Tuesday, July 5, 2011

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE BOX

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE BOX

BY

AMULYA RATNA TULADHAR (Article for publication July 2011)
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Population and Development Outside the Box

Amulya Ratna Tuladhar, 2011


One hundred years of counting Nepalese, this year 2011, is a good time to do some outside the box thinking on population and development. What are ways of broadening the discourse of business as usual categories that keep yielding the same old, same old understanding and solutions that most of us are exasperated about? What follows is a sample of such an effort in graduate course of population and development; for details readers are invited to visit the blogsite http://amulyaratna.blogspot.com/ for DEVS 504.

Nepal’s population increased nearly 4 times in 90 years since the first census in 1911 to the last census in 2011. Before this census, indirect reconstructions had our country’s population around 3 million around Prithvi Narayan’s time in 1768.

What will be our country’s population in the future, the next 100 years? 100 million? 60 million? Or 40 million? Depending on how we handle the rate of our fertility decline, says demographers Shyam Thapa and his colleagues in 2001.

The demographic transition from high birth and high death rates to low birth and death rates, observed in Europe over the last 200 years seems to be happening at a much faster rate in Nepal. A stabilizing population seems to be in sight contrary to the Malthusian doom we are currently facing with population rates exceeding our food production rate.

Will the population numbers and rate outpace our development and national aspirations to have a better life? Contrary to our frustrations that India and China who were as destitute Third World nations like Nepal 60 years are now chugging ahead while we seem to be stuck behind? Right?

Wrong! The Human Development Index, a composite of Wealth, Health and Literacy shows that we have made almost 100% progress over the last 30 years from 0.210 to 0.428; agreed there is a lot disparity over space, time, class, gender, castes etc and some even have reservations over the methodology and assumptions of such a measure.

One such glaring inadequacy is the non inclusion of Environment in this index. “Are we better off now than we were 30 years ago, in terms of environment?” we can ask the Reaganesque question.

The World Bank in 2007 asked this same question in their Country Environmental Analysis of Nepal. And,… the Bank conceded that environmental costs of getting rich has been high, up to 3.5% of GDP in higher health costs alone and this is likely to be higher since up to 50% of the national economy is directly or indirectly linked to natural resources of the environment.

How do we protect the environment and reduce poverty is the central policy question of the Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) Nepal framework for 2010, developed by the National Planning Commission, the Ministry of Local Development and the UNDP Nepal and UNEP. This Initiative has tried to integrate pro-poor climate and environmental concerns for sustainable development. Have we not heard that before?

Conflict with environment is an emerging issue discussed in a paper by Asian Development Bank and ICIMOD in 2006. Widespread conflicts over a range of natural resources such as forests, land and water have been noted and these have spread to urban environment too. A well developed means of environmental conflict resolution does not seem to exist.

Environmental conflict is thought to be driven by increased scarcity of environmental resources. Some relatively successful examples of environmental conflict management include Nepal’s community forestry but there are many unsuccessful examples as in urban environmental issues where even the Supreme Court decisions on the Government bodies to adhere to environmental laws of the land are routinely ignored.

Theoretical reasons for such conflict may be rooted in the oxymoron juxtaposition of sustainable development as two antagonistic ideologies: ‘sustainability’ originally coming from World Conservation Strategy, 1980, developed by global ecology bodies such as IUCN, WWF and UNEP to mean limits due to ecology while the ‘sustainability” from Brundlandt Report 1987 mean limitless economic growth to meet the needs of human generations ad infinitum. Conflict is therefore the necessary essence of sustainable development maintains Redclift in his 2005 paper.

Environmental degradation is even alleged to be a hitherto unacknowledged “ultimate cause of Maoist rebellion” in Nepal, asserts Bhurtel and Ali in their 2003 research paper. This is in stark contrast to a plethora of social, political and economic explanation we have heard so far.
The role of State as part of the problem in the population and development issues of Nepal is an outside the box thinking. No longer is it accepted that the State is a secular conduit of development or even an agent of positive change. This discourse deserves our serious attention.

A theoretical paper on the transformation of the Nepalese State by David Gellner in 2002 takes us from pre-State Nepal through the centralized monolithic State to the contested idea of State. Instances of the variegated shape, reach and power of the Nepalese State with respect to environmental programs is documented by Ben Campbell.

In 1989 when I visited Kandebas ridgeline boundary between Gulmi and Baglung as a part of Lokta stock assessment for UNESCO, villagers there were still practicing the traditional Mana-Pathi community management of forests although Nepal was theoretically under the uniform management of the Private Forest Nationalization Act 1957.

It is clear the State is NOT the exclusive player in population and development in Nepal. This is a theme that has been intellectually explored by political ecologists such as Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, 1987, in their landmark Land Degradation and Society. Here, the Himalayan land degradation is presented as a crisis of explanation rather than a crisis of ecology; an effect cascading from international political economy all the way to the land manager farmer in their interaction with the local environment.

The intellectual and theoretical boundaries of political ecology have been pushed to Liberation Ecology by Michael Watts and Richard Peet, 2004. Here the State has been de_essentialized as a contested agency of social and political movements dealing with social equity and environmental livelihoods such as Chipko Andolan. The contestation has broadened from material means of production such as land, labor to non-material knowledge and discourse on how power is created, negotiated, and transformed into material change in population and development.

An example of how discourse, like the tale of Emperor’s New Clothes, can prohibit certain powers (Only the wise can see the Emperor’s fantastic naked costume) is illustrated in contrasting development discourses on male migration in Nepal by Jeevan Sharma in 2008. Here, he demonstrates how the dominant development discourse paints migration as an activity to be ashamed of, while an alternative discourse paints migration as a romantic, adventurous activity to be proud of.

One of the dominant discourses relevant to Nepal is The Himalayan Environmental Degradation proposed by Erick Eckholm in the 1970s where overpopulation in Nepal hills was considered to be prime cause of Bangladesh effects through deforestation, denudation and soil erosion.

This was the dominant, neo-Malthusians discourse during the time of The Club of Rome, 1972, which projected overpopulation as the number one villain for all problems from environmental degradation to poverty, just as we have global warming and climate change as number one driver of global change in the popular imagination nowadays.

But even a neo-Malthusian such as Paul Ehrlich conceded that global environmental change was due to a number of factors in addition to population in his conceptual formula, IPAT, or environmental impact, I, as multiplicative product of population, P, affluence, A, and technology, T. Working on global land use and land cover change, Billie L Turner II and William B Meyer in 1995 proposed IPATIC, or the inclusion of institutions, I, and culture, C.

Different forms of institutions, defined as socially embedded system of rules such as law and marriage and organizations. For instance, Sanderson points out those institutional mechanisms of property rights and land reform are important to explain global land use change.

Culture deals with attitude and beliefs and a lot of land use decisions are based on such cultural norms and values according to Rockwell so they ought to be studied together with population and other explanatory variables of environmental change.

Although population has been considered an independent variable, authors such as Colin Sage advocate studying population and income together because they interact in complex and inseparable ways to affect land use.

The discourse on population and development is often alarmist and pessimist but the hazards school concentrating on why and how people adapt to risky situations offers hope. Of these, Regions at Risk, based on a global study of critical regions of the world by Kasperson et al of Clark University and published by the United Nations University Press, 1995, have looked into Nepal along with Amazon basin, the Ordos Plateau and Mexico City as a critical region.

They used common concepts and methods such as the trajectory of environmental change, well being, wealth along with concepts of environmental sensitivity and resilience. The authors classified risk into three categories: impoverished, endangered and critical.

“Critical” means that regional environmental change might continue through a trajectory of irreversible deterioration in this generation even when wealth and human well being were considered: such was the case for the Aral Sea.

Nepal was considered “Impoverished to Endangered” with some degree of certainty; in other words, there was some danger of irreversible environmental degradation in next two generations but there are also hopes of wealth generating human well being and resources for environmental stewardship. This was in 1995.

Today, 15 years later, we have some reasons for hope in the form of community forestry successfully greening the Nepal hills with the participation of nearly a third of the country’s population despite all the problems we have.

Nepal is progressing into the third stage of demographic transition from high birth and death rate to low death and birth rate and slowing population growth rate; the 2011 census is expected to confirm a declining population growth rate from 2.25 % a year to 2.17% or thereabouts.

Even development stands to take-off after real progress in the human development index and some lag time in the payoff in the investment in education and social transformation to a more equitable society where all the energies of the Nation will be released.

We are doing something right. The goal of this essay was to critically examine these outside the box discourses in population and development and consolidate such processes and forces for more efficient management of population and development.

Tuesday, July 05, 2011