|
Balancing alternatives-and interests
A protective institution such as an air quality protection agency operates
within an authorizing framework that balances interests. It may impose an
emission standard or a tax, or strengthen enforcement. This in effect
strengthens the rights of beneficiaries to air quality-weakening rights of
others, and this is one of the ways changing social priorities can be
implemented. The balancing of interests takes place at many levels: in national
legislatures, in court processes, in marketplaces, in individual norms and
village interactions, in the seen or unseen processes in corporate boardrooms
and branches.
Evidence shows how information provision (in an era of unprecedented quantities
of information) can catalyze shifts in political balances and real world
decisions. Thus, the term "transparency" dominates the current campaign for
better governance. There is evidence from rich and poor countries that greater
availability of information means better environmental performance.23
Figure 3.4 shows the 1,445 cities in the world-where,
according to World Bank estimates-the population suffers from exposure to
concentration of dust particles, or total suspended particles (TSP) above
traditional guidelines of 90 micrograms µ/m3.24
In less than 2 percent of these cities is air pollution systematically
monitored, and in even fewer is information about that pollution made available
to the public. A good working hypothesis-based on studies from industrial and
developing countries-is that monitoring pollution information and making it
public would help (in part through political channels) to improve air quality
in these cities regardless of their level of income.25
But balance is not maintained by information provision alone. More open and
democratic countries presumably give weight to dispersed interests, so there
are reasons to expect that they would give more attention to environmental
protection. The data are incomplete, but some results support this hypothesis (box
3.4).
Box 3.4
Democracy and environmental policy: picking up signals, shifting the balance
There are strong theoretical reasons to think of democracy as conducive to
environmental protection and economic efficiency in general.
Two plausible mechanisms can be observed:
-
Democracy helps give weight to dispersed interests.
In general, policies will be biased in favor of concentrated interests, giving
less weight to equally important interests spread across a larger number of
people. Benefits from environmental assets, such as from river water quality,
are often considered public goods and are thus dispersed across many
individuals, while the cleanup costs may be more concentrated.
-
Freedom of expression and association helps society pick up signals and adjust
to change. As population density increases, knowledge increases,
incomes grow, or preferences change, the pressures on the environment change.
As the problem of horse manure in London's streets declined, new problems-such
as smog or lead contamination in city air or oil spills in the North
Sea-emerged to beg for new management institutions and technical solutions. The
accountability of politicians to the people and the separation of powers are
best envisaged in a democratic setting; these institutional features are also
the key ingredients in putting new priorities on the table, rebalancing
competing interests, and taking action.
It is not easy to accurately measure environmental commitment. Even so,
democracies have a greater tendency to do the following:
-
Put their land area under protection
-
Sign and ratify multilateral environmental agreements
-
Belong to environmental intergovernmental organizations
-
Meet reporting requirements for the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora
-
Have a National Council on Sustainable Development
-
Have environmentally relevant information publicly available.
The study found that democracies are more likely to make an environmental
commitment, regardless of their level of income.
Source:
Neumayer, Gleditch, and Gates (2002)
|
One might expect a one-party system to have difficulty being receptive to
signals, since unpleasant news might be easier to suppress in such a setting.
But this is not always the case. In China two institutional features play a
role in areas such as environmental management, where there has been noticeable
progress in the last decade: a systematic approach to complaints, and national
policies to make local environmental information available to the public (chapter
7). A complaints-driven system has many qualities, but may be biased
toward immediately noticeable phenomena, such as noise. So the combination with
objective monitoring data is valuable. Both mechanisms utilize the strengths of
a decentralized system and recognize how national institutions (such as
assurance of information) can be important for local accountability.26
In Europe information that helped establish a common understanding of who
suffers from a problem and who contributes to the problem was essential in
shifting the balance in favor of reducing transboundary pollution, even when
negotiation-not authority-did the balancing (see
box 8.1). For balance and for unbiased signals, it is essential to have
supportive institutions in place. Corporations rely on laws and auditors for
such traditional goals as protecting workers' pensions and shareholders'
assets-and they now rely also on civil society for broader
corporate social responsibility (chapter
8).
|
;)
