Addressing Environmental Issues of the Future

This chapter examines how environmental issues of the future can be addressed learning from the evolution of environmental policy in the last three decades. After briefly reviewing the earlier chapters, we also provide an overview of the changed understandings of policy formulation in the literature. In particular, we examine the analysis of the interaction between economic systems and ecosystems as also the effect of interactions between multiple institutions, new and old. It is to be noted that the presence of several categories of stakeholders with unequal access to information and wealth further complicates matters. The inescapable understanding that we get from the analysis of social-ecological systems is that there is no one panacea that a policymaker, located in a remote echelon, can dispense. Panaceas often lead to significant problems. The way ahead is in adaptive learning with different kinds of change being factored in. There exist, in addition, a few dilemmas particularly relevant to environmental policy. These relate to the time preference, the treatment of unequal stakeholders and the prevalence of deliberate misgovernance. In looking for solutions to these dilemmas, we need new and reformed institutions for facilitating a change in human behaviour, to increase local appreciation of shared global concerns and to correct collective action failures that cause global-scale problems. However, this change in behaviour assumes acceptance of common norms, both nationally and internationally. This brings us back, full circle, to the issue of distributional justice and shared norms. In conclusion, it is true that shared values with regard to the linkages between economy, society and nature need to inform policy-making at both macro and project levels. It is these that we need to move towards, as we simultaneously strengthen the information and data bases which enable us to do so.