Picking up signals

Fisheries being depleted, toxins poisoning children, corruption weakening emission testing, oppression hobbling indigenous groups, violence against women continuing-all these phenomena can be ignored willfully or accidentally in a setting that is not receptive to signals. Signals of social and environmental degradation (chapter 2) can be based on scientific measurements (as in the case of air quality), or voice and feedback, but they would be effective only if there are constituencies for information and action.

The ability to pick up signals is closely associated with the ability to balance interests. Creating and receiving signals range from the feasibility of detecting a phenomenon in a meaningful way, to the process of aggregating signals and getting the attention of decision makers. Receptivity to signals thus depends on social and political relations. Are they open and inclusive, or fragmented and discriminatory? Are they pluralistic, meritocratic, and free, or politicized and monolithic? Is there freedom and competition in individual expression, business, and political organization?

Both citizens and the air-quality protection agency need good information on pollution, and this information has many uses. Mexico City's IMECA index, published daily in the press, advises people whether to keep their children indoors and avoid exercise. And it obviously informs citizens on how well the agency is doing in improving air quality, strengthening their hand in holding politicians and agencies accountable.

But there are also other signals. Voice describes the signals from citizens, firms, and civil society to influence institutions (i.e., through complaints, votes, court proceedings, and the media). A lesson from recent research in developing and developed countries is that influence-including good-natured influence from citizens to the emission reductions by firms-can travel through many channels, strengthened by information.²¹

A message from chapters 4 through 6 is that urban as well as rural residents can have difficulty in being heard and served, and new institutional arrangements are evolving to overcome this problem (e.g., boxes 6.4 and 6.5, respectively on favela residents in Brazil and on railway station-dwellers in Mumbai). For marginal rural areas, two factors make receptiveness to signals from the fringes more critical now than before. First, outmigration is less of an option than it was when high-income countries were industrializing (chapter 4). Second, other developments, such as mining, happen faster, so that signals about their impact on the community and the environment need to move faster too (see box 4.7).

Many countries are rearranging the way they govern themselves at the local level. With political decentralization, institutions develop to receive more fine-grained signals-important, since problems and priorities differ from place to place. But decentralization , proceeding in both rich and poor countries, carries promises as well as risks. It can be hard to get the incentives right, and there may be issues of weak institutional capacity and elite capture at lower levels of government as well.²²