Almost all the policies of a nation are usually targeted to social welfare and macroeconomic requirements, but their outcomes vary depending on the role of the actors. Resource and environmental aspects in a policy involve a leading group of people for planning and implementing the idea. However, there could be players and political influential groups intervening between the planning and the implementation of policies for their benefit. As a result, a policy process though having adequate targets, may not have sustainability fate with regard to social outcome. Thus, process evaluation in relation to actor influence is meaningful for a sustainable policy. In case of policies already formulated and implemented, process evaluation can only be done if enough documents about the roles of the actors are available.

6.6 POLICY STIMULUS

Apart from actors directly involved in policy process, other actors associated with macroeconomic planning may become involved in the “policy coalition” of resource use. The activities of those coalition actors have been termed here as “policy stimulus.” Policy stimulus is different from macroactor because policy stimulus actors work through coalition. Sometimes issues or achievements in other countries may become stimulus for sustainability. For example, success in a neighboring country in controlling population can be a stimulus for others. Such stimulus may be local, regional, or global. Strand and Toman (2010) have given an account of green stimulus for sustainable development. Though the roles of policy makers can be detected by process evaluation, the influential stimulus remains undetected. Identification of such stimulus is also important for sustainability evaluation of policy. Stimulus evaluation can also be considered as an ongoing process, evaluation thus has limited application in the past policy evaluation.

6.7 PARTICIPATION

A subservient policy usually addresses community issues to solve the problem. Policy evaluation, therefore, implies an attempt to develop a totally rational approach to the issues of community development. Although there are different types of participation, participation evaluation aims to determine the interest of community people toward the policy. Forest land use policy can be treated as one of the approaches of resource use attributed to community services, having relationships

78 Sustainability Assessment

with many other factors of community development. Some of these factors have been described in the impact model (FAO, 1993). Community relationships with forest land use are mainly for fuel, food, fodder, fiber, shelter, income, and environmental services. Community participation designates how they are benefiting from the policy. However, participation evaluation is also an ongoing policy evaluation thus it has limited application in the evaluation of past policies.

6.8 SECTORAL GROWTH

Economic growth can be considered as one of the desired outcomes of policy, but it is hard to entangle a single policy with economic growth. Thus, sectoral growth would be the more relevant indicator of policy sustainability. Sectoral growth identifies the economic out turn from the sector; thus, its contribution to economic growth can be assessed. Atkinson et al. (1997) discussed the ways of measuring sustainability in detail. However, the benefit of looking at sector growth is that it would be easier to determine the sustainability by identifying whether the contribution to economic growth is short or long term. However, a policy could have contribution to different sectors; relating the resource contribution to all those differential sector growths would clarify the sustainability circumstances better than that of considering only the dominant sector.

6.9 RESOURCE EXPLOITATION

Evaluation of sector growth is not complete if the aspect of resource exploitation is not looked at. Exploitation itself means the scale of utilization in a sort of unreasonable way. For example, using forest resources for exporting unprocessed wood is a kind of exploitation— because the potential contribution of such resource use to social sector growth is minimal. Thus, the growth prospects of many developing economies are dependent to a considerable degree upon the performance of their resource exploitation mainly dominated on land-based production systems like agriculture and forestry (FAO, 1988). The impact of growth may be reflected on resource exploitation which may create an unsustainable situation. For example, the economic growth of Japan from the 1960s has reflected in the forestry sector by a sudden tenfold increase in paper consumption (Dargavel, 1992). This may be

an unsustainable reflection; however, there are policy options to meet the situation.

Exploitation in the forestry sector can be explained in terms of exports, new road construction, urbanization, and a number of forestbased industries. On the basis of those reflections, a correlation might be drawn with the rise in income and increase in the consumption of forest produce. Correlation may also be possible by converting the consumption of forest produce into an equivalent land area required for supporting the increase. However, there could be more than one cause and effect that influence the forest resource use (Mather, 1990) which are different for different nations. Dargavel (1992) concluded that many of the causes are related to local and national policies. The multinational companies engaged in forest harvesting, mostly based in developed countries, encourage a certain form of growth and development and thus influence the forestry exploitation and sustainability. Thus, evaluation of policy relevance within resource exploitation is important for sustainability assessment.

6.10 TRADITIONAL PRACTICES

Traditional practices have often been blamed as the destructive process for resource use—particularly relating to inefficient use. Stebbing (1921) blamed traditional practices of India as a destructive process to forest land use. But they can be used as the sensor equipment of policy—particularly relating to conservative use. In many cases, traditional practices have been held responsible as destructive—not from the practice itself but from the intensity and/or practice of such practices. Although environmental geographers have done much to describe the relationship of environmental degradation and traditional practice, the roots of degradation are in fundamental dimensions of evolution (Boyden, 1987), population (Grainger, 1993), education, and consumption, the interpretation of which may be different between the political economists and the land use geographers. Traditional peoples have used forest lands of many countries for thousands of years without exhaustion of biodiversity and environmental characteristics. Policy consideration of traditional practices often determines the policy acceptability in developing society. Thus, evaluation of resource policies cannot go without including the status of traditional practice.