A large proportion of the wealth of developing countries and poor people is comprised of environmental assets. These provide the foundations for sustainable development. Fertile soils, clean water, biomass and biodiversity produce a range of goods and services that yield income, offer safety nets for the poor, maintain public health, and power economic growth. Conversely, bad management of environmental assets, poor control of environmental hazards such as pollution, and inadequate response to environmental challenges such as climate change, threaten development.

Such environmental considerations therefore need to be included (‘mainstreamed’) into the wide range of institutions and decisions that drive development. As the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) notes:

“The basic reason why environmental mainstreaming is important is that economic and social development and the environment are fundamentally interdependent – the way we manage the economy and political and social institutions has critical impacts on the environment, while environmental quality and sustainability, in turn, are vital for the performance of the economy and social well-being. As such the task of environmental integration and mainstreaming is at the forefront of development planning and policy formulation.”¹

Some traditional institutions have long recognised this and treat environment and development together. For example, the two issues are discussed as totally inter-connected in village meetings of the khotla system in Botswana and the Maori hui system in New Zealand. However, today’s mainstream government and market institutions tend to marginalise environmental issues, prioritising short-term economic growth. This is increasingly unsustainable, especially with growing competition for environmental resources, a ‘resource squeeze’ that particularly affects the poor. It calls for an accelerated effort to mainstream environmental concerns.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, attention to environment concerns rose steadily on national, international and political agendas. There was an expansion of government departments, legal frameworks and procedures directly concerned with environmental protection and management (e.g. environmental impact assessment, EIA). However, most are concerned with environmental problems and the safeguards needed to tackle them, rather than environmental potentials and opportunities:

“Environmental issues only get onto the agenda when there is a crisis or an issue that affects a wide sector of the general public” (CANARI, 2008)

There is much legitimate concern at present about the rise in incidence of environmental problems such as climate change, droughts, floods, loss of soil fertility, and unsustainable exploitation and incremental destruction of biodiversity. Many government institutions in particular increasingly have to bail out failing financial and social institutions and are greatly concerned about the confluence of these with ecosystem and climate system collapse. With persistent poverty, in part entrenched by such system failures, there is a growing interest in ways to minimise the chain of costs that arise from environmental shocks and stresses. Environment is becoming recognised as a key component in policies for security, stability and sustainability.

Thus environmental mainstreaming will not only help to minimise risks and problems, but also enable stakeholders to discuss, make the case, and pioneer activities that tackle real environmental potentials.

In these ways, it is becoming clear that environmental concerns lie at the heart of all good development. Indeed, it can be useful to lay out a framework for development and demonstrate its environmental links. For example, most development workers will broadly agree that development entails:

• increasing the asset base and its productivity per person – including environmental assets;
• empowering poor and marginalised groups – including their environmental rights – ensuring they are centrally involved in decision-making processes affecting their lives;
• reducing and managing risks – including environmental risks;
• a holistic approach to interacting social, economic and natural systems – including multiple environmental feedbacks
• taking a long-term perspective – including subsequent generations – a time frame which encompasses environmental change.
• building capacities for governance for the above at national and local levels – including environmental allocations, safeguards and management;
  

Thus environmental considerations need to be addressed both at central levels (i.e. national or regional planning and finance ministries) and sectoral levels (i.e. government, business and stakeholder organisations responsible for agriculture, industry, etc) - in other words, they need to be understood and responded to by the ‘mainstream’ of decision-making and not only by the environment ‘sector’ itself. But, in order to improve that understanding, environment actors in turn need to understand development considerations.

The environment also needs to be considered at local levels where local organisations and individuals make daily decisions about the way they use and manage environmental assets. As noted above, this can be an automatic thing in many traditional societies, and local decisions can sometimes influence national policies (see Box 1.1).

Consideration of the environment needs to cover both ‘positive’ issues (i.e. opportunities and potentials for sustainable use of environmental assets) as well as the ‘negative’ issues (e.g. problems of environmental degradation and pollution) that have been uppermost to date in the development and use of safeguards.

The need for a more high-level and cross-sectoral approach to integrating environment and development has never been more urgent. With pressure on resources, more innovative ways must be found to generate greater welfare from limited environmental assets. Infrastructure and agriculture must be climate-proofed. Industry must be energy and water efficient. Poor people’s environmental deprivations must be tackled in development activity. Their environmental rights must be recognised, respected, protected and fulfilled (the latter by the duty-bearer, normally the State). Environmental institutions need to work more closely together with other institutions – for too many of which the environment is treated as an externality.

Experience with truly high-level and cross-sectoral environmental mainstreaming (in advocacy, analysis, planning, investment, management, and monitoring) has been limited and scattered to date. There has been little sharing of experience. In contrast, there is perhaps too much untested guidance on how to go about the tasks, often pushed as conditionalities by funders. However, several global initiatives stand out as offering a body of experience (which we discuss in section 1.3.2. Amongst them, the Poverty-Environment Partnership [link to this menu item] (PEP) has made strong case for environmental mainstreaming (Box 1.2).