Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Environmental management: problems and needs
Westerners have tended to see themselves as being at war with nature, rather than
seeking to understand it and then trying to exist within its constraints. The environment
was to be ‘tamed’, and unspoilt lands were ‘wastelands’. Since the 1930s the last
land frontiers have been closing, and unsettled areas capable of giving a good
livelihood are increasingly difficult to find. By the mid-1960s the limitless world
was seen to have shrunk to Spaceship Earth, a finite and delicate system which must
be taken care of if it is to support humanity. The Gaian viewpoint goes further,
regarding the Earth as a system which, if upset by careless development, might adjust
in such a way as to make current lifestyles impossible or even eliminate humans.
Environmental management therefore faces complex environmental challenges
which may reach crisis level within fifty years. It will have to cope with these in the
face of growing human population, increasing poverty, likely social unrest, and
perhaps natural disasters. Anticipatory action seems to hold most promise, and people
will have to be involved more than has been the case with planning and management
in the past. How will environmental management achieve its policy goals? Through
a mix of moral pressure, the spread of appropriate ethics, and by ensuring economics,
business and law are sufficiently sensitive to the needs of the environment.
Environmental management will need to make use of education and the media to
alter social attitudes so that there is an acceptance of a new ethics. It will also have to
draw upon other fields to achieve its goals, and must have effective institutions.
Manuals, guides, checklists, conventions and agreements can help guide the
identification of goals and preparation of action plans and their implementation.
The reductionist approach of splitting problems into component parts for
study and solution lies at the core of western rational, scientific study. Some feel a
holistic ‘overall view’ approach should replace ‘compartmentalized and inflexible
science’; I feel that is a mistake—there is a need for both (Risser, 1985; Savory,
1988; Atkinson, 1991a:154; Rapoport, 1993:176).
Environmental management involves a series of decisions (Figure 2.2). How
these are made depends on whether a technocratic or a consultative model is adopted.
The latter has become the usual pattern in the USA and Canada, and is increasingly
being chosen in Japan and Europe, reflecting the trend towards freedom of
information. Whatever the overall approach, environmental management is, as
Matthews et al. (1976:5) noted, a ‘myriad of individual and collective decisions by
persons, groups, and organizations’ and ‘together these decisions and interactions
constitute a process—a process that in effect results in management (or
mismanagement) of the environmental resources of a society’.
Of the many problems that beset environmental management, inadequate
data is a common hindrance: there are still huge gaps in knowledge of the structure
and function of the environment, the workings of global, regional and local
economics, and of how societies and individual humans behave. The ideal is
adequate data that can be presented in real time, so that the scenario can be observed
as it changes. With improved computers, software and the development of tools

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CHAPTER TWO
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like geographical information systems (GIS) this may one day be possible, but
often all that is available today is an occasional, incomplete snapshot view.
Decision making is often made difficult by politics; lobbying; media, public
and NGOs’ attention; lack of funding and expertise. Environmental managers are faced
with two temporal challenges: (1) problems may suddenly demand attention and allow
little time for solution; (2) the desirability that planning horizons stretch further into
the future than has been usual practice. Decisions are easier to make and policies more
easily adjusted if there is time available—for example, a 3°C climate change over 150
years may not be too much of a challenge, but if it happens over 20 years it certainly
would be (Chiapponi, 1992). Predictions are difficult enough with stable environments;
once stability has been upset there may be unexpected and sudden feedbacks or shifts
to different states, all of which are difficult to forecast. The behaviour of economic
systems are even more difficult to predict, and human behaviour is especially fickle as
tastes and attitudes alter. The unpredictability and rapidity of challenges prompted
Holling (1978) to argue for adaptive assessment and management.
Sustainable development calls for trade-offs. For example, it may be necessary
to forgo immediate benefits to secure long-term yields—which may far outweigh
the former. Such trade-offs can be a cruel choice for individuals, groups or countries,
and a minefield for the environmental manager (and it is a situation where foreign
aid could be focused to cushion trade-offs).
Institutional problems probably present more difficulties for environmental
management than technical or scientific challenges (Cairns and Crawford, 1991).
FIGURE 2.2 Major decision-making steps in a typical environmental management process
Source: Part-based on Matthews et al. (1976:10, Fig. 1)

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Human institutions change and can be difficult to understand and control and building
new ones may be hard. It is vital that the institutions involved in environmental
management are effective. Even if there is technology and funding and a will to
solve a problem, success will be unlikely without the right type of sustainable
institution. A growing number of social scientists have been focusing on institution
building: this gives us grounds for optimism. The major international body charged
with environmental management, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP),
was designed in the 1960s (and founded in 1973), and needs remodelling to be more
effective (Von Moltke, 1992). The UNEP was located away from Paris, Geneva or
New York, in Nairobi, which has had mixed results—some argue it is off the beaten
track and this partly explains its poor funding and lack of power. To be fair to
institutions like the UNEP, they must rely on the quality of their arguments to convince
countries and multinational companies (MNCs) or transnational companies (TNCs)
to accept a strategy, and have been given little in the way of sanctions to enforce
policies.