SPCS Reloaded

Executive Summary

The Sarhad Provincial Conservation Strategy (SPCS) was initiated in 1992, substantially completed in 1995, and formally approved by the provincial cabinet in 1996. The Swiss government and other donors have supported a series of implementation projects, each of which has been the subject of specific monitoring and evaluation procedures.

The report that follows looks not at the action taken pursuant to the SPCS, but at the strategy itself. It examines the validity of the strategy in the changed context of 2003, and at how well it has stood the test of time and responded to the priority environment and development needs of the province. It assesses the present development outlook and the relevance of SPCS in meeting todays challenges, and it offers a range of suggestions for an approach that builds on the SPCS and moves onwards from where it was able to take sustainable development in Sarhad.

Assessment of the SPCS

To its credit, the SPCS is still regarded as a robust piece of work a decade after its completion, thereby validating the participatory process followed in putting it together. It has provided a strong framework for sustainable development in the province, and is widely regarded by those who know it as an excellent contribution both to awareness- rising on environment and development issues and in orienting the provincial government towards the highest priority responses to these issues.

At the same time, the relevance of SPCS to the challenges of today has reduced to such an extent that it no longer makes sense either to consider it the basic framework for sustainable development, or to update it so that it meets the requirements of today. We recommend that SPCS be regarded as an ongoing source of inspiration, ideas, and wisdom, but the process of sustainable development needs to be substantially recast to respond to a changed reality. Updating or rewriting the SPCS is not in order because a conservation strategy is, perhaps, not what is needed. 

What Next?

What is needed now is a new beginning, framed by the SPCS but operating in the world of devolution, new governance, and pro-poor development. In the coming phases of work, the approach pioneered by the SPCS must be made operational, streamlined, focused and concentrated on actions that can bring tangible benefits to people and communities.

We do not recommend a new strategy, or even the revamping of the one that exists. It remains valid, and need not be replaced. What we recommend is a roadmap that takes the best that SPCS can offer its vision, understanding of sustainable development, experience with participatory structures that bridge government, civil society, and the private sector and bring it into the workshops and laboratories where development is being crafted, sculpted, and polished.

In reality, we recommend moving beyond the notion of a conservation strategy, even though SPCS was much more. This is not to say that a strategy based on the contribution of environment and natural resources to poverty alleviation is being put in its stead. Rather, it is an approach, a road-map, a battle plan based on bringing the vision of sustainable development into efforts to address poverty at the provincial, district, and local levels. The follow-up to SPCS needs to be dedicated to supporting devolution, orienting development to the most needy, and ensuring that the contribution of environment and natural resources to poverty alleviation is thoroughly understood and incorporated into development planning and practice.

Conceptual Framework

We offer a conceptual framework based on the need to create and preserve sustainable livelihoods, especially in the rural areas. We believe that livelihoods lie at the root of human development. More to the point, livelihood security is an a priori condition for both poverty alleviation and sustainable development. In a situation where livelihoods are being lost, undermined or threatened, the conditions for investment in sustainable development are not assembled. Livelihood insecurity increases social tension, breaks down social cohesion and solidarity, leads to an increase in power-based behaviour and, in the worse cases, degenerates into outright conflict. 

Where there is conflict, a negative spiral is engaged, where hostility further increases social tension, undermines mechanisms for cooperation, and renders impossible the solidarity on which sustainable development must be based. Meanwhile, security tends to be self-reinforcing, in that it engages the positive spiral, where security permits the development of cooperative institutions, engenders mutual dependence, and permits the advance towards development goals essential to all parties. In particular, it creates the environment in which the investment in actions with a longer-term pay-off, essential to the achievement of sustainable development, becomes possible.

Thus stability and predictability are essential preconditions for the pursuit of sustainable development, and security of livelihoods is essential if this stability is to be achieved. It follows that sustainable development must be pursued through a focus on the preservation and creation of livelihoods at the local level.

In order to preserve and create sustainable livelihoods, we need to understand what is threatening these livelihoods. The answers are multifarious, and only offer a guide to where SPCS should concentrate effort. Part of the answer lies at the policy level, both in terms of the national framework of policies, incentives and regulations, and at the global level in respectof terms of trade, access to credit, conditionality attached to loans and grants from donors,and the policy overrides linked to the global and regional political situation. Part of the answer lies in creating transparent and participatory mechanisms of governance so that development action is more responsive to the needs identified by the affected people and communities. And part lies in offering responses and applying experience and expertise in such a way that these needs are met in ways that promote social justice and sustainable use of the environment and its resources.

The SPCS has a role at all three levels. It must intervene to help put in place a policy frame-work that offers incentives for sustainability and ceases to reward unsustainable behaviour.It must help strengthen the participatory structures at the provincial level, especially at lower jurisdictional levels, so that development addresses the real needs of people and communities. And it must bring to bear its environmental and natural resource-based expertise so that the development approaches are sustainable.

Mainstreaming Sustainable Development

One of the implications of bringing development down to the level where peoples concerns prevail and of basing it on democratic structures through which they can, to an extent, steer the development process, is that environment will no longer be the central thread that unites the development process. Indeed, this is already the case. In part, because the donors were taking it that way, and in part because development is increasingly based on a definition of needs at the base, the principal focus of development is now on poverty alleviation. Instead of trying to graft sustainable development on to the root stock of traditional development concerns, SPCS must mainstream its sustainable development message into the current of people-centered, poverty-focused development.

This requires more of a shift than most people realize. The SPCS is, after all, a complete framework in its own right, and is generally acknowledged as a compelling paradigm for sustainable development. SPCS must now accept that the principal framework has changed for which sustainable development is not the central objective.

The framework of development, for now and in the conceivable future, is poverty alleviationas articulated in the Federal PRSP, which is being elaborated in the Provincial PRSPs, and asset out in myriad donor priorities.

The principal challenge for SPCS in the next phase is to bring its influence, experience, and vision to bear on the poverty-based development paradigm so that what results is an approach to development that not only relieves poverty and addresses the needs of the most marginalised, but one that advances sustainability at the same time.

The SPCS should work with and through the poverty lens, but in doing so it needs to emphasize the importance of conserving natural resources. Indeed, one of the clear criticisms that can be made of the PRSP and similar poverty alleviation strategies is that they have taken insufficient account of the need for a sound and well-managed resource base and for a healthy environment. Without these, success in poverty alleviation will always be compromised, and many early results will prove to be unsustainable.

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