44 Sustainability Assessment

2.The ability of society for carrying a human development program.

3.A linking of society with policy process.

Sustainability of policy in that respect depends on society and policy considerations to address the issues to establish intraand intergenerational carriers involving with a transfer of social attitudes within the complex of socioeconomic and environmental systems. Brandtland Commission’s definition (WCED, 1987) of sustainable development has touched the similar issues comprehensively through the phrase “meeting the needs of present generation without sparing the needs of future generation.” If the generational equity is taken as the property of a sustainable system, exploring the basis of origination and establishment of such equity based on the policy may be taken as the activity of policy evaluation aimed at enhancing the sustainability. Dovers (1996) has called it “metapolicy setting;” the setting may only be achieved by a rigorous evaluation for justifying the issues of resource and environmental sustainability as a coherent policy field. The coherence of the resource system and environmental system in a policy depends how the system peculiarities and system components perform in policy practice. The following sections highlight some of the considerations essential for sustainability assessment of peculiarities and system components of resource and environmental policies.

4.2 SOCIOECONOMIC CONSIDERATION

The emergence and the principles of sustainability discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 reveal that the elements of policy climate in a society are important for policy evaluation. A detailed cognition of sustainability issues in developing countries is often available in power relations of the society extending from moneylender to money borrower, farm landlord to farmer, politicians to public, even in some cases government officials to ordinary citizens. The practice of unequal power relations is often linked to conflicts over access to, and the use of, diverse environmental resources (Bryant, 1998). However, the relationship (behind the screen) has a long legacy in policy perspective (Harrison, 1997), particularly in administrative intervention. For example, the step taken by the people in colonial administrative power through changing the status of communal forest land to staterun territories under a different level of legal system, in many cases has marginalized the shifting cultivators, farmers, and poor in the

society (Bryant, 1997; Guha, 1989; Peluso, 1992). Even now similar quasi-colonial intervention is not over, but often gets decorated under a fascinating term, “globalization.” Therefore, the dichotomy of relationship between colonials and colonized in the past and that of between developed and developing, poor and rich in the present societies is important for policy sustainability. This section aims to discuss the nature and elements of poverty, resource-richness, economy, and institutional development in general to support the policy evaluation.

4.2.1 Nature of Poverty

Poverty is considered as one of the important reasons of resource and environmental degradation in the developing world. Poverty is also considered as one of the indicators of economic evaluation of policy. But in case of environmental evaluation, poverty could occupy many dimensions. Peluso et al. (1994) differentiated poverty according to its characteristics in space, in persistence, and in its identity. Poverty is usually common in Natural Resources Dependent Areas (NRDA). By NRDA, the authors meant the places where natural resources either account for a substantial part of the local economy or attract population. The NRDAs in their turn can be classified into three categories:

1.Extractive NRDAs are places where the local economy is based on renewable or nonrenewable resources.

2.Nonconsumptive NRDAs have local economies based on nonconsumable natural resources like tourism.

3.Backdrop NRDAs have natural resources serving as an esthetic backdrop, luring residents whose income usually originates elsewhere.

The classifications of NRDAs are not mutually exclusive; all of them may occur in a single economy, distributing themselves in the space by conservation of significant natural resources or in urban areas. Therefore, comments or conclusions about poverty and sustainability may not always be applicable to all NRDA areas; rather they indicate different opportunities.

If overcoming poverty is taken as one step ahead to sustainability, it is important to evaluate the dynamic nature of poverty. According

is intricately related to resources, such as air, water, and soil pollution. Thus, although presently more abstractive classifications are introduced, e.g. cultural pollution, yet most environmental legislation delineates the protection of resources from pollution. Those classifications have facilitated the formation of different legislation and have been described as “compartmental division” of legislation (Hajer, 1995).

Compartmentalization of legislation was influenced by some elements of policy sustainability such as the nature of resources, marketoriented investment policies, and commitment to sustained supply. Gaventa (1980), Marchak (1983), and Peluso et al. (1994) recognized that the market-oriented investment policies of overseas capital extract resources destructively. Multinational timber companies, for example, enter a region and exhaust natural resources without concern for the region or its people, but the markets remain far away from the country. This is comparable to the practices of colonial times. The longterm costs of such extraction are thus borne by local people. Therefore, the controllers of the resources and their roles are also important element for policy evaluation.

4.2.3 Nature of Economy

From the above paragraphs, it is understandable that the standing of sustainability is different in different countries depending on the status of the economy. Some nations have to bear the burden of a large population, some countries seek economic growth, and some others have plenty. The most important aspect of policy for sustainability is to identify the concern of unsustainability. For example, if NRDAs are a backdrop type of which the economy is not based on local resources, according to Nord (1994), sustainability will largely depend on the vicissitudes of the national economy. In this process, urban poor flee to rural areas hoping to find more affordable housing, more respectable surroundings, and an escape from urban violence. Similarly, in nonconsumptive NRDAs, the fortune of the tourist industry/ies will rise and fall with social order and fascination of nature. The destructive forces of natural beauty and resources, such as forest fires, become a part of prescription for sustainability planning.

However, natural resource dependence is not a prior cause of poverty and hence sustainability. There are some other causes, which may