Environmental movement in Lebanon

The paper reviews and assesses the evolution of the environmental movement in both the public and the private sector in Lebanon. It studies the public sector involvement in the environmental movement by reviewing the commitments made by the government to the local, regional and international communities. The paper presents a summary of all the decisions, decrees, and laws pertaining to environmental protection that the Lebanese government has instituted over time, as well as all the conventions and agreements that the country has ratified and/or signed. Compared to the Arab world in the Middle East and North Africa, Lebanon is relatively more active and integrated in the world community. Using the total number of established environmental organizations and the level of reported activities aimed at spreading environmental awareness and educating people as indicators of private sector involvement in the environmental movement, the paper concludes that the post war era is characterized by a significant increase in the number of established organizations. It also concludes that there is a co-movement between economic and environmental variables. Readers should send their comments on this paper to: BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Water, Workfare and Poverty: The Impact of the Working for Water Programme on Rural Poverty Reduction

In 1995, the government of the Republic of South Africa launched the Working for Water (WfW) programme that links environmental and developmental goals through the removal of high water-consuming alien plants with pro-poor rural employment opportunities. Whilst bio-physical evaluations have widely reported on the hydrological, ecological and conservation components of the programme, there exists growing uncertainty over the programme’s role as a poverty reduction mechanism. This paper evaluates three projects in the Luvuvhu catchment, Limpopo Province, against five socio-economic workfare criteria and the underlying biophysical rationale. Results show that asset creation from incremental streamflow is economically efficient and is likely to improve significantly if biodiversity benefits, community harvesting of riparian goods and services, ecological non-use values and seasonal water demand values are incorporated into the analysis. However, socio-economic benefits are more questionable: poverty targeting is weak with wage rates failing to self-select the poor; a minor proportion (0.5%) of catchment households benefit from the highly-valued employment opportunities; high variability in monthly employment causes financial difficulties for labourers; labourers are not ‘empowered’ as is evidenced by the failure of the 2-year exit strategy; and programme efficiency is high in proportional allocation of cash-flow to non-management wage labour. It is concluded that the Working for Programme is a potentially replicable model in other semi-arid contexts in developing countries if based on its core biophysical remit but is a transitory and limited poverty reduction mechanism for improving rural livelihoods.