48 Sustainability Assessment

bring a sustainability risk to NRDAs. These causes are important for policy evaluation and can be outlined as follows:

1.Centralized economic structure—if dominated by a large single company or government enterprise whose major interest or activity is extracting and selling a single unprocessed raw material (Bunker, 1984).

2.Technological inability—processing resources to a poor-quality end product, fetching less market value, and excessive wastage (Blaikie, 1985; Freudenburg, 1992). These may be added to inefficient resource extraction, lack of local investment, and lack of economic multiplication.

3.Concentration of ownership and control—a likelihood of absentee ownership due to a centralization process and sector dominance by large firms (Freudenburg, 1992; Marchak, 1983).

Thus, policy climate inevitably becomes linked with control of resources, such as resource dependence, resource use, resource waste, and nature of capital (e.g., external or internal). Sometimes structural processes related to natural resource dependence may cause both poverty and environmental degradation (Blaikie, 1985). Moreover, weakness in structural processes retards the institutional development. Thus, the policy climate gets polluted by weak implementation leading to erosion of human behavior in terms of nepotism and bribery. Hype (1994) observed that environmental erosion and social erosion are so closely associated that one cannot be studied without the other.

Peluso et al. (1994) argued that such behavior in government agencies and structural processes may degrade public land resources affecting local livelihoods from alternative land uses and sustained job opportunities. A government agency may act like outside capital but justifies its action by its self-proclaimed representation of the greatest good for the greater number. Therefore, the end result of sustainability depends on the nature of capital and its management.

4.2.4 Nature of Capital

The nature of capital determines the scale of operation in the resource sector and thus influences the players’ role in policy climate. Advanced capitalism signifies concentration of capitals, vertically integrated, increasingly capital intensive, oligopolistic industries, and segmented labor markets and results in withdrawal of local control over economic

process and decisions (Markusen, 1987). The capital intensive firms can extract resource globally. The processing efficiency of capital intensive machines allows the extraction of unprecedented volumes of raw materials (Bunker, 1984); thus, the influence of capital is not only spatial but also on scale of operation accentuating unsustainable practices. Due to competition with technologically efficient and capital intensive processes, NRDAs may experience changes with widespread mill closures and loss of jobs (Marchak, 1983). The state thus needed to protect those mills through subsidies. At an extreme situation, the NRDAs could be transformed into net primary produce exporters, fetching little earnings in return with very little value addition. Thereby, they need to export more resources to meet the requirement of desired growth. As a result, growth in direct NRDAs occupies more space than that of sustainability prescriptions in the policy climate.

The transformation of advanced capitalized productions may cause a shift from resource use to alternative resource use with short-term economic benefits. Thus, the nature of capital determines the stability of institutions and organizations for supporting sustainability. Primary industries in a resource sector bear a disproportionately high part of the business instability partly because of the nature of resources and the mode of their extraction (Bunker, 1984; Freudenburg, 1992). Therefore, adjustment in the roles and modes of institutions and organizations can be a significant factor for sustainable policy.

4.2.5 Nature of Institutions

The displayed decision of a policy depends on the nature of institution whether it is bureaucratic or democratic. Non-openness in decisionmaking, delay, and red tape in bureaucratic control reduce public participation, delay project implementation and hence impede the sustainability. Sometimes the institutions and organizations of developing countries cannot work completely due to political barrier, dishonesty of staff, and systemic error. The institutions of such societies take risks on environment to get wealth. On the other hand, a society could enjoy the environment but without a guarantee of monetary wealth. Thus, a society that becomes exposed to risk is a construction of the nature of the institution or the ability and wealth of that society. Beck (1994) has termed such society as a risk society. Thus, the thinking of a risk society is a discourse of self-confrontation, therefore, it is less likely to be sustainable.