Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Aid and the environment
There is a wide range of forms and in the practice of aid: recipients may be
governments, bodies, groups of people or individuals. International agencies, NGOs,
individuals and groupings of governments may be donors. Sometimes donors
contribute aid directly to recipients, or it can be via an intermediary such as an NGO
or a UN body. When aid is government to government it is termed bilateral aid;

---

ECONOMICS
85
when several governments or an international organization have contributed it is
multilateral aid.
Frequently aid is tied or is conditional, i.e. requirements are attached to the
funding—a recipient may have to behave in a particular way or a percentage of the aid
must be used to buy goods and services from the donor nation. The latter arrangement
is known as ‘aid for trade provision’, and it is not unknown for obsolete, overpriced or
unsuitable goods or services to be traded (Hayter, 1989:21, 92). Aid may be in the
form of funding, foodstuffs or other supplies, sometimes training or secondment of
skilled manpower rather than donation of goods or funds. There are situations where
conditionality makes sense (environmental care or improvement may be a condition),
others where it is perceived as neo-protectionism or neo-colonialism, as an extra cost
and as a sign that there is a risk that support could be diverted. Environmental care is
increasingly a condition of aid (Keohane and Levy, 1996).
There has been criticism of some agencies’ aid policy for its impact on the
environment (Dinham, 1991; Hildyard, 1991). At the Earth Summit in 1992, Japan
offered more aid for the environment than any other nation, much tied to her export
or resources import policy and, according to Forrest (1991), has tended to support
large superprojects which have sometimes caused serious environmental impacts.
Aid may be well intended, but even providing roads can cause problems.
Environmentally benign aid is not easy to achieve. What to to a donor seems like
sensible safeguards to avoid unwanted environmental (and socioeconomic) impacts
may appear to a recipient to be excuses for more conditionality, delay and perhaps
loss of a portion of funding to pay for appraisals, safeguards and remedial measures,
and intrusion into sovereignty.
To combat global environmental problems will require considerable aid to poor
countries. At the Earth Summit richer nations were clearly reluctant to commit
themselves to the GEF, either for fear it would slow their economies or because they
wished to ensure tight control over how the aid was spent. The ‘democratization’ of
the USSR and its allies has meant less spending on arms and propaganda in both the
east and west but it may divert aid there which would have gone to developing
countries.
Academics and aid agencies have examined environmental (and socioeconomic)
aspects of aid, although surprisingly little has been published, given the huge sums
and considerable impacts involved (Linear, 1982; 1985; Adams and Solomon, 1985;
Hayter, 1989). Hayter (1989:83) listed a number of reasons why this might be.
Agencies have developed environmental guidelines and have staff to assess impacts
prior to granting assistance. For example, the World Bank established an Office of
Environmental Affairs in 1970 (Warford and Partow, 1989), and the UK Overseas
Development Administration (now the DFID) established environmental appraisal
procedures (ODA, 1984; 1989a; 1989b).

---

CHAPTER FIVE
86