162 Sustainability Assessment

may promote agricultural production at the expense of decreased water availability for the industrial sector and for household consumption. Most governments, NGOs, and international agencies do not deal with the social, economic, and environmental needs across different sectors. Policy objectives should be understood by the implementing agencies or by recipients. It is often said that perfect communication and coordination are unattainable particularly in the case of top-down policy processes. The main reason is that information and understanding of policy may get lost when they are communicated from person to person or office to office. Inevitably the changes are reflected through their implementation stages, which is an important characteristic of imperfectly communicated policy. If a change is continued, it is unlikely that the policy actions will be coordinated. Under that circumstance, policy recommendation will be one but the policy outcome could be different due to changed action, thereby the action will remain undetected.

12.6.8 Rare Perfect Compliance of Implementing Body

Sometimes compliance of the members, even within the implementing agencies, may not be perfect for policy implementation. The more radical the policy, the more likely is interagency rivalry. For example, when the policy of a participatory forestry approach was proposed for implementation in Bangladesh, initially traditional forest officers resisted it, and the implementation was very slow and delayed. In practice, the transition from decision to action in the policy process is neither smooth nor obvious (Jenkins, 1978). They may partially succeed and partially fail and there may be unintended side effects which negate the original stated aims.

Although the sustainability evaluation of a policy needs to consider so many factors, most evaluations are done on the basis of few parameters: population, institution, infrastructure, and economics. No doubt, population and infrastructure are important long-term determinants of general resource use trend over decades, but interannual variability of resource use is not tightly linked to such parameters. While the variation in population and institution is gradual, evidences of resource extraction (e.g., deforestation) are irregular, from time to time. Econometric variables such as variation in price structures and local market demands are likely to be better predictors of resource extraction and abandonment rates (Peluso, 1992), thus there are changes in resource use over short-time cycles. This information may

be coupled with information of longer-time cycle, e.g., historical information of land use change and policy measures evolved from aforementioned activities and socioeconomic desire for building a diagnostic model of deforestation process. Such models can provide:

•An improved understanding of the factors which control periodical variation in resource extraction and hence their significance on environmental changes.

•An improved understanding of the factors which determine the balance between resource transformation (e.g., new farmland through deforestation and the creation of new farmland by clearing secondary fallow forests).

•An improved understanding of the factors which control the balance between resource extraction and abandonment.

•A method for spatial and temporal extrapolation of the result from the activities ascribed above.

But availability of information and data often limits the historical evaluation of policy to a few factors. Though the evaluation can be extended to local, national, and regional levels, in this thesis the levels will be limited to only national and regional levels. Regional levels will be used as explanatory examples toward supporting national evaluation. The limitation of undertaking studies below national level is that, perhaps, the findings cannot be calibrated against a generalized scale.