Environmental Management: Principles and practice

The politics and ethics to support environmental
management
Environmental management is, as has already been stressed, a politicized process
(Wilson and Bryant, 1997:85); it is much affected by politics and ethics. There has
been considerable debate about the most supportive forms of politics for
environmental management: is it better to seek centralized or decentralized, citizen-
led or state-managed, liberal or authoritarian control? Goldsmith et al. (1992:23)
suggested there were two groups of future strategies (which may be of value to
environmental management): (1) those that counter destructive trends; (2) those
that help foster more positive objectives. The precautionary principle should prompt
the latter.
Some argue that democracy of some form is necessary for effective
environmental management. Environmentalism and green politics developed in
western democracies and has so far been more democratic in outlook than
authoritarian, but it has been mainly reactive to problems, whereas environmental
management needs to be anticipatory. A democratic system may allow public
involvement and some degree of scrutiny of development, but it may also slow decision
making (for a discussion of ecology and democracy see the 1995 special issue of
Environmental Politics 4(4), 1–321) (Figure 14.2). The People’s Republic of China
recently announced a nationwide shift of labour to reafforestation and controls on
logging, prompted by growing land degradation and flooding, illustrating that non-
democratic governments are perfectly able to take proactive environmental measures.
Popular concern for posterity and people in other countries may not be strong
and could need shaping, i.e. environmental management will sometimes have to go
beyond the will of the people, or continue in spite of loss of interest or fashion
changes. How, then, can environmental management deal with popular self-interest,
inertia or misguided hostility without resort to authoritarian ‘eco-fascist’ powers? If

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FIGURE 14.1 What the world wants—and how to pay for it
Source: Henderson (1994:128, Fig. 2)
Note: Figure shows annual costs of various global programmes. Each programme is estimated
to be sufficient to accomplish its goal world-wide. The combined total cost of all these
programmes is about 25 per cent of the world’s total military expenditure in 1994 (in US$, US
billion and trillion).

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THE WAY AHEAD
269
a liberal democratic approach is favoured, should it be moral, popular or pragmatic
in outlook? Appealing to a people’s sense of decency or altruism is probably too
much of a gamble, and anyway liberalism tends to be anthropocentric. One way of
countering the environmental inertia of democracy might be to adopt a World Charter
on the Rights of Nature (efforts to do so at the 1992 Earth Summit failed).
Global environmental problems are apparent now and will probably increase
in future. Already national energy needs have led to conflict over resources and
transboundary pollution. Environmental problems can lead to political conflicts and
vice versa. To be anticipatory environmental management will have to involve political
analysts as well as ecologists, social scientists and economists. Science can be used
by environmental management to reduce the polarization and squabbling that can be
generated in negotiations (Brenton, 1994).
There are situations which demand a large-scale approach to their solution, for
example vital investment in research may be beyond the level a single region or
country could afford. The dictum ‘think globally, act locally’ is wise. Most sustainable
development strategies will have to be tuned to local conditions, but need coordination
at a higher level. EIA has moved towards a tiered approach, as have some
environmental management systems (like SEM). With such a tiered approach,
environmental management could be applied to local conditions, so that adjoining
areas may have quite different approaches, yet somewhere else there may be shared
FIGURE 14.2 Singapore, a city state which, in spite of a dense population and a challenging
humid tropical environment, has made impressive progress with urban environmental
management. In a number of fields the city is among world leaders, notably in efforts to
control car traffic and provide adequate public transport. The approach adopted has been
quite ‘top-down’

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similarities. Overall co-ordination, probably tiered at regional, national and global
levels, would look for conflicts, ideas that might be shared, resources (notably
biodiversity, crop varieties and knowledge) that should be duplicated far enough
apart for security, so that if one locality suffers a disaster there are possibilities for
recovery. The overall pattern would be like mosaic tiles, a global picture with
considerable local diversity and simplicity of organization and duplication of units
at different locations to give security against loss of infrastructure, skills, biodiversity,
etc., if there is a disaster. Switzerland manages its environment and other affairs with
a canton system of government which is similar.
Noting that environmental management is a multi-layered process, Wilson and
Bryant (1997) suggested that it could be undertaken by international, state and non-
state bodies. At present environmental management is under central, state control in
some countries, while in others it is decentralized. There are also grassroots
environmental managers (e.g. peasants seeking to protect their forests), MNCs and
TNCs which have global environmental policies, NGOs (often with a sectoral focus—
e.g. active in protecting whales and dolphins), and individual activists/scholars (e.g.
Vandana Shiva, Anil Agarwal, Ignacy Sachs). The future probably lies with ensuring
that environmental management operates as a multi-layered process dealing with
human—environment interaction, as suggested by Wilson and Bryant (1997). Co-
ordination of such a multi-layered process, involving social and physical science co-
operation will be a challenge.