Sustainability Indicators for Natural Resource Management & Policy
Dan Rigby
School of Economics, Manchester University
Purpose
The main goal of the research project is to develop and test a methodology for using indicators to inform policy on natural resource management in southern and eastern Africa. It is a collaborative research project funded by the UK Department for International Development (DfID) under their Natural Resources Policy Advisory Department (NRPAD) research programme.
The project's full title is "The effects of policy and institutional environment on natural resource management and investment by farmers and rural households in east and southern Africa" and is running from 1 July 1998 for a three year period.
Background
Since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, it has become widely accepted that ‘indicators of sustainability’ will play a key role in ensuring that development policy is environmentally sustainable. Among the many initiatives to identify appropriate sustainability indicators, a number have focussed on the sustainability of agricultural land use. These include the Land Quality Index, co-ordinated by the World Bank and the OECD’s programme on environmental indicators for agriculture. However, the majority of these indicator frameworks have been developed only at a conceptual level. Few have been tested against empirical data from farming systems, and fewer still have addressed conditions of natural resource management (NRM) in agricultural systems in sub-Saharan Africa.
The current context of sub-Saharan Africa present a number of specific difficulties in assessing sustainability issues. First, many economies in the region have recently undergone profound institutional and structural reform including market liberalisation and retrenchment in state service provision in rural areas, whose consequences are still emerging. Second (and interlinked), ‘rural’ livelihoods are increasingly understood in many parts of Africa to involve significant non-farm, and often urban-based, components. Thirdly, recent research challenges previously-held conventions on what constitutes ‘sustainable’ natural resource use, emphasising particularly the need to recognise resource users’ own criteria of long-term success, as well as (or in preference to) those based on scientific opinion.
Methodology
This research project seeks to develop a methodology to identify an indicator set which can compare agricultural NRM between social groups and locations so as to identify factors critical to policy interventions to improve farming success and eliminate rural poverty. Indicators are being measured and compared for a range of different agro-ecological conditions and scales of farming in Uganda and South Africa (Eastern Cape Province).
Initial steps already taken in identifying indicators have involved reviewing the existing indicator frameworks, and exploring how these may be combined with ‘sustainable rural livelihoods’ (SRL) approach adopted by the UK DfID. This latter is felt to be particularly appropriate because it allows the analysis of the assets, activities, and access which determine the living gained by individuals or households. In particular it allows an analysis of the contributions and linkages between different sources of income that constitute the ‘multiple’ nature of many African rural livelihoods. In a parallel activity, an initial phase of fieldwork in the Ugandan and South African study areas is currently seeking to identify local indicators of sustainability, based on criteria of success used by local stakeholders in agricultural systems.
The initial phase of research on indicator selection is due for completion in February 2000. A further phase of fieldwork (completion in August 2000) will seek to measure the selected indicators in each of two study areas in Uganda and South Africa. Analysis and identification of policy implications are anticipated to be completed by January 2001.
More information on the project activities and working papers can be found at the project’s homepage:
http://les.man.ac.uk/ses/research/CAFRE/indicators/home1.htm
or from Dan Rigby: dan.rigby@man.ac.uk
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