, 46 Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), 43, 57, 59 Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Regulations, Indonesia, 18 Environmental Protection Society Malaysia (EPSM), 121 environmental politics literature, 7 environmental problem, 2, 109–17; definition of, 2 Environment Liaison Center International (ELCI), 94, 146, 156 epistemic communities, 86–3, 101–9 eucalyptus plantations, 25, 123 Europe, 138, 145, 146, 147, 152 European Community (EC), 49, 152 European Rainforest Movement (ERM), 19; and Austrian labelling scheme, 71 fencing, 139–7; Botswana, 45, 47–48, 54 FEVORD-K (Federation of Voluntary Organisations for Rural Development, Karnataka), 24, 28, 29 Finger, M., 155, 156 flood recession agriculture, 49


Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 22, 88–6, 91; role in creation of Tropical Forestry Action Programme, 88 food security, 43 forest access rights, 118, 127 forest conversion, affecting livelihoods in Sarawak, 122, 130; biodiversity loss, 114, 117–4, 130; climate change, 115–3, 130; competing frames of, 111–18, 119–6; deforestation and degradation, 109–17; fire, 115; incorporating into policy agendas, 109– 17; water management in Sabah, 114; see also deforestation; tropical forests Forestry Advisers Group, 90 Forest Stewardship Council, 97, 99–7, 102– 11; Founding Assembly of, 99; institutional arrangements of, 99 Fowler, A., 42 Friends of the Earth (FoE), 19, 102; and Forest Stewardship Council, 100; and WALHI, 29; as international NGO, 29, 71; position on negotiation of International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1994, 97; position on UNCED forests debate, 93, 94; timber labelling proposal to the ITTO, 91, 99

cemented by North-South NGO collaboration, 65; interlinked national civil societies, 68; see also ‘world civic politics’ global climate models, 139 global environmental agenda, 136 Global Environmental Change Initiative (UK), 6 Global Environmental Change Programme at the Open University (GECOU), 6 global environmental issue/problem, 2, 141, 145, 151 Global Forests Convention, 6; arguments against, 94–94; proposals for, 91–8, 141, 142, 152, 153 global politics, 30 global warming, 101–9, 139, 145; see also climate change GOLKAR, 10 good governance, 38 Grainger, A., 137, 156 grassroots level, 42, 89 Green Fridge, 42 Green Globe Yearbooks, 9 Greenpeace, 41, 42, 49, 50, 50, 56, 100; and Forest Stewardship Council, 100; Greenpeace (Austria), 71 Grindle, M., 2 Group of 7 developed countries (G7), 4, 91 Group of 77 developing countries (G77), 4, 145, 151; UNCED forests debate draft proposal, 91, 92, 94, 95, 125 Gunby, D., 52

Gambia, The, 39 gap-filling, 43, 55 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 4 Gennino, A., 12 Gleditsch, N., 9 global capitalism, 5, 29 Global Coalition for Africa, 38 Global Forest Working Group, 93 global civil society, 6; cemented by NGO collaboration, 64–9;

Haas, E.B., 86 Haas, P.M., 85, 86–3, 101, 102 Hanoi, 13 Harihar Polyfibres Ltd, 25 Haufler, V., 100, 154, 156 human rights, 38, 76, 130 Huntington, S., 7 IDS (India Development Service), 25 IGOs (intergovernmental organization), 2; as site for NGO collaboration, 64; constrained by nation states, 67

INDEX 163

implementation see policy process India, 2, 5, 10–11, 152; democracy in, 10; Eight Five Year Plan, 26; government, 20; National Forest Policy, 22; Seventh Five Year Plan, 22; Supreme Court of, 25 indigenous: knowledge, 59, 142, 144, 146, 149; pastoral systems, 139; seed research, 43; technology, 144, 146 Indonesia, 5, 10–11, 12, 14–20; activation of NGO partners in the US, 76; divisions civilian/military politicians, 79; exports—timber and rattan, 15; government, 10, 14, 15; harassment of NGOs, 74; Indonesia Legal Aid Association, 18, 19; logging concessions/concessionaires, 15; Ministry of Forestry, 14, 15; Ministry of Industries, 18; Ministry of Population and the Environment, 18; pulp and paper industry, 15; significance of externally funded forest projects, 63; state-business nexus, 28; students, 19 Indonesian Secretariat for the Development of Human Resources in Rural Areas (INDHRRA), 12 influence: definition of, 2 insider group, 41 institutional innovations, 43 interest group research, 3 interest groups/’demand groups’, 28 intergenerational equity, 4 Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Desertification (INCD); accreditation, 145; Panel of Experts, 143, 144, 150, 156; participation of Northern NGOs, 147, 148, 155; procedures for NGO participation, 147;

proposal for desertification trust funds, 148; Secretariat, 142, 143, 144, 145, 145, 147, 148, 150; see also Convention to Combat Desertification International Campaign for Ecological Justice in Indonesia, 19 international conventions and protocols, 6 international destabilisation, 154 International Development and Research Centre (IDRC), 147 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 93, 150, 156 international interests, 58 international organisations, 55 international trade, 136, 140, 142, 144, 145, 145, 146, 154; in tropical timber, 87, 91, 98, 99, 100 International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1983, 90, 97, 102 International Tropical Timber Agreement, 1994, 6, 97–5; North-South disputes over widening mandate of, 97–5, 125 International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO), 4, 6, 90–7, 97–5; mission to Sarawak, 123, 128; NGOs on national delegations to, 91 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), 50, 90–7, 102–10, 155, 130; drafting of the ITTO’s biodiversity guidelines, 91, 102; intervention in the negotiations for the International Tropical Timber Agreement,, 90, 102; national delegations to the ITTO, 91 interpenetration of economic and political interests, 129, 131 Irian Jaya, 12 irrigation, 49 issue: definition of, 2 issue linkage, 116, 130, 141, 142, 145, 152, 153–2 issue-specific hegemony, 85, 87


Jakarta, 12, 15 Japan, 15; as model for environment policy, 126; tropical timber in construction, 127 Java, 12 Joint Forest and Planning and Management (JFPM), Karnataka, 22–28 Kalimanton, 12 Karnataka, 11, 20–28; Forestry Department, 12, 24–28 Karnataka Pulpwood Ltd, 25 Kashmir, 10 Kaunda, K., 38 Kelompok Studi Pengembangan Prakarsa Masyarakat (KSPPM), 16, 19, 29 Kenya, 40, 146, 149, 156 Kenya Energy and Environment Organisations (KENGO), 146, 149 Keohane, R.O., 85, 88, 101, 151, 154, 154, 156 kgotla meetings, 40, 44, 50, 54 Kittiko Hachchiko (Pluck and Plont), 25 Kjellén, B., 141, 142, 143, 154 Klandermans, P.B.: and NSMs in Europe, 72–8; on adversity solidifying NGO networks, 79 Knoke, D.: NSM networks in US civil rights campaigns, 73 Kochanek, S., 28 Korea, 16 KRAPP (Indonesian Pesticides Action Network), 12 Krasner, S.D., 85 Kripa A.P., 30 Labat Anderson, 19 Lake Toba, 16 land conservation, 46 land degradation, 46, 137, 139, 141, 152, 154; see also desertification; soil erosion land tenure, 47, 48–2, 52, 59, 140, 142, 148, 149, 153;

private, 45, 49; communal, 45, 46 Latin America, 145, 146, 151 legitimacy, 41 Lesotho, 141 Levy, M.A., 101 liberal democratic consensus, 39 Lipschutz, R.D., 136, 156 Litfin, K., 85, 101 lobbying, 42, 95, 9 lobbying strategies, 102, 146, 147, 148, 154, 155 Macandrews, C., 29 Malayan Nature Society (MNS), 121, 123, 130–8; protecting scientific mission, 70; and risks of global collaboration, 80 Malaysia, 6, 145; and desertification convention, 142, 151, 152; divisions between federal and local state governments, 79; harassment of NGOs, 74; opposition to forests convention, 142; significance of internally funding forest projects, 63, 80–7 Mali, 147 Mankin, B.: and proposals on UNCED forests debate, 94, 94, 95 Matebeleland, 50, 54 Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP), 46, 50–6, 55, 56, 57–57, 58 Matebeleland Zambezi Water Trust (MZWT), 52, 58 Maun, 50 (map), 50 Mauritius, 39 Medan, 19 media, 52, 76; independent, 40, 50 Mediterranean countries, 145, 145 Mexico, 144 mismanagement, perceptions of, 138, 139 Mobil Oil, 44 mobilisation, 38, 42 modernisation theories, 7

INDEX 165

Molutsi, P., 40 Mortimore, M., 137, 156 Moyo, S., 41 Mozambique, 141 Mpande, R., 52 multi-party elections, 37, 38, 39, 44, 54 multi-party democracy, 37; Botswana as example of, 39 multi-partyism, 39, 54 multi-party system, 55 Myers, N., 14, 102 Mysore Relief and Development Agency (MYRADA), 11 Narain, S., 94 National Wildlife Federation, 93 Natural Resources Defense Council, 93 Ndebele, 52; political leaders, 52 neo-liberal economics, 57 network analysis, vii networking, 92; random NGO collaboration style, 70; see also allicances; coalitions; networks networks, 6, 96; more active NGO collaboration style, 70; see also alliances; coalitions; networking New Agricultural Policy, Botswana, 45, 47– 48; 1990 consultative conference, 48 NGOs: apex, 150; definition of, vii–2, 11; desertification network, 48, 148, 149; grass roots, 146, 149, 150; Northern, 5, 42, 94, 147, 148, 155; Southern, 2, 5, 94 nomadic herding, 139 non-governmental organisations see NGOs non-governmental regimes, 100, 102–11 North Sumatra, 12, 16–20, 29 North-South uneven development, 5

Nyerere, Julius, 38 Okavango (Delta), 46, 49, 50 (map), 50, 56 Okavango Wild Life Society (OWLS), 49 one-party states, 37; Zimbabwe virtual example of, 39 onion-skin strategy, 42–5 opposing the state, 41 opposition, 41, 52 opposition party, 39, 44 Orapa, 53 (map) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 145, 150, 151; Development Assistance Committee, 38 Osherenko, G., 86 overgrazing, 46, 138, 139 Overseas Devlopment Administrative (UK), 26 pancasila, 28 participation, 142, 144, 147, 148, 150, 155; people’s, 38; political, 38, 39, 40, 43, 48, 55 passive resistance, 41 Payne, R., 9 Pearce, F., 97 Penan, 121, 130–8 perceptions, 137, 138, 139 Pesticides Action Network (PAN): as NGO collaboration site, 66 Philippines, 28 Plan of Action to Combat Desertification, 140–8, 142, 149, 158 pluralism, 10, 28, 38 plurality, 40 policy analysis, 2 policy network approach, 41 policy process, 2, 26, 109–17; 26, 27, 45, 48, 57–57, 109, 123, 155; policy choices, 2, 26, 45, 57–57; stages, 45, 57–57; see also agenda-setting implementation policy-making processes, 41, 86 policy-making system, 56 political conditionality, 38, 76 political parties, 137, 28


political rights, 39 political space, 56 politico-administrative elite, 40, 54, 57 Poore, D., 122 Porter, G., 86, 92–9, 102, 143, 151, 158 Potter, D., 41, 151 poverty, 142, 143, 145, 154, 154 power centres: alternative, 40; diversity of, 39, 43; internal plurality of, 44, 54 private enterprise, favourable environment for, 39 privatisation, 46, 46, 57 productivity, 46 Pt Inti Indorayon Utama Ltd, 16 Punjab, 10 radioactive fall-out, 154 Rahman, A., 155, 158 Rainforest Action Network, 19 Raja Garuda Mars Group, 16 rangeland, 47 Rasheed, S., 38 reforming the state, 41 regime theory, vii, 84–87, 98–9, 137; cognitive theories, 86–3, 101–9, 152; interest-based theories, 86, 100–8, 152, 153; power-based theories, 85–2, 98, 152, 153 regime formation, 152, 155 regimes, issue-dense and issue-specific, 87 regional workshops: for NGOs, 149, 156 Réseau International des ONG sur la Desertification (RIOD), 149, 156; see also networks; NGOs desertification network resources, over-exploitation of, 46 Roberts, R., 90 Roncerel, A., 155, 158 Rose, C., 41, 42 Rosenau, J.N., 98 Rowlands, I., 94 Ruggie, J.G., 84–85 rule of law, 39 Sabah:

1992 log export ban, 128 Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM), 71, 74, 121, 122, 130; and the risks of global collaboration, 80; critic of Austrian labelling scheme, 71–7; Sarawak campaigns leadership resented, 77 Salim, E., 18 Samaj Parivarthana Samudaya (SPS), 25 Sarawak: 1958 Land Code, 130; dependency on Penisula Malaysia, 127; disputing indigenous Dayak status, 130; economic role of timber, 128–6; global visibility for NGO campaigns, 78; ITTO mission to, 123, 128; power of political elites, 78–4 satyagraha, 6 Sayer, J., 90 scaling up, 42 scientific community: working with NGOs, 65 scientific uncertainty: and epistemic communities, 130–9; over biodiversity loss, 117–4; over declining forest food supplies, 114; over desertification, 136, 137–7; over forest regeneration, 122; over Sabah water problems, 114; over selective cutting damage, 120 Scudder, T., 50 security of tenure, 46 settlers, 45 shifting cultivation, 138, 114; disputes about links to deforestation, 120–8 Sierra Club, 93, 97 Sirsi, 11, 27 SKEPHI (NGO Network for Forest Conservation, Indonesia), 12, 16, 19, 28, 29; support from global friends, 77, 80 SKREPP (NGO Network against Pollution), 12 Snidal, D., 85 social forestry, 22 social movement/environmental movement, 2, 64, 72–8

INDEX 167

soil erosion, 138; see also desertification; land degradation South Africa, 40, 49, 50, 141 South East Asia, 57 Southern Networks for Development (SONED), 94 Southern Okavango Integrated Water Development Project (SOIWDP), 45, 46, 49–4, 50 (map), 55, 56, 57 Spandana Semaja Seva Samudaya, 11 Spivy-Weber, F., 93 state, 4, 5, 21; capacity of, 55, 56–57, 57; centralised, 40; nation-state, 2, 2, 4, 30 Stoneman, C., 39 structural adjustment, 38, 57, 147 structural theories, 7 structure, 3; of power, 5 Suharto, President of Indonesia, 15 Sukanto Tanoto, 16 Sumatra see North Sumatra sustainable development, 144, 154 Sverdrup, B., 9 Swaziland, 141 Taib, M., 121, 129, 130 Tanjung, O., 12 Tanzania, 39 target institution or organisation, 2, 42, 58 Taylor, A., 151 theories of democratisation, vii theories of international relations, vii third world debt, 66, 69, 127, 131, 140, 142, 144, 145, 146 Thomas, J., 2 Timber Trade Federation (UK): and WWF’s 1995 target, 98 Toulmin, C., 137, 145, 156, 158 tourism, 49 traditional knowledge systems, 142, 144, 146, 149 TRAFFIC International, 97 transboundary problems, 151 transition theories, 7

transmigration scheme, 14 transnational business organisations, 4 transnational power, 7 transparency, 39 Tropical Forestry Action Plan see Tropical Forestry Action Programme Tropical Forestry Action Programme (TFAP), 6, 87, 88–6; Bellagio meeting 1987, 88; Consultative Group debate, 89–6 tropical forests, 86, 89, 91, 92, 97, 138, 152; see also deforestation; forest conversion Tshomorelo Okavango Conservation Trust (TOCT), 46, 49, 50, 50, 55 Tunga Ahadra River, 20, 25 United Kingdom government, 41 United Nations: Commission on Sustainable Development, 96; Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 92, 96, 97; General Assembly, 92, 96, 137, 141, 142, 143, 150, 158; General Assembly Resolution 47/188, 142, 143, 145; General Assembly Resolution 44/228, 92, 150 United Nations Conference on Desertification, 140 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), 43, 57, 87, 141, 142, 145, 145, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 154, 155, 156; Agenda 19, 141, 145; arrangements for NGO participation in, 92; forest negotiations of, 91–96, 116, 124– 3; NGO networking, 62, 74–75, 79, 92– 96; North-South NGO divisions, 77, 93– 94; Preparatory Committee Decision 1/1 of, 92;


Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 142 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 90, 91, 97 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 88, 119 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 93, 116, 140, 141, 143, 145, 158 US Task Force on Global Forests, 93, 94 United States of America, 141, 154; Congressional Committees, 2; State Department, 10, 11 Uttara Karnada District, Karnataka, 11 veto coalition, 86; countered by NGO collaboration, 69 Vietnam, 13 village development committee (VDC), Botswana, 40 Village Forest Committees, Karnataka, 23– 28 WALHI (Indonesian Forum for the Environment), 12, 16, 18, 19, 28, 29; and Friends of the Earth, 29; and international campaigns, 71, 80 Wapner, P., 29 water development projects, large-scale, 57 water, sustainable management of, 46 Webb, M.C., 85 Western Ghats, 21 wetlands, 49 white commercial interests, 44 wildlife, 49, 50, 59, 114 Wahana Informasi Masyarakat (WIM), 12 women, role of, 142, 144, 146; in JFPM (Karnataka), 24, 28 Wong, J., 116, 122 World Bank, 2, 4, 29, 88, 90, 94, 119, 131; ‘greening’ of and NGO collaboration, 67; target in Brazilian rainforest campaigns, 76; and Tropical Forestry Action Programme, 88, 90 ‘world civic politics’, 29, 81; see also global civil society

World Conservation Union see International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resource World Forest Agreement Working Group, 92, 93 World Forestry Congress; Eighth Congress (1978), 21; Tenth Congress (1991), 90 World Rainforest Movement (WRM), 19, 89; as example of NGO alliance, 70; criticisms of TFAP, 89 World Resources Institute (WRI), 90, 102, 155; role in creation of TFAP, 88, 99; criticism of Indonesian National Forestry Action Programme, 89; criticisms of TFAP, 89; calls for establishment of TFAP Consultative Group, 89; on tropical deforestation and greenhouse gases, 116; suspends funding of TFAP activities, 89 World Trade Organisation, 4, 87 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 56, 97, 102, 155; and Forest Stewardship Council, 99; national delegations to the ITTO, 91; position on UNCED forests debate, 93– 94; promoting better collaboration within, 79; suspends funding of TFAP activities, 89; WWF (Malaysia), 70–6, 121, 123; 1995 target, 98 Worldwatch Institute, 9, 102 Young, O.R., 86, 153, 154, 154, 158 Zaire, 85 Zambezi, 45, 46, 50–6, 52 (map), 55, 56, 58; valley, 44 Zambezi Society, 44 Zambia, 141 ZANU(PF), 39, 49, 52 ZAPU: dissidents, 39, 52

INDEX 169

ZERO (Zimbabwe Environmental Research Organisation), 52, 52, 136, 155 Zimbabwe, 5, 35–62; alternative report to UNCED, 44; community-based resource management, 48–2; drought, 141; Land Tenure Commission, 48–2; liberation movement, 40; National Conservation Strategy, 43; 1995 election, 49 Zimbabwe Trust, 56

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