influence of economic agents over g

influence of economic agents over government. The processes of political development are promoted or impeded by administrative action. The same is true for the legal order, and for management of the difficult transition that many states are engaged in from customary and religious law to codified civil law. The space for local organizational initiatives on environmental (or, for that matter, all other) issues is defined by the administrative system. Yet rarely are the environmental implications of these structures or the side effects of changes in them given explicit consideration. Indeed, one often has the impression that substantial reforms of administrative systems are entered into with rather slight exploration of consequences, for quite narrow or partisan reasons—for example, to help mobilize political support for the government.
The arbitrariness of such reforms is lessened in practice by the continuity of administrative institutions: the tendency for new administrative regimes to revert de facto to long established patterns of behavior (for instance, in the style of relations between local officials and community leaders) because that is the least effort means of conducting necessary routine business. Those old patterns, however, while they may have served well the incidental purpose of environmental preservation under low-pressure demands, are not necessarily well suited for the high-pressure demands that are generated by contemporary tecimological and demographic change. Indeed, just as patterns of social organization may fortuitously be well or poorly suited to economic management under rapid technological change or to acceptance of fertility regulation under fast-declining mortality, so may the pattern of local administration. for equally fortuitous reasons, help or hinder the cause of environmental stability,- Constrained though the feasible range of reform may be by this weight of institutional inheritance, the systematic search for improvements in how the administrative regime deals with environmental considerations warrants far greater attention than it gets.

Ecological futures under nonterrnorial governance
A theme of this essay is the changing scope for local solutions to ecological problems. Encroachment of the urban world anti the consumer economy, the widening of the labor market, increased temporary and permanent outmigration, and the weakening of formal and informal local authority structures are familiar changes associated with economic and political development that modify and frequently diminish the role of locality in rural development—usually, though not necessarily, in the course of delivering improved well-being for the rural population.The processes underlying these changes operate jointly, but from different starting points and at different paces. Where a particular society is positioned onthose various axes, however, constrains the set of environmental policies that would be workable for it. A korean-type “New Community Movement" which has the potential for a stringent conservation component, would seem to require an authoritarian local administration, close sattlement with perhaps constraints on migration, and a moderately egalitarian distribution of wealth. Such conditions clearly are not those of South Asia, for example, so transplanting the model there would likely be fruitless. Conversely, more loosely set up non-government organizations, like India's Chipko Movement (see bellow) or various cooperative organizations in Bangladesh, would have been ineffectual in the “hard” states of East Asia. Environmental policies, no less than others, neol tailoring to existing institutional arrangements.
But those arrangements are in flux, both at the national level and locally. In many poor countries rural development policy, after several decades of dirigisme, has veered toward promotion of a private property/free-market regime. This retreat of state control, welcome as it is economically and politically, is not necessarily any improvement ecologically (and may be significantly worse) in the absence of an alternative regulatory order at the local level. In any formal sense, such a substitute local order—a framework of economic incentives and legal sanctions- is a long way off. Finding a structure of governance in the meantime that can support the major productivity gains offered by this shift while also delivering ecological stability is an extraordinarily challenging policy task.
In his study referred to earlier, Wade (1988) argues for a middle way of managing depletable, degradable resources at the village level between the extremes of privatization and state control, namely through self-organized corporate action. Wade has much of value to say about the conditions under which corporate responses emerge and what is needed to sustain them. It is clear, however, that those condition, are frequently hard to attain—for the kinds of reasons dealt with in the pages above.
To the extent that rural society in many countries is moving beyond the stage of territorial social organization, an important locus of policy action has been lost. Governments still thinking in terms of village government as the principal agent of reform would be, like generals, equipping themselves to light the last war, drawing on an annamentarium that implies a local reality already disappearing: one of stable, cohesive villages set at the base of a neat hierarchy of administrative units. But in parts of the Third World (how much of South Asia is a critical question) there seems still to be scope, albeit waning for village-based organizational initiatives directed at environmental management.
A possible alternative mute to ecologically sustainable economic growth is to be found in the loosely structured activist movements that have coalesced around ecological issues in a number of poor countries, India most notably. Best known among them is the Chipko Movement, originating in the early I970s in the Indian Himalayas as a spontaneous protest by village women against the disruption of their traditional livelihoods by commercial forestry. The movement subsequently spread throughout India (see Centre for Science and Environment, 1985, and Shiva and Bandyopadhyay, 1986). The strength of the Chipko Movement derives both from the commithment it can draw on in activism on the ground and its sustained voice on forestry issues in national political debate. It has been increasingly influential. More broad-spectrum environmental organizations, rapidly expanding in many parts of the Third World, may less helpful. They tend to mirror the concerns of activists in the rich countries-wilderness areas, air pollution, climate change-or to adopt radical anticapitalist and communitarian postures. (The private Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, compiler of the important "Citizens Reports" on the state of India's environment, takes the latter stance: corporate greed, both domestic and foreign, is held to underlie India's ecological degradation; population growth and the design of local-level incentives no at all.)
The subject of this essay is considerably narrower in scope than the agenda of most environmental movements. It is not purist in its ecological goals, nor does it seek to gauce the esthetics of environmental change or the economic threats of large-scale (greenhouse-type) ecological trend. It is concerned with preserving and raising the sustainable economic productivity of local ecosystems. To return, to the example I started with the transformation of a landscape from first-growth forest to settled agriculture is a drastic ecological change by any measure, whether it takes place over a few years of many generation. If the long-run stability of the physical base of production is maintained in the process, a permanent gain in economic productivity may be achieved. Not with standing the radical goals of today's green movement, under the massive rural demographic expansion that has taken place over recent decades and that will continue for at least several more, those productivity achievements may be the best mark of success we can aim for—and offer a partial defense in ecologically uncertain times.