The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment


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<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 II - Workshop on the Councillor as Guardian of the Environment
- WORKSHOP -

WORKSHOP COMPONENTS

13.16 Trainer Presentation: RESOURCES

Time Required: 60 minutes

Objective:

To prepare participants to evaluate the resources available to them as councillors to implement environmental technologies and to overcome institutional barriers to their use.

Preparation:

Develop a short presentation on the resources available to the local official to implement environmentally sound technologies. Important components of this presentation are a council's capabilities to mobilize resources and sources of assis-tance inside and outside the organization and council recognition of institutional barriers to implementation and what can be done about it. As preparation, use material on Mobilizing Resources from Part I supplemented by the following information and ideas of your own.

Focus:

For new government programmes to come into existence, decisions must be made to acquire new resources or shift existing resources from other purposes. The needed resources may be people, equipment, materials, money, information or a combination of these. As a result, finding the necessary resources to achieve a higher level of sustainable development involves either some adjustment of government priorities or new resource commitments from outside the organization.

Main Points:

Every councillor knows or soon learns after being elected to public office that there are never enough public resources to do everything that needs to be done. Government's capacity to raise revenue through tax levies or other means is limited. Public money, therefore, must be thoughtfully allocated to priority needs and efficiently managed. Opportunities must be sought to leverage public resources by using them to attract private capital and other external investments. New programmes must rank high as a measure of critical public need in order to compete successfully with existing programmes for limited public funds.

In many urban places, the depletion of natural resources and the growing weight of environment degradation falling on the urban poor is producing a shift in priorities. Taking advantage of a period of change and restructuring, Durban, South Africa initiated a Local Agenda 21 campaign in 1994 aimed at creating a more healthy, viable and sustainable urban environment for its population of some 2.5 million, approximately a third of whom live in squatter or informal settlements. Funds were shifted within Durban's local government to create an environmental branch in the urban development department for administering Local Agenda 21. The position and role of Local Agenda 21 in Durban has been strengthened by a workshop held in Drakensberg and attended by councillors and officials representing local authorities throughout the metropolitan area. It was through this educational process that local councillors developed the vision that has led, in turn, to their willingness to commit public resources to the new programme emphasis.¹⁹

Within every community and the urban environment within which the commu-nity exists is a reservoir of resources that can be used to achieve environmental goals. As a catalyst for mobilizing needed resources, city councils, like yours, are ideally suited to the task of identifying the resources needed and determining how to get the necessary participation and support from interested parties who have control over them. The needed resources may vary in form and come from many different sources.

Trainers' note: You might print on a sheet of newsprint or a transparency the names of the three cities that are used below as examples of successful and creative mobilization of external resources so participants have something to look at while you are talking. Underline the types of resources being used in each case.

In Nepal, the formation of the Annapurna Conservation Area Project in 1986 through the ingenuity of three men, a national park warden, a micro-hydro specialist and a medical geographer, has been a catalyst for the introduction of energy-saving and energy-creating measures to reduce reliance on wood and practices aimed at protecting and enhancing Nepal forests. The project has been successful in stimulating the active involvement of village women in entrepreneurship, community health and conservation activities.²⁰
In a unique example of mobilizing resources and expertise, Quito, Ecuador's mayor and municipal council engaged local community organizations to help design waste collection and recycling services for poorly served, low-income neighborhoods. Commitment of resources to this scheme has fostered job creation and the establishment of micro-enterprises in these neighborhoods.²¹
The seaside city of Santos, Brazil, through a partnership with a local university, has achieved a 50 percent reduction in the concentration of bacteria in canals that drain onto the city beaches. Unregulated emission of sewerage from city buildings into the canals had become a major source of pollution to Santos beaches and the cause of a dramatic decline in the city's tourist industry. Since 1991, engineering students of University Santa Cecilia dos Bandeirantes, who receive monthly stipends and are supervised by a municipal engineer, have inspected 31,000 properties and detected 23,000 irregular clandestine hookups to the city's storm water canals. The use of these students as resources coupled with a vigorous enforcement programme by the city is the chief reason for a significant improvement in water quality along Santos' beaches.²²

There are resources far outside the boundaries of your local government and even the physical limits of your community that can be tapped to achieve the purposes of environmental sustainability. The City Council of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a participant in the UNEP/UNCHS/Habitat Sustainable Cities Programme, serves as a catalyst to mobilize local resources and focus them for effective action. Participating local resource groups include desk officers and principal secretaries of relevant ministries, parastatals, NGOs, community-based organizations, and private groups providing technical support. These local resources, in turn, provide the leverage to stimulate investments and interventions from external public and private sources including the Ford Foundation, the European Union, UNDP, IDRC (Canada) and others. The experience of Dar es Salaam provides local officials with an important lesson: it is more effective to coordinate resource mobilization at the local level where the investments actually take place than from the national level.23

Unfortunately, there are significant barriers to the effective mobilization of local resources. Local policies, laws, institutional procedures and work practices define how things get done in every local government. These approaches, perhaps the result of earlier regimes, may be illsuited to the needs of today’s increasingly complex urban environment. The point is, when not re-examined from time to time and altered as necessary, outmoded policies, procedures and work practices can become barriers to progress. They may contribute to stalling or misdirecting government action and leading to less than desirable outcomes.24

Several of these barriers are described below. Some of them, no doubt, will be painfully obvious to you. As each is identified, recall an experience of your own where a policy, procedure or practice has slowed progress of a programme or actually brought it to a halt. Trainers note. Ask participants to use the following worksheet to record specific experiences where one or more of these policies, procedures or practices has slowed progress of a programme or actually brought it to a halt.

Trainers' note: Ask participants to use the following worksheet to record specific experiences where one or more of these policies, procedures or practices has slowed progress of a programme or actually brought it to a halt. Read each barrier and ask participants to share examples from their worksheets.

Lack of will or capability to look ahead with vision and plan strategically.
Lack of cooperation and collaboration across departmental, sectoral, and governmental lines.
Outmoded approaches to urban planning that are deterministic and assume an unrealistic degree of local government control over urban development.
Inexperience with the daily participation of citizens and key interested parties as regular and equal partners in urban planning and governance.
Inexperience with public-private collaboration and coalition building that recognize the duality of purpose in sustainable development.
Failure of local government to take full advantage of opportunities available for local financing.
Shortage of skills for effective environmental management and urban develop-ment planning.
Inadequate information gathering capabilities.
Reluctance to share what is already known out of fear of losing control.
Failure to enable every local government employee and official to contribute fully to the purposes of sustainable development.

This may seem an awesome list of barriers. But none of them is insurmountable. Another of your tasks as Guardian of the Environment is to assess your local government’s ability to overcome institutional barriers like these.

Review:

New environmental initiatives by local governments are fueled by the mobiliza-tion of needed resources. Needed resources include people, equipment, materials, money, information, or a combination of these. Finding the necessary resources to achieve a higher level of sustainable development involves either some adjustment of government priorities or new resource commitments from outside the organization. It also involves overcoming policy, structural, procedural and other kinds of barriers within the local government that would prevent shifting resources to the support of desired initiatives.

Worksheet
INSTITUTIONAL BARRIERS TO THE
MOBILIZATION OF RESOURCES

1. Barrier. Lack of will or capability to look ahead with vision and plan strategi-cally.