The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment


About UNEP	UNEP offices	News centre	Publications	Calendar	Awards	Milestones	UNEP Store

United Nations Environment Programme
Division of Technology, Industry and Economics

Newsletter and Technical Publications

<The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment>

An Essay and Workshop for Local Elected Leaders on Environmental Governance
with Emphasis on Adopting Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs)
- Training for Elected Leadership -

Part I - Essay on the Councillor as Guardian of the Environment
- ESSAY -
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does
to the web he does to himself. Chief Seattle, Native American Leader, 1857.

Definition and Summary

D. Tactics, Strategies and Approaches for Sustainable Development

5. MOBILIZING RESOURCES

After successfully using your option and consequence tools (to decide what environmental technologies will be needed to address your priority environmental risks), it is time to open the fifth drawer in your toolbox. In this drawer are the tools you will need to garner the resources necessary to implement the agreed upon environmental technologies (options). If council has used its technology assessment tools effectively (assuring that no foreseen short term or long range adverse consequences will be incurred), the task of getting the resources should be made less difficult. (Note that we refrain from encouraging you to think that sustainable development will ever be easy!)

Several dictums should govern your actions at this point:

Given local government's many responsibilities, public resources alone will not be adequate to solve environmental problems and achieve a satisfactory level of sustainable development within your community.
Your local government organization is potentially your most valuable resource. Please note our qualifier, potentially. We will discuss this point in a moment, but suffice to say for now, most local government organizations are given neither the resources nor the responsibilities required to be your greatest ally in achieving a higher level of sustainable development.
Local government's role as Guardian of the Environment is enhanced when councillors and staff become facilitators, enablers, power brokers, and negotiators, rather than implementers, in forging new sustainable development endeavors.
Every individual, every group of individuals, every organization and institution in your community (and all the resources they represent) are resources to be mobilized. Please note the inclusive term every.

Every Community is a Bounty of Potential Resources

Environmental challenges affect all kinds of people, groups, organizations and special interests within the community. In many ways, this is good news. It means there are resources to be tapped that go far beyond the organizational boundaries of your local government and the physical boundaries of your community. When we said earlier that local self-governance is the keystone for environmentally sound development, we were recognizing the potential powers that are vested in open, democratic institutions at the local level. We want to remind you once again about the importance of elected leaders and local governments being the keystone or the mechanism that supplies capability for action. As Guardians of the Environment, councillors can become keystones for change by supplying capacity for action to the myriad of individuals, groups and organizations that make up your community. Mobilizing resources is often as simple as reaching out and involving others in decision making and problem solving.

To prove our point, we want to share some action words that Joseph Coates and Ashok Jain use to describe the options open to non-governmental organizations to either make your life miserable as a public official, or become one of your most valuable resources in addressing the development-environment challenge.²²

It's quite a list. And, we suspect each of you could add more to it. The same is true of private sector organizations. We discussed earlier some of the things corporations are doing on their own to promote sustainable development. But, many of us who have served local governments in leadership roles find it difficult to reach out, to involve the larger community in tasks that have been traditionally defined as public responsibilities. Since this is a rather common dilemma, we think it might be useful to look in our "public official behaviour closet" to see what is hidden there. Here are some of the mental barriers we find that tend to make us less than effective in our role as environmental guardians.

Mental Barrier No. 1: The small fish in the big pond syndrome. Whatever we do as a local government won't make any difference in the long run so why bother. When this mental barrier jumps political boundaries and spreads from community to community, it takes on the characteristics of an infectious plague and nobody does anything to assure sustainable development. Luckily, there is growing realization that local governments are the pivots of environmentally sound development. Whatever one community does or does not do to take responsibility in this complex domain ultimately will have an impact, not only on its own citizens, but those beyond its boundaries.

Mental Barrier No. 2: An equally demobilizing barrier is the collective action of councils to buy into what someone called the killer phrases. You've heard them all during your service on council and maybe even uttered one or two of them on some rare occasion. They go something like this: "We tried that before ..." "Great idea but not for us..." " It may have worked somewhere else but it'll never work here"... "Don't be ridiculous..." "The citizens will never go for it..." "It isn't our responsibility..." "You've got to be joking..." "Look, I've only got two years left before I run for re-election..." "It's not in the budget..." "If the state can't do anything to solve the problem what makes you think we can..." and, of course, the old reliable standby which seems to work when just about anybody suggests any thing new, "Yes, but..." Well, you get the picture.

Mental Barrier No. 3: Perhaps the barrier that constrains sustainable development most is the growing tendency to deal with complex issues in fragmented bits and pieces. Although just about every action we take, as individuals and communities, is connected to everything else in our lives, we tend to engage in incremental and fragmented approaches to problem solving. This often leads to inadequate solutions. What we need is a healthy skepticism of simplistic solutions and the courage to move beyond our own experience in search of new responses.

One of the best ways to understand the dilemma created by fragmented problem solving is to look at your own local government organization and how it thinks and functions in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. At the beginning of this discussion about resources, we said your own local government organization is potentially your greatest resource for implementing your leadership as Guardian of the Environment. Unfortunately, the tendency to think and act in fragmented ways often shields local government organizations and their leaders from systemic thinking and actions.

This barrier is reinforced by the collection of policies, organizational structures, procedures, rules, regulations, and established ways of doing things that have been defined and refined over long periods of time. When a law is passed, an institution created, a procedure put in place, they take on a life of their own. When this happens, it is difficult to retrace the legal footsteps, challenge the permanency that institutions assume, and take back the power vested in bureaucratic rules and regulations.

Examples of Fragmented Organization Behavior

Let's look at some of the more obvious limitations to sustainable development that reside within the walls of our local governments and often lead to fragmented thinking and ineffective organizational behaviour:

Chronic problems of working across departmental, professional and governmental boundaries to address complex environmental and urban development challenges that ignore all of these invisible but often impenetrable barriers in their search for resolution.
Lack of any effective strategic planning capability to forge long-term, broad-scale perspectives that are pro-active and visionary.
Outdated and ineffectual land use and physical planning concepts and practices that assume a top-down, high control posture over land uses and activities in a dynamic world that has long ago exposed the irrelevance of such mechanisms.
Inadequate ways of involving the public and key stakeholders in an on-going dialogue that leads to consensus and collaborative efforts in planning, decision making, and problem solving;
Lack of working models to encourage and ensure productive public-private partnerships that address the duality of purpose in sustainable development endeavors;
The anemic state of local government finances brought on by central control, lack of sufficient options to raise local revenue, and the dearth of local expertise and experience in the array of financial management tools and strategies necessary to implement and manage sustainable development opportunities;
Failure to use financial incentives and disincentives to achieve sustainable development and environmental protection goals (e.g., penalties for environmental violations; tax breaks for industries that install pollution control devices).
Shortage of appropriate skills and experience required to manage and operate environmental management and urban development systems (both within local governments and the larger community) and the capacity to keep pace with emergent human resource development needs.
Outmoded and inadequate information gathering and processing capabilities brought on by failures to share what is already known, the inability to access and process data and information easily and quickly, and the norm that sharing information is equivalent to losing control.
Reluctance to empower every employee and official in local government to contribute their fullest potential in building economically viable, environmentally sound communities.

Reflection

We suggest you stop for a moment and consider the list of organizational concerns listed above. As you review them, are there particular maladies you believe are particularly characteristic of your local government organization? In the space below, take some time to record the most problematic concerns and what you believe might be done to address them.

1. I believe the following organizational limitations impede our ability as councillors to pursue the goals of sustainable development:
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________

2. Here are some steps I believe we could take as a council to remove these barriers:
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________

This litany of organization maladies may seem awesome to many of you. They are not, however, insurmountable. They are, more often than not, man-made and, therefore, can be undone by human endeavors. (We, as authors, recognize the potential incorrectness of the term "man-made" but want to emphasize that, in fact, most of the maladies just listed are made by men who still control a lion's share of the world's resources and make most of the critical decisions.) The potential for sustainable development will be greatly enhanced when these inequities are addressed. We encourage you to conduct a thorough assessment of your local government's institutional capacity to undertake forward looking, aggressive programmes of sustainable development.

Seeking Out Unlikely Partners and Coalitions

We have talked here and earlier about the importance of forging partnerships and coalitions with institutions, organizations, groups and individuals beyond the boundaries of your own local government. And, the challenges of reaffirming and re-establishing a leadership role for your local government staff and organization.

Before we move to a discussion about the last drawer in our environmental toolbox, Achieving and Sustaining Results, we want share an experience from Calcutta, one of those cities that define the future of urban living in many developing countries. The story is significant because it describes the courage and fortitude of two men, one of whom influenced the direction of a large public bureaucracy that was rampant with organizational maladies. They also established some unusual partners and coalitions on the way to success.

Sunshine in the "City of Dreadful Night"

Kipling's tales of Calcutta, in his classic City of Dreadful Night, conjured up images of poverty, overcrowding and human chaos. The images continue as the city, built for a million people, stretches far beyond 10 million souls and continues to grow bigger and more chaotic each waking day. But Calcutta is also a dynamic and exciting urban environment and the challenge to survive by the poorest of the poor in Calcutta has brought new meaning to the notion that poverty is the mother of invention. Some of the most innovative and resourceful efforts to meet the needs of the urban poor and cope with impending environmental disaster have emerged from the ranks of the "natural ecologists," marsh farmers and fishermen who work and live on the edge of hope. Their growing contribution to the ecology of Calcutta is significant and owes much to the work of two dedicated and persistent public servants.

Over the past hundred years, Calcutta has developed a system of sewage and waste disposal that ranks among the most enlightened in the world. As described in The Wealth of Communities, "The architects of this system?which transforms sewage and organic waste into fish and vegetables?are the fishermen and farmers of places like Mudialy and East Calcutta Marshes. Every day the Mudialy Cooperative takes in 25 million litres of polluted water, an oxygenless cocktail of sewage and industrial effluent?and every day harvests over a tonne of fish and expels some 23 million litres of reasonably clean water."

The efforts of this Cooperative, that largely emerged from trial, error and desperation, have been replicated with public blessing on the other side of the megalopolis. In the East Calcutta Marshes, 20,000 people transform daily over a third of the city's sewage and almost all its domestic waste into 150 tonnes of vegetables and 20 tonnes of fish. It is one of the most efficient and productive systems of sewage treatment in existence, and probably the cheapest. The process is not without problems and critics but it works. Unlike many other complex, mechanized and expensive waste treatment systems, this one, according to Dr. Ghosh, is "money saving...and we could do something similar almost anywhere in the world, and certainly anywhere in the tropics."

Their efforts have not always been appreciated nor supported by the city administration and the larger community. A few years ago public technocrats, who often see no role in low tech solutions, and developers, lusting after reasonably vacant and inexpensive land, nearly threw the natural ecologists from their habitat. To their rescue came two public servants: a self-effacing ecologist from the West Bengal Fisheries Department, Mulut Choudhury, who was interested in helping the fishermen improve their lot through better practices; and, Dr. Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, a sanitary engineer and then executive director of the Calcutta Metropolitan Water and Sanitation Authority, a man driven to find new low cost solutions to the burgeoning waste problem of Calcutta. Both men suffered the indignities of being loathed by all sides in the sewage saga. The fishermen, who had carved an existence from the waste of others and had come to trust no one from hard experience, were wary of outsiders. Many of the decision makers in public places saw no possibilities for personal gain from self-help sanitation solutions. For over ten years, Dr. Ghosh researched the potential, plead the case, took abuse for his persistent and courageous stands, and finally prevailed. Further development of the wetlands around Calcutta was stopped by the courts and the Calcutta Metropolitan District Authority affirmed the need to preserve the wetlands to function as a waste recycling region.²³

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this experience as we rummage around in our tool kit looking for ways to mobilize resources for sustainable development.

Don't ignore the contributions that nature can make to solve environmental problems and support development. These contributions are often kind to public budgets.
There is growing evidence that even the poorest of the poor can be resourceful and contribute to your efforts to engage in sustainable development. As Muket, the Fisheries advisor said about his work with the cooperatives in the wetlands of Calcutta, "We can provide advise but they have to motivate themselves...and there has been no need for the government or anyone else to provide money and it helps solve the unemployment problem."
Don't ignore those in the organization who rock the boat, or worse yet, punish them as was the case with Dr. Ghosh. Hear them out. Seek their advice and counsel. Remember the organizational maladies we spoke about earlier? Being a Guardian of the Environment is rarely business as usual.
Forge working relationships with those who oppose you. The fishermen in Mudialy were reluctant and unlikely partners in the sewage dilemma confronting Calcutta officials. They resisted any intervention in their community for fear it might work against them. After all, they had everything to lose. It was only after an element of trust was established that the dialogue could begin in earnest.

Not to Mention Other Resources

You no doubt noticed that we haven't mentioned the types of resources one normally finds in such discussions. For example, money, staff, money, equipment and materials, money, experts, money, time, money. We've ignored them for two good reasons: (1) either you already know how to mobilize these types of resources; or, (2) you use them as an excuse not to engage in sustainable development. Either way, we figure it's not very useful to dwell on them.

On the other hand, you may discover that monetary strategies can be employed to achieve your sustainable development and environmental goals and objectives. Some examples are: revenue bond issues to solve long term environmental problems, such as solid waste collection and disposal; economic sanctions to reward good environmental behavior and curb those that are destructive; and, tax incentives for citizens and local firms to use appropriate and indigenous environmental technologies, and engage in natural resource management and preservation strategies. Recognize and reward those who reduce, re-use and only then re-cycle, when dealing with those materials that deplete the natural environment or mess it up.

(We are aware that some of you may think these past two paragraphs are somewhat
contradictory. However, we never once used the word money in describing alternative
fiscal strategies that are available to most local councils.)

Other Non-monetary Ideas for Nurturing Sustainable Development

Any organizational renewal efforts should recognize the importance of securing active partnerships and forging productive coalitions to build toward a future that assures your children's children that their environment will be safe and sound. And remember the "natural ecologists" in the Calcutta wetlands when you reach out to involve others. There may be resources in your own community that have never been called upon to get involved. Look for tradeoffs and reciprocal gain opportunities. For example:

if your company gives the city a firm commitment to decrease the level of air pollution it currently creates by "x" percent, the city will rezone the land adjacent to your factory so you can expand;
if your neighborhood establishes a recycling program that can be sustained, the city will provide an additional day care center you have been requesting; and
if the local schools establish an environmental curriculum, the city will donate a wetlands area for research and class room studies.

To summarize, mobilizing the resources needed to implement sustainable environmental and development programmes will be a challenging task. As we said earlier, the municipal budget will never be large enough to address all your concerns and opportunities in these two inter-related aspects of community leadership responsibility. Given this reality, we urge you to take a look at your own organization and determine how the council can assist the managerial leadership to renew (re-engineer, in present day parlance) the organization so new environmental challenges can be addressed more effectively and efficiently. Remember, it's potentially your best and most powerful resource to achieve community goals.

Table of Contents

Brochure

International Year of Forests

World Environment Day

UNEP Campaign