MDGs and the Environment: Are Environmental Institutions 'Fit for Purpose'?

his 2-page opinion piece stresses the centrality of institutions in meeting environmental commitments. Author Neil Bird of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) argues that national government administrations, in particular, have a central role to play in meeting Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7 because it is central government that sets out the national policy and regulatory frameworks and provides the planning and monitoring of compliance.

The question is: are these institutions robust enough to champion this effort and do they have sufficient resources? Bird claims that the answer is "no" in many aid-receiving countries, pointing to conflicting functions within environmental agencies that can weaken their efforts to secure environmental sustainability. He argues that programmes supporting environmental sustainability need to be recognised as being as much a state responsibility as the provision of health and education.

Environmental agencies need to become far more successful in securing their recurrent spending through the national budget. (This is a preferable strategy, Bird contends, to internally generated funds, which can create a disconnect with national priority setting, in doing so removing several layers of accountability.) Furthermore, fundamental concerns related to the ownership of environmental assets and the equity of benefit-sharing regimes, "have long been fudged, being seen as too contentious to resolve. Even where there is little prospect of immediate resolution, reform efforts should address these issues."

Bird suggests that the influence of donor activity also needs to be examined critically, as the presence of large numbers of development projects threatens to undermine the very institutions in which they have been based. "In Mozambique, for example, in 2007, 71 environmental projects were being implemented by ten government agencies with funding from 19 different aid agencies, resulting in a hugely complex web of activities, relationships and decision-making."

At the international level, concerns about the institutional arrangements that have been put in place to secure environmental sustainability also plague Bird. This level, he explains, is characterised by a few dominant institutions that oversee and support the provision of global environmental public goods. "The cross-boundary nature of many environmental issues highlights the fact that global partnerships matter." Yet, as he illustrates through descriptions of both the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and the World Bank, sometimes these partnerships are not optimal.

Based on these observations, Bird concludes that "[g]iving greater attention to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the official institutions that have been established to deliver sustainability needs to be a central part of all future efforts."