THE POLICY FRAMEWORK AND MANDATES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MAINSTREAMING AND TO WHICH IT CONTRIBUTES

Table 1.1 indicates the significance of a range of international obligations in shaping how environment is mainstreamed (or not) into development at national, sector or local levels. Most countries have committed to a range of international agreements which set both obligations and challenges. Many of these provide an unofficial ‘mandate’ for taking forward any initiative for integrating environment and development:

• Several Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) contain obligations to integrate particular environmental concerns into policy-making, planning and decision-taking. For example, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), negotiated in 1994, specifies (Article 10,1a) that National Action Programmes shall, inter alia, “incorporate long-term strategies to combat desertification and mitigate the effects of drought, emphasise implementation and be integrated with national policies for sustainable development”. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), agreed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, has three main objectives: the conservation of biodiversity, its sustainable use and the equitable sharing of benefits from the use of genetic resources. In order to implement the Convention’s objectives in the national context, countries are required to develop national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs), and to integrate biodiversity concerns into all sectors of the national economy (Box 2.1).

Box 2.1: The Convention on Biological Diversity: mainstreaming requirements and outcomes Article 6 states that Parties shall: Develop national strategies, plans or programmes for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity; and Integrate the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity into relevant sectoral or cross-sectoral plans, programmes and policies. Article 10(a) requires Parties to integrate biodiversity considerations into national decision-making. Integrating biodiversity objectives into mainstream development is a complex challenge that lies at the heart of the Convention, and a key objective of NBSAPs, which have now been completed in over 166 countries. Swiderska (2002) examined the constraints to, and opportunities for, mainstreaming biodiversity in development policies, plans and programmes, and how NBSAPs can more effectively address the challenge of mainstreaming. She found that, by 2002, in all countries, North and South, NBSAPs had not paid enough attention to linkages with economic policies and plans, and have suffered from a lack of integration with other national institutions and planning mechanisms. As a result, the objectives of the CBD continue to be undermined by mainstream development activities. But NBSAPs have had a number of useful outcomes. They have helped to raise awareness about biodiversity, the threats to biodiversity, and action required to address these threats. New policies and laws on biodiversity have been introduced, protected areas have been expanded and some promising new initiatives have been launched on the ground.

• The Millennium Development Goals (agreed at the UN General Assembly in 2000) provide a framing focus for development planning and assistance. To be effective, they need to be integrated into national and local policy-making, decision-taking and planning processes. MDG7, in particular, calls for the “integration of the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes” and asserts the importance of water, sanitation, forests and now also biodiversity for development. There are also key environmental underpinnings of MDGs 1-6 (see UNDP 2004, WRI 2008), but most of these are not included in the MDG targets and indicators – which were a UN Secretariat construct developed rapidly and expediently, not especially informed of the critical poverty-environment links for each MDG. Table 2.1 lists some key environmental links for each of the MDGs.

• The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI) agreed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 stressed the importance of “strategic frameworks and balanced decision making … for advancing the sustainable development agenda”. Given many different circumstances and contexts, this demands a range of mainstreaming tools.

Table 2.1: MDG links to the environment
(Source: Irish Aid 2007)

• The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (adopted in 2005) commits development agencies to reform the way in which aid is delivered and to work in closer harmony to enhance development efficiency and effectiveness. It also emphasizes the need for donor agencies to better align behind the priorities of developing countries and their strategies to address these priorities. This commitment was reconfirmed in the Accra Agenda for Action agreed in Ghana in September 2008 at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness which reviewed progress in implementing the Paris Agreement, and which highlighted, inter alia, the need to support country environmental planning systems and to engage with civil society.

• A range of international programmes for environmental mainstreaming has evolved, most recently in response to the above three agreements. These have adopted various definitions of environmental mainstreaming, and play to different incentives and threats (some internal to the organisation promoting them):
• The Poverty Environment Partnership (PEP¹ - a multi-agency network which is attempting to mainstream environment in development aid, in support of national and sector development planning in developing countries (see Box 1.2).
• The Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI)² - a joint UNDP-UNEP programme which is working with country teams in several developing countries to support environmental mainstreaming in national and sector development policy, plans, and budgets.
• The Environmental Mainstreaming Initiative (IIED) – an IIED-coordinated initiative, guided by an International Stakeholder Panel which has investigated a wide range of mainstreaming approaches that work across many developing countries and to share learning, and produced this synthesis report.
• The UNDP’s Drylands Development Center, in close collaboration with the Global Mechanism (GM) of UNCCD, UNEP and the UNDP/GEF Global Support Unit, has developed Generic Guidelines for Mainstreaming Environment into National Development Frameworks, drawn from experiences in mainstreaming from a range of national case studies in drylands (UNDP 2008)³

Voluntary market and civil society initiatives can also be considered to provide a complementary ‘mandate’ for environmental mainstreaming. Some, such as forest and organic agriculture certification schemes, have proven to be powerful forces in ensuring that companies include environmental (and some social⁴) dimensions in their production, and in getting buyers to exercise preferential treatment in their consumption. This has been more effective with both producers and consumers who have the financial and human resources to adopt new ways of working (as well as to cover certification transaction and financial costs). Some of this ‘supply chain soft legislation’ has already influenced territorial legislation in countries that are both dependent on the sectors in question and are well-resourced enough to ‘mainstream’ environment in new production systems.

Furthermore, in all countries there is a range of domestic national (and more local) strategies, policy-making and planning processes covering environment and/or development (e.g. poverty reduction strategies, sustainable development strategies, sector-based policies and plans) as well as legislation, institutional procedures and voluntary arrangements. Some specify the use of particular environmental mainstreaming tools (notably EIA, and increasingly SEA and public consultation) but many are not well implemented, in part because stakeholders lack effective approaches.

It is to be expected that new international institutions and mandates will emerge in the coming years, especially regarding the growing confluence of economic, social and environmental problems and the need for a systemic approach to building resilience to change. For example, the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change concluded:

“There still remains a need for a body that brings together the key developed and developing countries to address the critical interlinkages between trade, finance, the environment, the handling of pandemic diseases and economic and social development. To be effective, such a body must operate at the level of national leaders.”

Report of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, 2004

In 2001, the European Commission development a working paper on integrating the environment into EC economic development cooperation (EC 2001). Subsequently the development of the European Consensus on Development (Official Journal C 46/01 of 24 February 2006) established ‘environment and sustainable management of natural resources’ as one of the nine areas for Community action. Yet a contemporaneous report of the European Court of Auditors (2006) highlighted existing problems and shortcomings in the European Commission’s work to integrate environmental aspects in development cooperation, as noted by Olearius et al. (2008):

• Lack of appropriate implementation mechanisms for the environmental integration strategy;
• Lack of appropriate monitoring systems;
• Delayed elaboration of a mainstreaming manual, started in 1998 and finalized in December 2006);
• Lack of sufficient in-house capacity;
• Shortcomings of capacity-building efforts.

Following further EC consideration of these challenges, the European Environment Council (of the EU) adopted ‘Conclusions on Integrating Environment in Development Cooperation’ at its meeting on 25th June 2009. These set out the EU approach for supporting environment integration in developing countries and priorities for implementation. To ensure a prompt and focused start of implementation, the following areas are highlighted for immediate action:

• Updating Country Environment Profiles (CEPs) to address environmental risks such as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation or desertification issues in a comprehensive way;
• Integration of environment issues, including climate change and in particular adaptation, into EU’s external action and promoting their inclusion in partners’ development strategies. Mid-term reviews of Country and Regional Strategy Papers should be an entry point for full integration in the 2012 programming exercise;
• Coherence, coordination and complementarity of EU support for climate change investments already identified and planned for in national frameworks;
• Preparing a CEP (including climate change issues) jointly with UNEP/UNDP, World Bank and other selected partners as a pilot exercise, while ensuring country ownership.

The following areas are identified as further priority areas:

• Strengthening the use of tools such as Strategic Environment Assessments (SEAs) in order to ensure mainstreaming of environment issues in key sector activities and explore the further use of these tools in new delivery modes, such as budget support;
• Working with others in developing and applying tools to quantify the economic value of environmental resources, to promote more sustainable use, and inform more sustainable models, of economic growth;
• Ensuring that the economic recovery programme makes the best possible use of investments to promote a resilient, sustainable and green recovery (low carbon development path).

The ‘Conclusions’ also indicates the areas needing coordination and policy coherence, invites Member States to mobilise resources and the EC to set up a framework to monitor the EU approach to environmental integration and prepare an EU-wide strategy for environmental integration. An annex lists recommended actions for improving environmental integration (Box 2.2).

The EC has developed an environment integration handbook - available at http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/multimedia/publications/documents/thematic/europeaid-environmental-handbook_en.pdf. In this handbook the environment is considered to include those bio-physical resources and conditions on which human lives and activities depend, and which in turn they influence. The handbook will be replaced by Environment Integration Guidelines, and the Environment Integration strategy will be updated by 2011.

The World Bank - moving beyond mainstreaming toward environmental sustainability.

The following quotation from the World Bank’s concept note for its new Environment Strategy indicates its thinking on environmental mainstreaming and environmental sustainability.

“Achieving environmental sustainability is an ongoing process on which we intend to move forward during the timeframe of the Strategy. In the WBG, key milestones in that journey include the adoption of the Safeguards, in the late 1980s, as the Bank’s policy instruments for implementing the precautionary or ‘do no harm’ principle in Bank-funded activities. Subsequently in 2001, the Bank’s first environment strategy emphasized mainstreaming or incorporation of environmental considerations in the activities of sectors. The new Strategy intends to move further along the spectrum, beyond safeguards and mainstreaming, to improving the environmental sustainability of the WBG’s overall portfolio. Building on areas where effective mainstreaming was achieved, the proposed Strategy will include targets for achieving environmental sustainability of the operational portfolio, to be achieved over the 10-year implementation period of the Strategy. This will require (i) a results framework; (ii) knowledge and capacity building, both internally and externally including to foster ownership of environmental sustainability in all sectors; (iii) close partnership with regional and sector colleagues, including linkages with relevant sector strategies such as climate change and energy; and (iv) leveraging external stakeholders support for sustainable development. Results indicators for sustainability outcomes will be agreed with the regions and sectors. The experience from implementing IFC’s Policy and Performance Standards on Social and Environmental Sustainability offers potential lessons for the Bank in moving forward, as will the experience from the integration of infrastructure units with environmental, social and rural development units into a Sustainable Development Network in June 2006”.