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The sooner implementation begins, the sooner a strategy can benefit from experience. Early action brings greater commitment and momentum to the process, in addition to developing essential management capacities. Other strategies for action throughout government and at local levels will be needed. These include implementation by government, the private sector and NGOs. Each has a key function, which can be helped through the appropriate legal frameworks, economic instruments and mechanisms for mediation and conflict resolution. There should be an emphasis on cooperation rather than compulsion.

The strategy secretariat or similar body has an important role to play, particularly through demonstration and pilot programmes bridging a number of sectors. Responsibility for implementation becomes more diffuse with each turn of the strategy cycle, and as the institutional mechanisms for sustainable development mature. These will include new forms of partnership that emphasize flexibility, informality and open approaches to problem solving and consensus building.

Strategies are cyclical processes, with capacity building and implementation continuing throughout. Implementation feeds into, and is guided by, regular review and revision of the policy framework and action plan, based on monitoring and evaluation.

The layers of implementation – by different levels and sectors of government and by a wide range of actors outside government – are likely to deepen with each turn of the cycle. The strategy’s policy and action plan benefit increasingly as plans turn to actions, and as lessons from these actions lead to better policy and greater capacity.

Implementation can begin from the earliest stage of a strategy, in fields where government or a group of other participants is already committed to action.

Nothing reinforces a strategy process more than actions beginning to take effect. As a general rule, the earlier and more directly participants can feel the impact of strategy actions, the more they will be committed to the process. This rule reflects three important lessons of strategy experience:

National environment umbrella legislation was drafted and broad involvement in the strategy planning process affected the receptiveness of governments to change, including the establishment of environmental protection agencies in each of the provinces, and the initiation of provincial conservation strategies.

Early implementation might be targeted to specific problems which are disclosed during the definition of issues. In Uganda, for example, concerns were expressed about pollution as a consequence of the proliferation of plastic bags. The NEAP secretariat immediately drafted regulations to control their use. Often, positive actions are already being taken by governments or communities on an ad hoc basis as a result of separate initiatives. Strategy secretariats can seek to identify these as ‘good news’ stories and reinforce them in other ways as elements in the overall framework for action. It is particularly important that a strategy build upon the best of what is already existing in a country. Selective support for innovative activities and the facilitation of exchange and links between them can be essential elements of strategy implementation during the planning phase. Other actions at this stage, such as demonstration programmes and capacity building during policy development, are discussed later in this chapter, along with the role of the strategy secretariat in implementation.

The most difficult time for most strategies is when plans must be turned into action. Many strategies have not made the transition. In fact, about 70 per cent of all sectoral and thematic strategies in Africa over the past ten years have not been implemented; others have been only partially implemented. Worldwide, even the most successful national strategies have seen many important components of their action plans be unsupported or overtaken by events. For some, the strategy process appears to have stopped dead following the preparation of the main document. This was the case with the Peruvian and Costa Rican NCSs.

A strategy can still be influential, even if it does not reach full implementation. Peru’s NCS process stalled when the government changed. However, the draft strategy document provided a basis for Peru’s national report to UNCED, a review of the TFAP, and a new proposal for a national system of protected areas. It also led to four regional conservation strategies (also halted by the unstable political situation).

Costa Rica’s National Conservation Strategy for Sustainable Development (ECODES) also stalled when the government changed. But the informal networks of professionals formed during the process continue, and the intellectual influence of the strategy document – which has an ambitious cross sectoral approach based on systems analysis – has been strong. It brought to national attention the debate about the sustainability of development. It provided a framework for the TFAP and the innovative National Biodiversity Institute (INBio); and it led the National Park Service to start working on the concept of buffer zones, and hence to a local sustainable development strategy for the Llanuras de Tortuguero. ECODES also resulted in the establishment of a National Commission for Environmental Education and a Master Plan for Environmental Education.

Experiences such as these would suggest that, to maximize the chances of full and systematic implementation, strategy teams should nurture:

If there were an existing cabinet level committee with responsibility for the strategy, this could continue as the overall coordinating and facilitating mechanism. If such a mechanism were not in place, then this is a desirable innovation, even if only as an interim or bridging mechanism during the crucial transition phase where many strategies have collapsed. In Pakistan, for example, a cabinet implementation committee was established immediately following approval of the NCS document.

Similarly, during the planning phase, the technical steering committee and secretariat would have acquired a deep familiarity with the issues, developed extensive networks and skills, and experienced team work: all invaluable resources during this difficult transition. In most strategies, these structures have been allowed to break down and their reservoir of experience and staff resources have dissipated before effective alternatives had been set in place. In Nepal, for example, the strategy secretariat ceased to exist for all practical purposes following the preparation of the NCS document. Some 18 months later it had to be recreated to build the implementation phase. It was another four years before an Environment Protection Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, was established, with the ultimate responsibility for strategy coordination. A steady process of transferring secretariat responsibilities to the National Planning Commission and other agencies is still continuing.

This process of defining and transferring responsibilities, along with capacity development, takes time and needs to be viewed as an inherent part of implementation. The centres of energy for a strategy, which often have been painstakingly built up during planning, will be its most valued resources in implementation.

One of the key lessons of strategy experience is that it should be an ongoing process in which many of the components are repeated over a period of several years. Implementation will deepen and be expressed in many ways as different actors take up their roles, but a principal concern should be to fix all the elements of strategy planning within a country's existing development planning cycle. There may be a three- to ten-year planning cycle, but some countries rely principally on the annual budgetary cycle in defining development programmes.

Whatever the arrangement, a commitment will need to be made to reiterate the strategy planning process. This can be difficult if changes of government occur, which reinforces the need for a multipartisan approach to the process. Commitment to the strategy might best be expressed through a statutory obligation under an umbrella act relating to sustainable development. The reforms to government structure proposed in the strategy document may determine who will be responsible and how to manage the process.

Box 20: Mediation, conflict resolution and arbitration: an Australian example

In Australia, the Commonwealth Environment Protection Agency (CEPA) was established as the central national body to implement the National Ecologically Sustainable Development Strategy process. It is required to work in close collaboration with the state and territory governments, industry, and the community to:

determine clear national standards for and of indicators of sustainable development;
develop well defined processes for decision making; and
agree on effective consultative arrangements for better environmental management.

The CEPA works on establishing partnerships, decision making methods and a policy framework that all Australian governments and sectors will respect. In 1989, the Resource Assessment Commission (RAC) was established to address the major issues which the strategy process had defined but on which consensus could not be reached.

In carrying out its public inquiry functions, the RAC was guided by a set of policy principles (expressed in establishing legislation) for resolving competing claims and views over the use of resources. The principles are a useful model and, in summary, are:

There should be an integrated approach, taking both conservation and development aspects into account at an early stage.
Resource use decisions should seek to optimize the net benefits to the community from the nation's resources, having regard to efficiency of resource use and environmental considerations, ecosystem integrity and sustainability, the sustainability of any development, and an equitable distribution of the return of resources.
Government decisions, policies and management regimes may provide for additional uses that are compatible with the primary purpose values for the area; recognizing that, in some cases, both conservation and development interests can be accommodated concurrently or sequentially and, in other cases, choices must be made between alternative uses or combinations of uses.

In reaching consensus, or at least in coming to a position that the main parties can live with, the RAC interpreted these principles as demanding a thorough understanding of the range of beliefs and ethical frameworks underlying the different community values relating to an issue. The RAC process aimed to ensure that even though a party may disagree with the final decision taken by a government, it accepts the reasonableness of the process which led to it. The major elements of the public inquiry process encompass research, clarifying the pertinent issues, meetings, public hearings, written submissions and the formulation of options and recommendations. Three important public inquiries undertaken by the RAC involved the sustainable use of forests, the management of Australian coastal zones and mining in a national park. A statutory authority such as the RAC is a valuable innovation in strategy implementation so that a body of expertise and a range of methodologies is built up to enable the consistent application of sustainable development principles to the resolution of major resource use issues.

Yet such an open process can threaten established development interests, and the RAC came under heavy attack from industry and opposition parties as a ‘superfluous layer of green tape bureaucracy’ that drove away potential resource industry investors. The RAC was abolished four years after it began. The various sustainable development institutions, like all offspring of the strategy process, are likely to meet with strong resistance and, unless backed by committed and influential political constituency, can be short-lived.

Other desirable sustainable development structures include environment tribunals, which can mediate and, if necessary, arbitrate more specific conflict situations. These occur as strategy actions begin to define more sharply focused conflicts of interest over the use of specific sites or resources. The RAC was set up to examine national issues of conflict whereas other bodies, such as the Land and Environment Court within the Australian State of New South Wales, might conciliate on actions proposed within local strategies such as a zoning plan or the siting of an industry. Finally, administrative structures are needed to fulfill control and enforcement functions more akin to a conventional environment protection agency.

The precise form of these structures that seek to institutionalize strategies for sustainable development is not so important: in fact, one agency might fulfill any number of them. A greater concern is that there be a clear definition and understanding of their functions and relationships with other institutions, i.e. how they connect to the system.

It is essential that all agencies involved in implementing the strategy are clear about their relative responsibilities. The component actions are likely to be the responsibil-ity of many bodies, both inside and outside government. The role and influence of the steering committee and secretariat or their equivalents (i.e. the central strategy agency) will vary. There will be:

Choosing the central agency to drive implementation depends on how strategy planning was managed. In Nepal, the National Planning Commission provides the secretariat for the strategy and its overseeing body, the Environmental Protection Council (EPC). Similarly, in Zambia, the inter sectoral EPC, which falls under the Minister of Environment, manages both the NCS and NEAP processes. A central strategy agency will need to have four main characteristics. It should:

Different levels of sustainable development structures and agencies established in Australia are described in Box 20.

A wide range of other structural reforms can complement and reinforce the functions of the central strategy agency. In the United States, two new executive offices have been established to coordinate the preparation of sustainable development policy. The Office for Environmental Policy focuses on domestic issues, while the Global Environmental Affairs Office, situated within the National Security Council, deals with international issues. Both report direct to the President and have a mandate to produce action plans that set out policies and approaches to implementation. They are required to seek broad public participation and inter-agency collaboration. Also, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established a strategic planning group that examines critical development trends, and, on the basis of various future projections, identifies emerging environmental problems and their possible solutions.

In Pakistan, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute was established following the recommendation of the NCS. It has a monitoring and evaluation role in addition to identifying the main sustainable development issues and defining frameworks for public action.

Sustainable development structures, and the laws which underpin them, need to reflect the flowering of a comprehensive consultation and capacity building process that begins during strategy planning and continues as part of implementation. This is particularly true for those laws that set in place the main institutional and decision making framework for integrating the strategy process throughout government and the community. Rarely should laws be the point of departure in a strategy; rather, important signposts erected along the way so that the journey becomes a familiar and well-charted one for the communities concerned. It is particularly important that the technical officers and lawyers responsible for implementing the laws have had a central role in preparing them.

‘If sustainable development is to mean anything at all, it will have to involve a partnership with the future, not just a partnership for profit.’
Chris Rose, Greenfreeze Project, UK

Sustainable development principles and definitions, including a coherent philosophical framework that sets out the basic principles of sustainable development and the practical ways in which they will be applied (Box 21).

Environmental rights, involving a system of legal rights for people to take action to protect the environment, to require the government to act, to have access to information, to participate in policy making and to question decisions.

Box 21: Principles for sustainable development law

A range of principles or approaches to sustainable development are now being expressed more frequently in international agreements and domestic legislation. Although they all encapsulate ideas that have been common in political philosophies for a long time, most have only recently been expressed as basic tenets of environmental policy. Even the polluter pays principle, which goes back some 20 years, is only beginning to work through the decision making system to have practical effect. The process has yet to begin in most developing countries. All these approaches are expressed in some form or other within the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21. The principles need to be cast in a way which reflects the cultural, political and economic nature of a country and the different communities within it. They work best when applied together, especially when special circumstances would mean that the rigorous application of one principle alone might be impracticable or inequitable.

The public trust doctrine has its origins in Roman Law. It has been extended in recent years, placing a duty on the state to hold environmental resources in trust for the benefit of the public. At its widest, it could be used by the courts as a tool to protect the environment from many kinds of degradation. In some countries, the doctrine has formed the basis of environmental policy legislation, allowing private rights of action by citizens for violations by the state (directly or indirectly) of the public trust.

The precautionary principle as defined in the Rio declaration holds that where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation (or expressed more liberally, when in doubt about the impact of development, manage according to the worst case scenario of its effect on the environment). Politically, this principle is difficult to apply and is, in fact, ignored in most countries. Erring on the side of caution is not an attractive option when considered against immediate projected economic benefits which can be spelt out in conventional development terms.

The principle of inter-generational equity is at the heart of the definition of sustainable development and requires that the needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It depends on the effective application of the other principles for sustainable development combined.

The principle of intra-generational equity requires that people within the present generation have the right to benefit equally from the exploitation of resources, and that they have an equal right to a clean and healthy environment. This principle applies to the relationship between groups of people within and between countries. This principle is being applied more and more in international negotiations. But within nations, it is particularly susceptible to cultural and socio-economic forces.

The subsidiarity principle is resurfacing worldwide after many decades of centralized planning and decision making. In essence, it is the principle that decisions should be made by the communities affected or, on their behalf, by the authorities closest to them. Decisions should rest at the national rather than international level and local rather than national level. This has been the basic principle governing the devolution of planning systems worldwide and is intended to encourage local ownership over resources and responsibility for environmental problems and their solutions. These growing pressures for devolution in government need to be balanced by a recognition that local areas are part of larger systems and cannot function in isolation. Often,
environmental problems may come from forces outside of local control, such as upstream pollution from a neighbouring country or community. In such cases, the other principles for sustainable development would override the subsidiarity principle.

The polluter pays principle (PPP) suggests that the polluter should bear the cost of preventing and controlling pollution. The intent is to force polluters to internalize all the environmental costs of their activities so that these are fully reflected in the costs of the goods and services they provide. Problems will be inevitable if an industry or plant would go out of business if this principle were enforced rigorously. A community might decide, for example, that the employment benefits of keeping a factory open outweigh the health and other environmental costs of pollution. Environmental agencies in developed countries have usually taken a flexible approach, with the
continuation of government subsidies in special cases and the negotiation of individual programmes to allow certain polluters to meet new environmental standards gradually.

The user pays principle (UPP) applies the PPP more broadly so that the cost of a resource to a user includes all the environmental costs associated with its extraction, transformation and use (including the costs of alternative or future uses foregone). The PPP and UPP can be expressed in similar ways through market systems and government regulation.

Promoting partnership, including systems that encourage partnerships for sustainable development between levels of government and with the private sector and non-government organizations.

What is possible, or even desirable, in sustainable development law will vary from country to country according to the cultural and political context. The issue of environmental rights is particularly sensitive and difficult for some countries to embrace. The rule of thumb is to seek to maximize the legal expression of these basic elements of sustainable development.

The bulk of existing environmental regulation is aimed at specific sectors of the economy, and specifies production, technology or emission standards to reduce environmental degradation or resource depletion. Regulations can be effective and economically efficient in promoting sustainable development actions when standards:

Regulations have their disadvantages, however. They are seldom the most cost-effective way to reach a given standard of environmental quality and studies in the United States suggest that they can be up to six times as costly as the least cost alternative. This is because regulations that do not meet the above criteria are often inflexible, requiring polluters to adopt standard solutions even if they were able to find better alternatives. Furthermore, regulations do not provide incentives for further improvement beyond the required standard. In contrast, economic instruments produce a financial incentive even as wastes are reduced, hence stimulating continual improvement.

In contrast to regulation, by which government aims to set rules to control the behaviour of resource users, market approaches address strategy implementation in a different way. Economic instruments aim to sensitize both producers and consumers toward responsible use of environmental resources and avoidance of pollution and waste, by internalizing environmental and social costs. They include taxes, charges, subsidies, deposit/refund schemes and tradeable permits. These are geared towards ‘getting the prices right’ so that environmentally and socially beneficial goods and services are not at a market disadvantage with respect to polluting or wasteful competitors. Sometimes, therefore, they need to be accompanied by regulations or other controls to ensure this.

Economic instruments can enable industry and other resource users to meet environmental standards in a cost-effective way, encourage them to do better than the standards require, and add their resources to those of government to maintain ecosystems. They can:

Box 22: Examples of market based approaches for environmental policy

Brazil: Discontinuing fiscal and credit incentives for ranching has saved around US$300 million annually, while easing (although not eliminating) pressures for deforestation.

China: Economic instruments include fees to discourage pollution, the reform of resource prices and the planned application of environmental taxes. Certain industrial pollutants are subject to emission fees, collected by local environmental protection offices. Revenues are placed in banks and used to finance loans to firms for pollution control investments, covering 20–25 per cent of the requirements for this purpose.

Colombia: The Ministry of Development will support environmental improvements in industry through a credit line from foreign banks and international lending agencies. A Fund for Industrial Modernization will provide credits for business to buy new equipment. From 5 to 10 per cent of the fund will be used for environmental projects. Companies that invest in cleaner technologies will benefit from reductions in capital gains tax of up to 20 per cent.

India: Measures include income tax exemptions from donations to environmental institutions; a 50 per cent depreciation allowance for devices that minimize pollution or conserve resources; soft loans and investment allowances for pollution control equipment; pollution fees; and a levy on water use. Fertilizer subsidies have been removed, with exemptions for small farmers.

Indonesia: Pesticide subsidies accounted for almost 80 per cent of the retail price in 1985, creating a big incentive to over-use them. This resulted in widespread soil and water pollution and a rise in pesticide resistant strains of pests. After a severe loss of rice production, all but four of the chemicals were banned. Subsidies were eliminated entirely by late 1988. This greatly reduced pesticide use in favour of integrated pest management systems, and saved more than US$120 million a year.

The important task is to set the prices or taxes at the right level and to introduce change gradually so that it does not result in severe economic dislocation. Subsidies, in particular, should only be used in special cases where severe environmental problems and issues of equity come into play. A common effect of subsidies is to place a significant economic burden on a country by supporting technological backwardness and inefficiency. Also, they often result in large-scale environmental damage by discouraging full internalization of costs. Economic subsidies with negative environmental effects should be removed.

Box 22 provides some examples of how economic instruments have been used to encourage implementation of environmental policies.

Interest in economic instruments to promote sustainable development actions has grown with the increasing concern about the efficiency of over regulation. Yet there are circumstances in which economic instruments may not work or would need to be applied carefully in combination with other approaches, especially in lower income economies:

When people are too poor to pay: Economic instruments that rely on governments charging fees or collecting taxes from polluters are unlikely to work in the majority of rural areas in lower income countries, where poor people live in subsistence conditions and simply cannot pay. In these areas, positive subsidies or incentives should be considered.

When markets are undeveloped: In many poor countries, a combination of undeveloped markets, uncertainty about supply and demand, and macroeconomic instability undermines the effectiveness of market based instruments.

The OECD has adopted five criteria to judge whether economic instruments or regulations would best tackle a given environmental problem:

In most cases, tools from the three different approaches – regulation, cooperative processes, and economic instruments – will
need to be applied together in combinations best suited to the situation. For example, regulations and voluntary agreements could set basic standards and targets while economic instruments could provide the stimulus to meet and exceed them by whichever means each business finds most efficient. Whatever the approach, there should be a policy transition, giving industry a stable and predictable climate in which to shift from unsustainable to sustainable practices.

Of central importance to strategy implementation are integrating mechanisms that build bridges between key agencies and groups participating in a strategy and that lead to partnerships and greater collaboration. They are needed to form working links between national government agencies, between levels of government, and between government, the private sector and the public. They are important because:

Integrating mechanisms can include structures like committees or working groups, various forms of agreements on the way things are to be done, and innovative decision making methods that are inherently cross-cutting, such as environmental assessment.

These can take many forms. The more important are underpinned by legislation but most operate on a more informal basis. In Canada’s Yukon Territory, for example, the government has established a statutory Council on the Economy and the environment, with members representing aboriginal people, labour unions, business, women, NGOs and a municipal government, bearing in mind the need for a balance of regions and interests in the territory. The council has a broad range of functions, including monitoring implementation of the Yukon Conservation Strategy. It is an advisory body to the territorial cabinet but can report directly to the territory’s legislative assembly on certain matters.

The Nepal Environment Protection Council is similarly constituted and also oversees NCS implementation, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. In the UK, an independent group of experts from government and the private sector has been established to advise the Prime Minister on areas where policies and practices conflict with the environment objectives within the
government’s NSDS.

As implementation deepens, national and local strategies will need to be linked effectively through integrating structures. In Panama, the Ministry of Planning and Economic Policy is represented on the coordination team of a local strategy (Bocas del Toro). This ensures that national planning takes account of the strategy’s proposals and translates them into national budget allocations. The strategy for Petén, Guatemala, was developed by the Secretary for Economic Planning and adopted as the government’s official plan. A regional forum of governmental and non-governmental organizations meets once a month to consider common problems and coordinate activities.

Existing consultative mechanisms – such as inter-agency committees, inter-governmental councils (such as the Environment and Conservation Council in Australia) and the many forms that bring together governments with other groups – should be reviewed for their potential to contribute to strategy implementation. Some might need strengthening if they lack sufficient credibility to contribute effectively. A number of innovative approaches have become the main creative driving force for planning and implementation. Structures which have co-evolved as variations on the same theme include:

Round tables: A round table is a group of senior representatives of government, business, citizens’ groups and other key sectors of society. It provides a forum for collaborative analysis and treatment of major issues, educating government and NGO leaders in each other’s perspectives, approaches and concerns. The group should be fairly small – ideally around 25 – although that may make it difficult to cover all the key sectors. The bigger the group, the more difficult it is to develop the right
atmosphere for progress. In some cases, for example British Columbia’s Strategy for Sustainability, the round table is also the steering committee of the strategy. In other cases, round tables are vehicles for discussing, developing and helping to implement the strategy, but overall direction of the strategy is the responsibility of a separate steering committee.

Core groups: A core group is an inter sectoral network of government officials from most, if not all, ministries and departments. It provides a forum for bringing in sectors to deal with shared problems. The group may be large: Nepal’s Environmental Core Group involves more than 70 people, its members coming together in differing combinations depending on the policy being addressed at the time; for example, environmental assessment procedures or national heritage conservation. A core group is a working network, intended to internalize the strategy (or aspects of the strategy) within government.

Action networks: These are networks of national government agencies, local governments, and non-governmental actors that come together to solve multi-sectoral problems, often in a particular part of the country, such as a river basin or a coastal zone. For example, an action network was formed to address problems of water pollution in the Densu River Basin in Ghana. As the problems change, the composition of the network changes. Because action networks are designed to address multi-sectoral issues, they are an important means of implementing an NSDS.

Round tables, core groups and action networks all seek to provide structures and processes for problem solving and consensus building beyond the conventional forms of government characterized by hierarchical, inflexible and closed decision making. Most mediation and conflict resolution can continue within such informal and task-oriented networks and groupings. They allow participants from different organizations – who might not normally interact – to contribute as equal partners, to exchange experience, learn by doing and, through mutual support, build their own confidence and commitment to agreed actions. It is in governments’ interest to facilitate, resource and acquire the skills to manage these new forms of partnership.

Agreements can be reached through conventional forms of negotiation or innovative networking. Usually the goal is to agree on collaborative ways of working that meet sustainable development objectives, often through self-management. When national environment assessment legislation was introduced to Australia, Memoranda of Understanding were negotiated with all key sectoral agencies, detailing how each would take responsibility for applying the legislation to its own activities. Also, an
Inter-Governmental Agreement on the Environment (IGAE) was adopted in 1992 to provide mechanisms for:

The agreement embraces many of the principles of the National Ecologically Sustainable Development Strategy, and defines the roles and responsibilities of the different levels of government. Intragenerational equity is of particular concern to the Australian federation; the agreement sets in place a consultative structure for establishing national environment protection standards, guidelines, goals and associated protocols. The object is to ensure:

The implementation of national strategies can be greatly assisted by these kinds of governmental agreements. In fact, in many countries implementation is not possible without them. Voluntary agreements with the private sector are discussed later in this chapter.

In strategy implementation, the various forms of environmental assessment and planning are the most valuable methods of drawing together sectors and disciplines, and conservation and development issues. Some countries have developed national systems of environmental assessment and resource-use planning as part of the sustainable development management framework. By working cooperatively to develop these various decision making methods, participants, such as sectoral experts, can gain a better appreciation of the environmental responsibilities of their own agencies vis-a-vis other sectors. Such cooperative efforts help people better understand the role of the central planning and environment organizations and improve working relationships between them.

The strategy secretariat, whatever form it takes, has a special role in implementation. Its principal concern needs to be setting in place the key ingredients of an institutional and decision making framework for sustainable development at the national level. It should focus on the inter sectoral aspects of the strategy which are not covered by, but affect all other, government agencies. In Nepal, the NCS secretariat implementation programme includes:

In pursuing these goals, the secretariat is using the environment core group approach and other integrating mechanisms to forge partnerships with the private sector and NGOs. This process was complemented and reinforced by selected demonstration and pilot programmes.

The strategy secretariat may, at least in the first cycle of implementation, need to mount one or more pilot programmes to test and demonstrate the practical application of policies, and to build capacity and commitment within relevant sectors. These pilot programmes should generally aim only at inter sectoral activities or those which fall outside existing sectoral mandates.

Demonstration and pilot programmes can be introduced at any point in the strategy cycle as model sustainable development activities. They can be particularly valuable when some of the proposed approaches (i.e. integration, coordination and participation) are unfamiliar or even threatening. In addition, they can enable the feasibility and effectiveness of various cross sectoral approaches to be tested in local situations.

In certain countries, such as Zambia, Botswana and Nepal, the policy and institutional changes required by the strategy have not been made until several demonstration programmes have been underway for some time, and have shown the need and direction for change. Even where policy and institutional changes are made soon after preparation of the policy framework, demonstration programmes can provide ways to introduce new approaches. Without this initial focus activity, it is often difficult
for several sectoral agencies to coordinate activities and define and achieve joint aims.

Demonstration projects can have a multiplier effect, helping people understand – far more than any document can – what the strategy is all about, and generating support for it. To fulfill this potential, a demonstration project should:

Often, pilot projects will build on an existing activity. In Zambia, two significant regions were selected as NCS pilot districts. These were areas where a number of sectors and interest groups shared problems: an urban area, the project for which was based on a successful NGO programme; and an agriculturally marginal rural area, for which a new project was specially developed.

A national strategy provides an umbrella of policies and a range of well-targeted actions; the most important concerning new instruments, methods and capacities for making better decisions. These policies and actions may reach across government and down to local levels, but will be given expression through more detailed planning and implementation.

Box 6 in Chapter 4 provides examples of the different strategy types. For example, depending upon the priorities of national government; thematic strategies, covering biodiversity, environmental education, climate change or population might be needed. These would cut across all government sectors and generate more comprehensive actions relating to the theme. Similarly, sectoral strategies will be needed to pick up on the momentum of policies and demonstration programmes of the national strategy. These will follow their own cycles and feed back to the broader national process.

In countries with a federal system, state or provincial governments may feel that the national strategy cannot be translated directly to local levels. They may feel that a greater sense of ownership and focus would come through a state or provincial strategy, once again building on and integrating with the national process. This is what is happening in Pakistan, although the way the links between the national and provincial conservation strategies will evolve is yet to be determined. In most countries, this crucial meshing of strategy cycles will come only through trial and error and exchange of experience with other countries.

Core groups or action networks have an important role to play, complemented by the kind of integrating structures, agreements and methods previously described. In countries with very large populations, such as India, or even the United States, the state or provincial level will need to be given special emphasis in providing the strategy umbrella for fostering local initiatives. In countries with a regional structure, such as New Zealand and Nepal, actions within the national strategy process will need to stress the subsidiarity principle. In Nepal, the National Environmental Planning Guidelines prepared by the NCS environment core group drew from the experience of eight local conservation strategies undertaken as pilot exercises. They reinforced the government’s policies on devolution and promotion of district- and local-level strategies.

A central component of New Zealand’s strategy for sustainable development is the Resource Management Act, introduced to devolve major sustainable management functions to regional councils. The councils are required to initiate their own strategy processes. A number of the state governments in Australia have introduced similar systems, placing the main responsibilities for policy definition and implementation with local government.

In a number of developed countries, the strategy processes tend to merge with the conventional land-use planning systems as they come closer to local communities. In many less developed countries, planning for land-use tends to proceed in isolation from planning for social services. Strategy processes can bring them back together.

In Australia’s Victoria State, more than 20 local governments have mounted local conservation strategies based on the National Ecologically Sustainable Development strategy model and following guidelines prepared by the state government. Local sustainable development strategies are the subject of a separate handbook in the IUCN series.

Whatever the strategy level, much of the implementation should be non-governmental; by business and industry, schools and universities, research institutions, environmental organizations, human development organizations, community groups, and so on. The wealth-creating sectors of society are almost entirely outside government; so it is essential that business and industry be centrally involved in implementing the national strategy. Much societal organization and mobilization occurs via the host of non-market, non-governmental organizations, so they must implement the strategy too.

Businesses and NGOs are unlikely to become involved in implementation unless they have a sense of ownership of the strategy. It is vital that they participate in the choice of objectives and issues, assembly and analysis of information, policy formulation, and decisions on the strategy. Some strategies are, by design, basically governmental: they are meant to be implemented primarily by the national government. The Malaysian NCS is an example. Others are intended to be implemented more widely. The action plan of the Pakistan NCS, for example, includes many actions by business and industry. However, the corporate sector was involved only marginally in formulating and deciding the Pakistan NCS and so was not ready to implement the strategy when it was adopted by government. An industry round table has now been established to work through the main fields and methods for action.

The Pakistan experience highlights the strength of the target group approach adopted by the Netherlands’ National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP), in which industry, farmers and other non-governmental sectors are included as partners with government. The non-governmental partners share in diagnosis and setting targets, and undertake much of the implementation through voluntary agreements.

The trend in the relationship between government and industry, in particular, is to seek cooperation rather than forcing implementation of strategy policies through complex regulatory frameworks. Experience has taught that, where industry has assisted in identifying the key environmental problems, it is more likely to recognize its shared responsibility for tackling them. The main components of the cooperative approach are:

In the United States, this approach is being seen as a substitute for the lengthy and expensive regulatory approach, which often involves extensive litigation. In the energy sector, for example, the use of ‘collaboratives’ followed by voluntary ‘settlements’ is now facilitating the implementation of sustainable development strategies in industry. It is also helping overcome the antagonism resulting from what industry had labelled the BANANA syndrome: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission defines ‘collaboratives’ as a group of individuals from government, NGOs and the private sector who pool resources to constructively solve problems without recourse to litigation. Independent facilitators have often been used to help in discussions and, in particular, to reach the negotiated settlements.

In upper-income countries, voluntary agreements are increasingly becoming part of environmental policy because they can provide more flexible and cost-effective ways for government and industry to meet environmental goals. Their use in lower income countries is limited but growing. Pioneered through the concept of self-regulation and industry codes of practice, more companies are committing themselves to improving their environmental performance. In many cases, the pressure to do so comes from employees, consumers, investors and local communities. Companies find it is in their longer-term self-interest to take action. Advantages of the voluntary approach are:

In the UK and Japan, industries are encouraged to introduce Environmental Management Systems on their own initiative. Such systems can enhance their public image and the marketability of their products and reduce the likelihood of government taking punitive actions.

Such agreements and voluntary systems are, however, successful only if they are backed up with a government intention to regulate if industry performance does not meet the environmental goals within an agreed time scale. Voluntary initiatives are particularly difficult in marginal industries or in countries where a depressed economic situation discourages immediate action to improve environmental performance. In such cases, the cooperative approach would need to be accompanied by strong legislation and/or well-targeted incentive measures.

Building capacity for sustainable development is a central task of national strategies. It requires developing the necessary individual and group perspectives, skills and organization. Capacities are needed through all the main components of a strategy: for assessment, including diagnosis (at the start of a strategy), and monitoring and evaluation (during the entire strategy cycle); for designing the actions (planning); and for taking the actions (implementation).

Capacity-building needs to respect the same principles which govern the entire strategy process and which have been enunciated throughout this handbook. They relate to ways of changing or strengthening societal values, knowledge, technologies and institutions. Capacity-building applies equally to strengthening and improving governmental and non-governmental organizations of all kinds, from national to local levels. The increased capacities should lead to communities that are more self-reliant and equitable, and more open, participatory and integrated in their decision making.

An effective way of building capacities is to take action – from the earliest stages of a strategy – on those aspects to which participants are already committed. Experience in Nepal has shown that if actions are taken in policy areas that do not threaten the territorial imperative of key government sectors, then a strategy secretariat can do much to increase technical capacities and political commitment. In this case, key staff from many government sectors were involved in the development of a national
system of environmental assessment. This resulted in broader thinking on environmental policy generally and a better understanding of how it is applied. It also led to the establishment of environment units within many ministries and an Environment Protection Council.

Implementing an EA programme such as Nepal’s, at the same time as developing the strategy’s policy framework, brings a number of important benefits to the strategy process. It:

An emphasis on capacity building as a way of developing important areas of environment policy begins to shrink the considerable gap that often exists between policies, as expressed in various development plans and in practice. Such an emphasis forces technical staff to confront, for example, the incompatibility among policies that require decentralized mechanisms, devolved authority and cross sectoral collaboration and the management style of their own institutions, which is most frequently authoritarian, highly centralized and closed.

‘Environmental debate and environmental education can go on for ages, but while poverty-ridden communities do not have benefits, we are talking to an unconverted group.’
Taparendava Mavaneke, CAMPFIRE Project,
Zimbabwe

Capacity-building and implementation should embrace the corporate sector, NGOs and communities as well as government. Historically, the government has been seen as the primary agent to induce and maintain the social and economic changes required for the overall task of nation-building. By and large, such work has concentrated on increasing the skills, knowledge and professional capacities of public servants. Increasingly, evaluations have shown that the performance of government development projects and programmes is critically dependent on the functioning of both state institutions and NGOs. More recent strategies realize this: for example, the Papua New Guinea Forestry and Conservation Action Plan gives equal emphasis to the building of non-governmental and government capacity. It recognizes that NGOs are crucial in organizing and ‘brokering’ government services to the traditional land-owners, who own 97 per cent of the land.

A particularly valuable role for strategy implementation is demonstrating and testing development options that emphasize sustainable use of resources by communities or small private enterprise. The NCS implementation programme in Nepal, for example, includes a fund to help community cooperatives and NGOs identify sustainable uses of their resources as an alternative to existing, more damaging developments.

Technical backing is provided in the management, accounting and monitoring of these small enterprises and in the initial assessment of alternatives to define benign but profitable enterprises. Successful marketing of new products, such as handmade papers, traditional cloth, soaps or artwork, often holds the key to sustainabilty. It requires special measures to promote economic partnerships; often well beyond the boundaries of the community concerned. The principles governing sustainable use in these situations – and the processes which can ensure they are upheld – need to be defined in close collaboration with the communities or groups that must apply them.

Government should create an enabling environment for sustainable development in all sections of society, not just the state. NGOs can be effective carriers of sustainable development throughout the country; catalyzing participation, organizing and mobilizing groups, obtaining grassroots perspectives, raising awareness, and providing long-term ideas, analysis and advocacy. Building non-governmental capacities for sustainable development is as important as building governmental capacities. To work effectively with government, NGOs need simple funding and administrative mechanisms that do not
compromise their independence.

Achieving an early focus in implementing a national strategy will depend upon the extent to which basic needs are being met. Where the private sector and NGOs are barely developed and government is highly centralized, a strategy should be very selective in what it attempts to achieve at the different levels of society. It might be most important to show results in development terms within selected communities so that the strategy constituency continues to grow. In countries that enjoy a higher level of human well-being, strategies can promote more ambitious actions that require longer-term perspectives of environmental main-tenance. Whatever the level of economic development or sophistication of decision making institutions, experience with strategy implementation suggests three approaches to management, particularly within government.

First, it needs to be open and collaborative. In implemention, the most effective forms of decision making are those which involve interest groups in sharing problem solving; which go beyond sectoral boundaries; and which are flexible and organic. Forms of government are needed that build on the best in traditional approaches, that are transparent and form working unions with and between groups that normally function separately.

Second, management needs to be adaptive. Strategies for sustainable development are best viewed as processes for managing and adapting to change. Never before has the need for, and the pace of, change been so great. Forces influencing change include population growth, massive movements of people from hills to coastal and to urban areas; technological innovations that enhance people’s ability to shape the environment; and, increasingly more significant, changes associated with environmental debts passed from one community or generation to another.

Even in the most self-sufficient, stable communities, background levels of change are inevitable. Strategies to cope with change are required. Communities satisfied with their level of development, or committed to conserving the essential elements of their environment and lifestyle, may wish for minimal change. Such communities, whether in Indonesia or Switzerland, would seek to maintain most elements of their natural and cultural heritage while making selective changes to certain qualities of life. The emphasis is not on permanent strategies for the years or decades to come. Rather, adaptive strategies are required in which all goals and actions are continually re-evaluated.

Third, management needs to be conciliatory. As national strategies begin to take effect, conflict between development options and interests will become better defined. Such conflict is frequently disruptive, but need not be. It can be managed so as to contribute to social integration and innovation. It can facilitate communication and define relationships and group structures in order to clarify for people their position relative to others. At this productive level, conflict can be used to initiate direct interaction among affected groups, through specific and accepted procedures that lead to the negotiation of settlements.
Increasingly, institutions within and outside government will be needed to facilitate these processes of conciliation and mediation, so that mutually acceptable and respected settlements assist sustainable development.

Crucial to these voluntary processes is the information that flows from a constant assessment of the changes taking place in society and its environment. Gathering information, analyzing it and making prescriptions for settlement of conflicts holds the key to keeping strategies on track, and is the subject of the next chapter.

		Updated 10 June, 2003