Sarhad Provincial Conservation Strategy - IUCN

cable solutions to the problems of sustainable
development;
■ religious and cultural values must be respected
and used as a resource in the design and implementation
of the SPCS;
■ each individual citizen has a responsibility to the
environment and can play a positive role in conservation;
and
■ the NWFP has a role to play in national and international
efforts to ensure that sustainable development
is effectively implemented and that global
environmental problems are solved.
The SPCS has identified certain priority areas for
action. These include governance and capacity
development, poverty alleviation and population,
community participation, communication and education,
urban environments and sustainable cities, sustainable
industrial development, natural resouces
management, biodiversity conservation and cultural
heritage and sustainable tourism.
In addition to the priority areas this summary also
presents the short-term (three-year) commitments of the
SPCS.
3
TOWARDS IMPROVED GOVERNANCE
At the core of the Sarhad Provincial Conservation
Strategy lies a set of structural reforms needed to
improve the quality of governance in the province
and to strengthen the ability of various agencies to
operate in a manner which promotes sustainable
development. These improvements address a number
of problems that currently impede the government’s
efficiency. Many of these are remnants of the colonial
legacy of South Asia. A major effort is needed to
affect change.
A number of these ideas came from people at the
district public meetings and from Government officials.
Some of these individuals had never heard the
term ‘sustainable development’. But they implicitly
knew what it meant, and that it was not being
achieved. They wished to see a mandate for change
adopted by the Government. That would include:
■ potential reorganization of the Government’s environmental
responsibilities; strengthening of the
E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y
Planning, Environment and Development
Department and the Environmental Protection
Agency;
■ policy and programme reform;
■ law reform;
■ privatization, incentives and partnership;
■ strategic planning processes;
■ environmental planning processes;
■ environmental impact assessment processes;
■ state of environment reporting;
■ environmental research; and
■ other institution-strengthening initiatives.
One fundamental problem is a generally acknowledged
difficulty with administrative accountability.
The Rules of Business that define the organization of
Government and departmental responsibilities are
outdated and inflexible. The institutional structure in
Government is highly bureaucratic, and individuals
are trained to adhere strictly to these procedures.
Combined with the generally low rates of remuneration,
there is little incentive for flexibility or creativity.
Training in newly emerging fields, particularly multidisciplinary
ones such as environmental management,
is weak.
Although the NWFP Government has set up the
Environment Section in the Planning, Environment
and Development (PE&D) Department, as well as the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), significant
environmental and natural resource management
responsibilities are distributed among other government
departments such as Forests, Physical Planning
and Housing, Public Health Engineering and some
others. These, too, need attention. There are problems
of coordination amongst these departments partly
due to the inflexibility of their respective mandates
and very limited financial resources.
The case of the EPA is a special one because its
mandate comes from Federal Government instructions
that are outdated and from an unenforceable piece
of legislation, the Environmental Protection
Ordinance, 1983. Hence the EPA is not able to do
its primary work, that of enforcing certain standards.
It can do little more than public relations exercises,
which it does well, and some environmental research.
But the EPA has little equipment, few people and
almost no budget.
SARHAD PROVINCIAL CONSERVATION STRATEGY xiii