Regulate Global, Burn Local

By Eddie Koch

NELSPRUIT, South Africa

The thousands of delegates to the World Summit have flown into Johannesburg over a landscape that is littered with state-of-the-art laws, conventions and policies designed to protect and nurture the ecoystems of Southern Africa.

They may have noticed that these landscapes are literally burning.

Satellite images from space - and a view from the window seat of an airliner - show that countries like Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique are literally alight as people resort to slash-and-burn agriculture, veld fires to promote spring-time grazing and the chopping of hardwoods for charcoal.

And these images, taken from the very tableau against which the summit takes place, may have probably caused passengers to reflect on how best to bridge the vast gap that exists between policy and performance when it comes to dealing with desertification, loss of bio-diversity and global warming.

They are three of the big issues at this Summit.

Professor Christo Fabricius, head of the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rhodes University in South Africa, says: ''Southern African countries have all adopted the major conventions designed to protect the ecosystems of the subcontinent, which are still among the most biologically rich in the world. The problem is the big gap between policy and practise".

''There are many reasons for this but one thing stands out very clearly from our research. That is where grassroots movements by people who live in and with their ecosystems are active to protect the living environment, the gap is smaller - and this is because local people come up with more appropriate action plans to deal with threats to their environment,'' he says.

All of the governments in Southern Africa have signed the major conventions that are up for review in Johannesburg, including those on climate change, biodiversity, desertification and greenhouse emissions.

In addition, the New Partnerships for African Development (NEPAD), a continent-wide blueprint for economic renewal, states explicitly that a '' healthy and productive environment'' is a prerequisite for the objectives of the programme to be achieved.

NEPAD, along with the Africa Union that was formed last month to replace the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), thus in principle endorse conventions, laws and policies that aim to deal with desertification, wetland protection, coastal management, global warming, wildlife protection and good environmental policy.

''But this is all talk. Africa is a very diverse continent and has many problems associated with stable governance. These big continental initiatives try to create a common ground and approach to the conventions. They tend to fail, they're really all talk shows," says Oussenyou Diop, the regional coordinator for a programme called Managing the Environment Locally in Sub-Saharan South Africa (MELISSA).

’’The more effective approach is to try and create partnerships between local actors who can devise local environmental action plans that are relevant to specific conditions and thus more adapted and effective."

Saliem Fakir, director of the South Africa office of the IUCN-World Conservation Union, agrees that one of the major issues to surface at the summit will be the gap between policy and effective action by governments of Southern Africa. They have yet to implement the conventions that were set in motion at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992.

’’Most governments in the region are having problems in implementing their own policies. They lack capacity, have a high staff turnover and in many cases now rely on lobby groups û think tanks, consultants, big business and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) û to formulate and implement policy for them," says Fakir.

’’What we are seeing is that, given this vacuum in government implementation, action by civil society is becoming an important instrument for environmental protection. It is this kind of action that needs to be encouraged to turn policy into practice in this part of the world."

Steve Johnson, former co-ordinator of the Natural Resource Management Unit of the Southern Africa Development Conference, says it is no coincidence that those countries with a strong network of community based organisations active in the environmental field have the best results in terms of policy implementation.

Namibia and Botswana provide good examples. The governments of these countries have passed legislation that enables and encourages local residents to take ownership of, and to make commercial use of, resources that exist in their natural environment. The result is a bottom-up groundswell that pressures governments to protect their living environment.

And, says Fakir, protest politics and legal action by citizens in South Africa has proved to be an extremely effective weapon in terms of forcing government to adopt more effective policies.

He points to the Treatment Action Campaign, which is placing strong pressure on the government of South Africa to adopt more effective policies to curb the AIDS pandemic. The citizens also have launched a set of highly successful class actions against asbestos companies that have forced government to introduce a new mining and mineral policy that contains extensive environmental safeguards.

The proponents of civil action to ensure that policy becomes reality rather than rhetoric all note that local people have more at stake than their governments. ‘’The reason is simple," says the Johannesburg Memo, drafted by a group of environmental activists and intellectuals under the auspices of the Heinrich Boll Foundation.

’’The direct victims of the degradation of living systems à are typically part of the majority beyond the corporate-driven consumer classes,'' says the Memo. ''Essentially urbanite, the consumer (and bureaucratic) class lives in a cocoon which shields their senses and their existence from the decay of forests, fishing grounds, water tables, topsoils and plant diversity in the countryside.

’’Geographically or psychologically, the scenes of accumulation and the scenes of destruction, the places of comfort and the places of distress, are usually separated from each other by large distances. And this is why the awareness about the human despair and despair caused by the fraying web of life can so easily be ignored," adds the Memo.

Fabricius states that this is precisely why local action by citizens is either more effective, or an indispensable counterpart, to governments in terms of promoting sustainable development.

''Big programmes like NEPAD and the Africa Union assume a level of stability and homogeneity in Africa that has never existed. They tend to impose blueprints on a highly fluctuating situation with a diversity of opportunities," he says.

’’What we need, in order to close the gap between policy and practise, are adaptive and flexible strategies of the type that local communities are far more adept than bureaucracies at devising," adds Fabricius.