ISSUE NO. 7: Special Double Issue                                                            October 2000

Population, Development, and Human Security

Population, Development, and Human Security:
A Micro-level Perspective

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Exploring the Links Between
GECHS and Population

This special double issue of AVISO presents two articles on the links among environmental change, human security, and population. The complexity of these linkages and the many theories and views that surround them are as controversial as they are stimulating. Hence, we chose to present them in a format that highlights some of the diversity of opinion and research within the population-environment field.

The Science Plan of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project (GECHS) calls for population research that engages structural issues of poverty, militarism, male dominance, and consumerism. It notes that the linkages among population growth, human security, and environmental degradation are complex, multidimensional, and conditional. Moreover, they are "indeterminate as there has been a paucity of empirical work on the subject, the complexity and controversy surrounding the linkages can be oppressive, and the relationships themselves are somewhat ambiguous" (Lonergan, 1999: 50). Population-environment-security linkages include such issues as women's reproductive rights, and differences in power, agency, and decision-making among individuals.

The authors of this AVISO address these linkages and issues. Hartmann focuses particularly on inequality and impoverishment, as they are integral to population and human security dynamics. She shifts the center of attention away from population growth as the determinant of fragile or degraded environments and human insecurity to inequity (in access to resources and social services). Hartmann also emphasizes how inappropriate policies lead to processes of environmental change and impoverishment.

In the second article, de Sherbinin concentrates on the micro-scale linkages of the population-environment debate. Specifically, he presents a framework for understanding the complex linkages and explores the theoretical and empirical underpinnings. In highlighting the spatial and temporal uniqueness of fertility, migration, resource management, and livelihood strategies, de Sherbinin moves the debate from the abstract to the contextual.

The ideas and views presented here are only a sample of the work being done to redress the "indeterminate" nature of the linkages among population, human security, and the environment. We hope that this issue of AVISO stimulates readers to engage in the debate and to move beyond traditional theories that suggest population growth per se is responsible for environmental degradation and human insecurity.

Wanda Ollis - Managing Editor

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Population, Development,
and Human Security

Introduction

The one simple thing one can say about the relationship between population, development, and human security is that it is complex. To many people, the term "population" means only growing human numbers, the so-called "population explosion." But population dynamics entail much more: who is born, when they die, where they live, whether their chances of survival differ by gender and class, what proportion of the population is old, and what proportion young. All these things affect, and are affected by, the equally complex social, economic, and political processes of development that underlie human security.

Just what is "human security"? According to the working definition of GECHS, human security results when and where individuals and communities:

• have the options necessary to end, mitigate, or adapt to threats to their human, environmental, and social rights;
  
• have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and
  
• actively participate in attaining these options.
  

Moreover, human security will be achieved through challenging the structures and processes that contribute to insecurities, notably poverty and inequity (Lonergan, 1999: 29).

Many people believe that rapid population growth limits people's options because it is a major, if not the major, cause of poverty, environmental degradation, and political instability. In some quarters, alarmist images fuel fears of overpopulation: If the brakes aren't applied soon, the Worldwatch Institute recently warned, the global population locomotive will trigger a demographic train wreck.

Are such fears justified?

The Population Picture

It is certainly true that this century has witnessed an unprecedented rise in human population. In 1900, global population was roughly 2 billion people; today it is close to 6 billion. Twenty percent of the world's population lives in the developed world, eighty percent in developing countries, with Asia contributing the largest share. These percentages are not so different from the world's population distribution at the end of the 1700s, though it will shift more toward the developing regions in the future since most of the current population increase is occurring there (see Table 1).


Table 1 . Population Growth in World Regions, 1750 - 2000

	Population in millions
Region/country	1750	1800	1900	1950	2000
World	791	978	1,650	2,521	6,055
More Developed North America Europe Japan, Australia, & New Zealand	191 2 163 26	26 7 203 26	539 82 108 49	813 172 547 95	1,188 310 729 149
More Developed Africa Asia (less Japan)* Latin America & Caribbean	600 106 478 16	742 107 611 24	1,111 133 904 74	1,709 221 1,321 167	4,867 784 3,563 519
	Percent of world total
World	100	100	100	100	100
More Developed North America Europe Japan, Australia, & New Zealand	24 ~ 21 3	24 1 21 3	33 5 25 3	32 7 22 4	20 5 12 2
More Developed Africa Asia (less Japan)* Latin America & Caribbean	76 13 60 2	76 11 62 2	67 8 55 4	68 9 52 7	80 13 59 9
Note: Numbers may not add to totals because of rounding. * Includes Oceania except for Australia and New Zealand. Countries of the Middle East are included in either Asia or Africa. ~ less than 0.5% Source: Adapted from Gelbard et al., 1999: 5.

The population explosion is gradually fizzling out, as population growth rates decline worldwide more rapidly than was anticipated even a few years ago. Since 1965, the world's annual population growth rate has fallen from 2.04 to 1.33%. According to the UN's high, medium, and low projections, world population will reach either 10.7, 8.9, or 7.3 billion people in 2050 and then will start to level off. The medium variant of 8.9 billion is the one most commonly accepted.

Declining population growth rates result from a number of factors, including the shift from rural to urban livelihoods, a corresponding decrease in the value of children's labor, the spread of education and social security systems, the rising age of marriage, growing female employment outside the home, and reductions in infant and child mortality. Between 1950 and the present, the percentage of people living in urban areas in developing countries has increased from 18 to approximately 40%. Urbanization stimulates the demographic transition to lower birth and death rates because urban dwellers tend to have higher educational and income levels, as well as better health and lower fertility rates (Gelbard et al., 1999). The increased availability of family planning helps people to achieve their desired family size.

While improvements in living standards are the central force behind the demographic transition, there are also negative causes. In sub-Saharan Africa, the AIDS epidemic is causing a dramatic decline in life expectancy in a number of countries. In Botswana, the most severely affected nation, the population in 2050 will likely be 20% smaller than it would have been in the absence of AIDS (UN Population Division, 1998). The AIDS crisis in the region is one of the immediate threats to human security, severely limiting the options of individuals, communities, and nations to address pressing development problems.

The lingering perception that we are still experiencing a population explosion stems from the fact that a large proportion of the population in developing countries is comprised of men and women entering their reproductive years; children under 15 accounted for one-third of their population in 1998 (Gelbard et al., 1999). Barring major catastrophes, an inevitable demographic momentum is built into our present numbers, even as birth rates decline. The challenge is to plan effectively for the addition of three billion more people in the next fifty years.

The environmental impact of this increase is hard to predict, and will likely be highly context-specific and contingent on a host of social and economic factors. Yet, many people sketch frightening scenarios based on aggregate statistics at the national or global levels. The human security framework can help to refocus the lens on the appropriate spatial level of analysis, which in many cases is local, and on important issues of equity (Lonergan, 1999).

The Population-Environment Debate

Is population growth the driving force behind environmental degradation? Certainly, demographic factors can have an influence on the environment, particularly population distribution. Millions of people crowded into megacities, especially when they drive cars and are located in environmentally vulnerable areas like Mexico City, can do far more damage to the environment than if they were more evenly distributed in towns and small cities.

However, demographic factors pale in comparison to current inequitable production, consumption, and distribution patterns. According to UN figures, the richest fifth of the world's people who live in the developed countries consume 66 times as much as the poorest fifth. The richest fifth consume 45% of all meat and fish, 58% of total energy, and 84% of all paper. In addition, they own 87% of the world's vehicle fleet, a major source of greenhouse gases (UNDP, 1998).

The nature of technology is the decisive factor which will determine whether as population grows and living standards rise in the developing world, the environmental impact of increased consumption by the poor will be negative or not. In the post-World War II period there was a critical shift from more environmentally benign technologies to more harmful ones – for example, from rail to truck freight, natural products to synthetics, and reusable goods to disposable ones. Military activities and technologies are believed to be the single biggest polluter of the planet – the Pentagon alone generates more toxic waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined (Hynes, 1999).

Particular economic and political interests drive these technological choices. A commitment to human security might lead to a very different direction in terms of technological development: for example, more reliance on local agricultural knowledges, investment in non-polluting production processes and energy sources, and making rapid public transport a top priority. But what about the impact of population growth at the micro level? Conventional wisdom holds that in developing countries the population pressure of the poor is primarily responsible for land degradation. Deforestation, in particular, is often blamed on population growth.

On closer inspection, however, social and economic inequalities often play a much bigger role. In Brazil, starting in the late 1960s, highway construction initiated destruction of the Amazon rain forest and its indigenous inhabitants, subsidizing the entry of large ranching, mining, and logging operations. To the limited extent that peasants did cut down the forest to farm the land, this was not a result of population growth, but because the Brazilian government encouraged peasant colonization of the Amazon in lieu of much-needed land reform in other regions (Hartmann, 1995).

What about situations in which the poor are more directly implicated in environmental damage? In El Salvador, many peasants have cleared steep mountain slopes for subsistence agriculture, causing severe soil erosion. However, population pressure was not the main factor pushing them on to marginal lands; rather, it was the concentration of fertile land in the hands of a few wealthy families who ironically underutilized a large portion of their estates (Acevedo, 1996).

Population growth does not necessarily have a negative impact on the environment. Recent research in Africa reveals that in some cases increasing population densities, if combined with sound agricultural practices, can sustain the environment or even stimulate environmental improvements (Leach and Mearns, 1996). In areas where population pressure is leading to land shortages, potential environmental impacts depend largely on whether people are able to diversify their livelihoods so that they do not depend solely on the land and have the capital to invest in improvements. It is also important to remember that depopulation can have harmful influences. In Mexico, the exodus of peasants to urban areas has led to the loss of valuable microhabitats and crop genetic diversity previously sustained by their labor (Garcia-Barrios and Garcia-Barrios, 1990). People are not only destroyers of the environment, but can be agents of its management, restoration, and improvement.

To better understand human impacts on the environment, one must look carefully on a case-by-case basis at the precise dynamics of resource use and follow the chain of control up to the larger economic and political forces that profoundly influence "local" environments. For example, renewable and nonrenewable resources alike have long been the traditional exports of developing countries, and effective demand elsewhere for those products often drives environmental degradation much more strongly than do local poverty and population growth. Clearly, the global economy belongs in the picture too.

Development for Whom?

At the end of this century the biggest threat to human security is the rapidly growing gap between rich and poor. In 1960, the one-fifth of the world's people who live in the developed world had 30 times the income of the poorest one-fifth; now they have 82 times as much. The 225 people who comprise the "ultra-rich" have a combined wealth of over US $1 trillion, equivalent to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world's people (UNDP, 1998).

Although there have been improvements in infant mortality, life expectancy, and literacy rates in many places, almost one-third of the people in developing countries still live below the income poverty line of US $1 per day. Fifty-eight percent lack access to sanitation, and 29% to safe water. Almost a third of children under age five are underweight (UNDP, 1998). The benefits of economic growth and globalization have clearly failed to "trickle down" to many. It is impossible to achieve real human security when one is forced to struggle for basic survival.

There are many reasons why economic development has not met the basic needs of the majority of the world's people for adequate food, shelter, clean water, education, and health care. These include unequal terms of trade for developing country raw material exports, undemocratic regimes whose leaders spirited away their nation's wealth to foreign bank accounts or spent it on arms to suppress opposition (often with the complicity of the Cold War superpowers), and the crippling burden of debt repayment. Mozambique's external debt burden is nine times the value of its annual exports and the country spends nearly half of its annual budget on servicing the debt – four times what it devotes to health. Debt is greater than the GNP in 27 poor countries, and in some, debt payments are almost equal to all the official development assistance the country receives (UNDP, 1998).

However, the failure of development is also a failure of commitment. The international donor community's pledge in the 1970s to meet basic human needs, including "Health for All," through public investment in basic social services was sacrificed on the altar of free market ideology in the 1980s. Structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund forced poor countries to slash health and education budgets, devalue their currencies, and privatize their economies without regard for the impact on the poor.

Today there is a belated acknowledgment that even though private markets may help to deliver economic growth, they alone cannot provide the public services needed to raise basic living standards and to ensure real human security. Reinvestment in social services is necessary, yet only seven percent of official development assistance goes to human development priorities, and developing countries themselves devote already scarce resources to the military. In Asia, where many countries have a better record of public spending on health and education, the financial crisis has dealt a crushing setback to human development. (See Table 2 for indicators of the world's skewed priorities.)


Table 2. The World's Priorities?

annual expenditure $ billions
Basic education for all Cosmetics in the USA Water and sanitation for all Ice cream in Europe Reproductive health for all women Perfumes in Europe and the USA Basic health and nutrition Pet foods in Europe and USA Business entertainment in Japan Cigarettes in Europe Alcoholic drinks in Europe Narcotic drugs in the world Military spending in the world	$6* $8 $9* $13 $12* $12 $13* $17 $35 $50 $105 $400 $780
* Estimated annual cost to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries. Source: Adapted from UNDP, 1988: 37.

The Gender Dimension

In the last several decades, a strong transnational women's movement has forced recognition of gender inequalities and how they affect population, development, and security. Women's subordination takes many forms, including:

• undervaluing women's non-monetary, but productive work, especially in agriculture where women produce almost half the food crops grown in the world;
  
• wage discrimination in the formal labor force, where women are generally paid less for equal work and channeled into low-paying, low-status occupations without adequate protections or maternity and child care benefits;
  
• lack of educational opportunities;
  
• discrimination within the household where women bear most of the responsibility for housework and raising children, yet often receive the least food and health care; and
  
• violence against women, ranging from domestic abuse to the use of rape as a weapon of war.
  

The debt crisis and structural adjustment policies have had a particularly negative impact on women, who have had to manage the increased scarcity caused by cuts in public expenditures through unpaid "caring" labor in the home and community. The growing proportion of female-headed households also means that many women must shoulder this burden alone. Even in many environmental projects, women are expected to come forward to contribute unpaid labor to conservation management, adding to their workloads without giving them commensurate rights over resources (Jackson, 1994).

Recent market-based health sector reforms, while ostensibly designed to improve the efficiency and accessibility of health services, have instead often placed them out of the reach of many poor women. The imposition of user fees for previously free services, soaring pharmaceutical costs, poorly planned decentralization, and lay-offs of public health personnel all serve to erode access to services. For example, the introduction of user fees in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana led to a 50% decline in attendance at clinics and hospitals after only a few weeks; in Nigeria user fees for emergency admissions are one of the factors blamed for the increase in maternal mortality (PANOS, 1999). "Like all other adjustment policies in the social sector, health sector reforms have defined efficiency without taking into account the enormous human cost of coping strategies adopted by the poor, women in particular" (Sadasivam, 1999: 11).

Women, too, have inordinately borne the cost of those population programs that have made efficiency in reducing birth rates a higher priority than meeting women's genuine needs for safe, accessible birth control, abortion, and reproductive health services. While family programs have had the positive effect of increasing women's access to birth control, lack of adequate contraceptive choice, informed consent, and screening and treatment for contraceptive side effects have undermined the quality of care in population programs in a number of developing countries. In some cases, notably India and China, women have been the victims of coercive sterilization policies (Hartmann, 1995).

Acknowledging these problems, the Program of Action of the UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo in 1994, called for a new approach to population policy. It identified the empowerment of women as the key to reducing population growth. It also criticized the use of coercion, targets, and quotas in family planning programs and endorsed a broader reproductive health strategy in which women have access not only to contraceptives but also to sexuality education, pregnancy care, and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases.

The Cairo document has helped stimulate much-needed reforms in population policies and programs, though in many places the rhetoric is still not matched by the reality. Peru has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, with over half of rural women lacking access to any prenatal care in 1996. Officially, the government is committed to reproductive health, but poor women have instead been subjected to systematic abuse in the public health system, including forced sterilizations (CLADEM et al., 1998).

The Cairo empowerment agenda is also limited since it views improving women's status primarily as a means to reduce population growth, rather than as an important end in and of itself. This skews priorities and narrows the definition of empowerment to those factors – namely, education of girls and access to family planning – that appear to have the most immediate impact on fertility. Expanded employment opportunities, higher wages, and reform of legal, political, and land-tenure systems to give women greater control over resources – too often these are left out of the empowerment equation because they present a greater challenge to the status quo.

Nevertheless, the Cairo reforms are a definite step forward, though five years later much of the proposed funding, especially from the developed countries, has yet to materialize. The other major obstacle is resistance from conservative and fundamentalist forces who oppose contraception and abortion and, in the case of the U.S., wage a relentless campaign against international family planning assistance, women's rights, and freedom of choice.

Moving Forwards

Rethinking the relationship between population, development, and human security leads to a policy agenda that puts human needs and human rights at the center. What is called for is nothing short of a fundamental shift in development policy, away from the failed measures of the 1980s and 1990s, which exacerbated poverty, inequality, and insecurity.

The director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, J. Brian Atwood, expressed his frustration with the current state of affairs in a speech at the Overseas Development Council (June 30, 1999): "The sad and even dangerous reality is that globalization and the democratic market economy have not closed the gap between the rich and the poor." He remarked that the industrial world is getting "shamelessly rich" while most of the world's people are getting poorer. Economic growth, Atwood argued, can reduce poverty only with investments in health care, education, job creation, community development, and food security.

What would a new policy agenda entail?

Economic reforms:

• Cancellation or substantial reduction of the debt burden of developing countries, particularly in nations where the population derived no visible benefit from the loans.
  
  
• Fairer terms of trade for developing country exports and greater democratic accountability of international financial institutions.
  
  
• Regulation and taxation of international financial flows to fund social and environmental improvements and to reduce the risk of economic crisis.
  
  
• Reduction of the environmentally wasteful luxury consumption of the rich.
  

Social reforms:

• Reinvestment in public health, education, transport, and other social services. "Health for All" would make one of the biggest contributions to improving human security in the next century, in both the developed and the developing world. It would also provide a firmer foundation on which to build good quality reproductive health services, including family planning.
  
  
• Substantial reductions in military spending and arms production and trade. There can be no real human security in a hyper-militarized world. The peace dividend promised by the end of the Cold War has yet to materialize. The resources and technical ingenuity needed to produce advanced weapons should be redirected to producing a new generation of energy-saving, environmentally friendly technologies.
  
  
• Support for local, national, and international initiatives for democracy, social justice, women's rights, and human rights. This includes speedy ratification and enforcement of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women as well as other UN conventions on human rights.
  

There is no scarcity of financial resources to implement such an agenda, only a scarcity of political will.

References and Key Readings

Acevedo, Carlos (1996). The Historical Background to the Conflict. In James K. Boyce, ed., Economic Policy for Building Peace: The Lessons of El Salvador. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

CLADEM - Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women's Rights, Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and Estudio para la Defensa de los Derechos de la Mujer (1998). Women's Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Peru: A Shadow Report. Compiled for the Nineteenth Session of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Garcia-Barrios, R., and L. Garcia-Barrios (1990). Environmental and Technological Degradation in Peasant Agriculture: A Consequence of Development in Mexico. World Development 18(11): 1569-85.

Gelbard, Alene, Carl Haub, and Mary M. Kent (1999). World Population Beyond Six Billion. Population Reference Bureau Population Bulletin 54(1): 1-44.

Hartmann, Betsy (1995). Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. Boston: South End Press.

Hartmann, Betsy (1999). Population, Environment and Security: A New Trinity. In Jael Silliman and Ynestra King, eds., Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment and Development. Boston: South End Press and London: Zed Books, 1-23.

Hynes, H. Patricia (1999). Taking Population Out of the Equation: Reformulating I=PAT. In Jael Silliman and Ynestra King, eds., Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment and Development. Boston: South End Press and London: Zed Books, 39-73.

Jackson, Cecile (1994). Gender Analysis and Environmentalisms. In Michael Redclift and Ted Benton, eds., Social Theory and the Global Environment. New York: Routledge.

Leach, Melissa, and Robin Mearns, eds. (1996). The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment. London: The International African Institute in association with James Currey Ltd. and Heinemann.

Lonergan, Steve (1999). Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Science Plan. International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) Report No. 11. Bonn, Germany: IHDP.

PANOS (1999). Diagnosing Challenges: Health and the New Millennium. PANOS Briefing, No. 36. London: PANOS.

Sadasivam, Bharati, ed. (1999). Risks, Rights and Reforms: A 50-Country Survey Assessing Government Actions Five Years After the International Conference on Population and Development. New York: Women's Environment and Development Organization.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1998). Human Development Report 1998. New York: Oxford University Press.

United Nations Population Division (1998). New Estimates and Projections of the World's Population. Population Newsletter (66): 1-31.

Betsy Hartmann
Director - Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.

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Population, Development, and Human Security: A Micro-level Perspective

For a billion or more poor people in the developing world, life is highly insecure. Whether they are subsistence agriculturalists, relying on rain fed or irrigated agriculture, or urban-based workers in assembly industries or the informal sector, the basic needs for food, clean water, shelter, and clothing often go unfulfilled. The previous article helped to set the context for this one by presenting some of the reasons for widespread insecurity in the midst of economic globalization and rising affluence. This article examines the linkages among population dynamics, human security, and the environment at the household and community levels in the developing world, since this is where the dynamics of change manifest in people's lives. It begins by describing household livelihood strategies and the ways in which they mediate population-environment interactions. It then examines a popular framework, the population-poverty-environment spiral, and some of its theoretical and empirical underpinnings. Finally, it presents alternatives to the "downward spiral" perspective and ends with policy recommendations.

It needs to be emphasized at the outset that population-environment linkages are complex; they vary from place to place, and are subject to multiple interpretations. The best understanding of how the linkages play out in any given place is usually found through in-depth research that takes into account the physical environment, the political and economic context, as well as local culture, institutions, population dynamics, and livelihood strategies. Nevertheless, it is possible to say that rapid population growth, like any rapid change, complicates the search for environmentally sustainable development and taxes the ability of often fragile economic, political, and ecological systems to adapt. Successful adaptations can and do occur, but the chances are less likely in contexts of rapid population growth, widespread poverty, and environmental stress.

Household Livelihoods

In most rural areas of the developing world, the household is the basic unit of production and reproduction. Production includes activities that produce tradable (or potentially tradable) goods and services that result in income, and reproduction includes household maintenance functions such as childcare, cooking, and cleaning, which are not tradable, but are nevertheless essential for household well being (Sousan et al., 1999). In order to survive and prosper in what can often be difficult circumstances, rural agrarian households employ livelihood strategies¹ which, depending on the context, may include farming, herding, fishing, off-farm employment and, to a lesser extent, exploitation of "wild" resources through hunting and gathering. In contrast to the nuclear family model prevalent in the developed world, households are often composed of grandparents, sons and their spouses, children, and other relatives, all tied together by bonds of kinship to form the household economic unit.²

Households employ five dominant forms of livelihood assets (Carney, 1998):

• Natural capital: the natural resource stock from which resource flows useful to livelihoods are derived.
  
  
• Social capital: The social resources (networks, membership of groups, relationships of trust, access to wider institutions of society) upon which people draw in pursuit of their livelihood.
  
  
• Human capital: The skills, knowledge, ability to work, and good health important to the ability to pursue livelihood strategies.
  
  
• Physical capital: The basic infrastructure (transport, shelter, water, energy, and communications) and production equipment and means that enable people to pursue livelihoods.
  
  
• Financial capital: The financial resources that are available to people (whether savings, supplies of credit, or regular remittances and pensions) and which provide them with different livelihood options.
  

The relationship that the household has with its environment, and by extension its impact on the environment, is mediated by these forms of capital, as well as by institutional and cultural factors (as presented in Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Household - Environment Relationship

Source: Adapted from Mishra, 1995.

Thus, it is hard to speak of a direct impact of population upon the environment, for though population size and composition is important, the utilization of natural resources and ecosystem services by a community will depend upon a wide range of variables. If institutional factors are not functioning properly (in terms of determining who has access to which resources), or land tenure arrangements are highly inequitable, it is likely that there will be a higher degree of resource degradation than in cases where common property regimes are respected, and households have sufficient land to pursue their livelihood strategies.

Population, Poverty, and Environment

Linkages at the Local Level

Volumes have been written on the relationship between population and development, and how population growth may adversely affect economic development and poverty alleviation (by depressing wages, reducing savings rates, degrading natural resources, etc.), on the one hand, and under-development may contribute to rapid population growth (due to lack of education, health care, and basic services), on the other. This debate is important, but outside the scope of this article. In recent years, emphasis has shifted from macro-economic models explaining the relationships between population growth and development to so-called vicious circle models (VCMs), which seek to explain the connections among high fertility, poverty, low status of women, and environmental damage.³

One popular formulation of the VCM, published in UNICEF's State of the World's Children (1994), suggests that in contexts of high population growth and widespread poverty a downward population-poverty-environment (PPE) spiral may ensue. Diagrammatically, this can be shown as follows:

Where poverty contributes to population growth through factors such as:

• demand for children due to high infant mortality, farm and household labor requirements, and old-age security in the absence of social security programs;
  
  
• lack of education and future orientation, which implies less awareness of family planning services, and less confidence in an ability to control one's future, which is a pre-requisite to use of such services; and
  
  
• low status of women and disempowerment over fertility decision-making.
  

Population growth affects poverty through:

• unemployment, low wages, and increasing landlessness in the agricultural sector; and
  
  
• overstretching of social services, schools, health centers, and water and sanitation services.
  

High poverty levels contribute to environmental degradation due to:

• a short-term orientation in which current needs take precedence over long-term stewardship of resources; and
  
  
• lack of access to technologies to mitigate the environmental damage.
  

Environmental degradation contributes to poverty through:

• degradation of resources (soil erosion, salinization, and short-fallow cycles) that contribute to declining yields;
  
  
• deforestation that leads to flooding and erosion;
  
  
• poor environmental sanitation, contributing to disease and income loss; and
  
  
• declining per capita availability of water, forest, rangeland, and other "commons."
  

And, population growth adversely impacts the environment because of:

• increasing pressure on marginal lands, soil erosion, siltation, and flooding;
  
  
• increasing use of fertilizer, pesticides, and water for irrigation leading to water pollution and impacts on fisheries; and
  
  
• migration to peri-urban squatter settlements, and attendant problems of water supply and sanitation, proximity to industrial effluents, indoor air pollution, and mud slides.
  

Though the specifics vary from place to place, a number of factors seem to be associated with the chance of a vicious circle developing. These include high dependence on natural resources for subsistence, a scarcity of the most basic natural resources such as water, ecological fragility or "constrained" environments (e.g., mountainous or semi-arid regions), low indicators of human and social development, inequitable access to natural resources, and low status of women (IUCN/UNFPA/UNEP 1999). Case studies point to its existence in certain regions. For example, in Eastern Province, Zambia, an area severely affected by droughts and high rates of HIV infection, recent research suggests that the importance of labor and cash transactions for rural households have been intensified due to environmental and social change, with children's labor increasingly being redefined in cash terms. Children are being viewed as assets to be negotiated between rival parents and families because of their labor value – which may partially explain why fertility has remained above seven births per woman (Barrett and Browne, 1998). In Haiti, research on the link between human security and fertility confirms that high fertility and migration are indeed coping strategies in a context of increasing environmental degradation and economic decline, though the origins of Haiti's environmental and economic crisis can be traced more to failed governance and interventionism than to population growth per se (de Sherbinin, 1996).

The value of VCMs stems less from their ability to "predict" what certain combinations of contextual variables will produce in terms of outcomes, and more from the policy prescriptions that flow from them. Here, the emphasis is on synergistic "win-win" strategies that seek to improve the status of women (through schooling, micro-credit, and labor saving technologies), redress gender and social inequities, and increase access to family planning and reproductive health services. Though the positive synergies arising from these strategies are clearly attractive, their formulation is not without some contradictions. For instance, according to the model, fertility is unlikely to decline unless household livelihood security is increased; yet, the means to achieve this goal in the context of environmental decline and widespread poverty is far from clear. A potential solution to this quandary is provided in the next section.

Theories of fertility, population growth, and the environment Given the popularity of the VCMs, especially in the arena of policymaking, it is worth briefly exploring some of their theoretical underpinnings. In terms of fertility behavior, VCMs generally build on intergenerational wealth flows theory, which holds that high fertility in traditional societies is beneficial to older generations due to the net flow of wealth from children to parents (Caldwell, 1982). In other words, children contribute more than they consume in the household economy. The PPE spiral also borrows from theories that describe fertility as an adjustment to risk, which argue that in situations "where financial and insurance markets are poorly developed, and...there is no tradition of extrafamilial welfare institutions," children serve as old-age security (Cain, 1983). In more traditional societies in which children possess a deeply engrained sense of filial obligation, this kind of "pension plan" often works very well. Some economists have incorporated environmental elements to the above theories by suggesting that children are valued by rural households in part because they transform common property resources (forests, fisheries, and rangeland) into household wealth (Panayotou, 1994; Dasgupta, 1995). Thus, according to this interpretation, individual responses to resource scarcity lead to problems at the societal level as each household copes with increased risk and uncertainty by maximizing its number of surviving children. This theory, in turn, is partially derived from Hardin's famous theory of the "tragedy of the commons," which holds that as long as incentives exist for each household to privatize open access resources, then there will be a tendency at the societal level to over-exploit available resources to the detriment of all users (Hardin, 1968).

Alternative Perspectives

The forgoing presentation on the PPE spiral described a scenario of social, economic, and environmental breakdown in which poor rural households are virtually locked into strategies that involve some combination of (a) high fertility to ensure a sufficient labor supply, "resource capture," and old-age security; (b) short-term exploitation of resources (at the expense of long-term stewardship) simply in order to survive; and (c) migration to urban or rural areas for low-wage jobs or informal sector activities. Although there is evidence to suggest that such coping strategies are employed by poor households in environmentally constrained areas, some have challenged the "downward spiral" interpretation as being overly simplistic or deterministic. The challenges come from two schools – one that sees opportunities to defuse population pressures through family planning programs even in contexts of high poverty and environmental decline, and another that sees such "generic" presentations of PPE linkages as misleading and contributing to a perpetuation of macro-level policies that do little to improve livelihood security. Each is examined briefly in turn.

The first school mentioned above views supply side variables in family planning programs – for example, information, education, and communication campaigns, high quality services and widespread access to modern forms of contraception – to be as important as demand for fertility reduction due to improvements in socioeconomic conditions. Research in Bangladesh suggests that fertility can decline in contexts of widespread poverty, low levels of education, and insecure livelihoods, provided the proper ingredients are present (Cleland et al., 1994). These include government commitment to family planning service provision through culturally appropriate methods (door-to-door service), female labor-force participation, and efforts to provide economic opportunities to women through micro-credit. Donor country financial commitments were also important. Today, fertility in Bangladesh stands at 3.3 births per woman, much lower than Pakistan's 5.6 births per woman, despite the fact that Bangladesh has almost five times the population density and a lower GNP per capita.

Poverty-led fertility declines have also been identified in Kenya and Malawi, where government commitment to family planning services is similarly strong. Less dramatic, but nevertheless important evidence for social and economic improvement and low fertility in the context of widespread poverty comes from Kerala State in India. Kerala's total fertility rate is now below replacement level, despite the fact that its per capita domestic product is below the Indian average of US $440. The factors that have contributed to this include historical emphasis on female education, active involvement of women in economic and political life, and provision of family planning services (Sen, 1994).

The second set of criticisms of the PPE framework point to the way that "downward spiral" conceptualizations over-generalize and simplify complex local linkages, and can contribute to the wrong policy responses. For example, the problems cited by Forsyth et al. (1998) include underlying assumptions "that (a) there is an aggregate ‘population' or ‘community' which interacts with an aggregate ‘environment'; (b) people's livelihoods are based more or less exclusively on the use and management of environmental resources; (c) poverty and environmental change have a direct causal relationship...; and (d) poverty is the principal or only cause of environmental change, and vice versa."

In the "environmental entitlements" approach proposed by this school, the population, poverty, and environment variables need to be disaggregated based on different sub-population's rights of access to and use of particular environmental endowments. Thus, different social actors (women, men, young, elderly, farmers, fisherfolk, rich, poor) have different entitlements to different environmental resources (specific resource bundles within forests, range lands, fisheries, etc.). Institutional aspects – such as land tenure, traditional rights, and resource policies – play a central role in determining who has access to what resources, and for what periods. Poverty is no longer defined as some arbitrary income threshold, but rather the sum of resources garnered and livelihood strategies employed vis-à-vis subsistence needs. To the extent that a group is unable to garner the necessary resources, then it is possible to talk about "social exclusion."

Population variables (growth, density, and distribution) are not explicitly included in the entitlements framework, yet proponents of this approach cite case examples where population growth did not necessarily lead to environmental decline or increasing poverty. A frequently cited example is Machakos District in Kenya, where increase in population density went hand in hand with improvements in soil fertility and local livelihoods (Tiffen et al., 1994). Among the enabling factors in this case were local and national institutions (property rights regimes and product markets) and strategies adapted by small farmers, including short-term migration. Even in this "success" story, however, not all social actors benefited, as some were inhibited by local institutions, policies, or customs concerning gender and property rights.

Conclusions and Policy Recommendations

The forgoing discussion can only lead one to conclude that there are many highly differentiated local manifestations of the linkages among population, human security, and the environment that reflect differences in natural resource endowments, climate, historical context, macro-economic policy, market penetration, linkages to the global economy, functioning institutions, culture, etc. In light of this, is there hope then for generating policy prescriptions that can be of relevance to such varying local contexts? The following are some of the factors that have been found to be significant in preventing some of the negative inter-linkages described above. They have the additional advantage of being largely context-independent.

At the national level, it is important to have supportive macro-economic policies and institutions. Respect for civil liberties, democratic institutions, accountability, and land resource rights (including traditional rights of access) is critical. An international comparison of environmental sustainability suggests that countries with the most transparent and accountable governance systems also have the best environmental performance (see Pilot ESI report under key web sites).

Policies need to support women's empowerment, including access to schooling, employment opportunities, and micro-credit. Family planning programs should be tailored to the clients' needs, and emphasis should be placed on quality of care (e.g., adequate counseling, attention to reproductive health, and non-coercive approaches) and male involvement, an important constituency that was overlooked in the past.

At the local level, approaches such as primary environmental care and participatory action research (also known as participatory rural appraisal) can help local actors, including the varied sub-groups identified by the entitlements approach, to analyze local problems at the interface of population, poverty, and the environment, as well as to plan solutions and implement them (see Our People, Our Resources under key web sites). Although more time consuming than expert-driven development plans, these locally-driven agendas for change, based on partnerships with NGOs and key government agencies, have a much greater chance of success.

Endnotes

¹ A good definition of livelihoods, based on work by Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway, is found in Carney (1998; see Key Web Sites): "a livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base."

² The word economy derives from the Greek word oikonomia, which means "household management."

³ For a more complete review of the literature on macro-level population-poverty linkages see McNicoll (1999). Chapter 3 of Lutz et al. (2000) addresses both the neoclassical macro-economic models of population and economic development and the VCMs.

References and Key Readings

Barrett, H., and A. Browne (July 1998). Environmental and Social Change in Zambia: the Value of Children to Rural Households. Global Environmental Change Program Briefs, Number 22. UK: ESRC Global Environmental Change Programme.

Cain, M. (1983). Fertility as an Adjustment to Risk. Population and Development Review 9(4): 688-702.

Caldwell, J. (1982). Theory of Fertility Decline. London: Academic Press.

Cleland, J., J.F. Phillips, S. Amin, and G.M. Kamal (1994). The Determinants of Reproductive Change in Bangladesh: Success in a Challenging Environment. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Dasgupta, P. (February 1995). Population, Poverty and the Local Environment. Scientific American 272(2): 40-45.

de Sherbinin, A. (1996). Human Security and Fertility: The Case of Haiti. Journal of Environment and Development 5(1): 28-45.

Forsyth, T., M. Leach, and I. Scoones (1998). Poverty and Environment: Priorities for Research and Policy. Sussex, UK: Institute for Development Studies.

Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 152: 1248.

Lutz, W., L. MacKellar, and B. O'Neill (2000). Population and Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McNicoll, G. (1999). Population and Poverty: the Policy Issues. FAO's SD Dimensions web site (see below).

Mishra, V. (1995). A Conceptual Framework for Population and Environment Research, IIASA Working Paper, 95-20.

Panayotou, T. (1994). The Population, Environment, and Development Nexus. In R. Cassen, ed., Population and Development: Old Debates, New Conclusions. Washington, DC: Overseas Development Council, 148-180.

Sen, A. (1994). Population: Delusion and Reality. The New York Review of Books 41(51): 62-71.

Sousan, J., N. Emmel, and C. Howorth (1999). "Freshwater Ecosystems Management and Social Security." A Contribution to IUCN's Vision for Water and Nature in the 21st Century.

Tiffen, M., M. Mortimore, and F. Gichuki (1994). Population Growth and Environmental Recovery: Policy Lessons from Kenya. London: IIED Gatekeeper Series.

UNICEF (1994). State of the World's Children. New York: Oxford University Press.

Key Web Sites:

Barton, T., G. Borrini-Feyerabend, A. de Sherbinin, and P. Warren (1997). Our People, Our Resources: Supporting rural communities in participatory action research on population dynamics and the local environment. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN.

http://www.iucn.org/themes/spg/opor/opor.html

Carney, Diana (1998). Implementing the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods Approach, London, UK: Overseas Development Institute.

http://www.dfid.gov.uk/public/what/advisory/group6/rld/dianakey.html

IUCN/UNFPA/UNEP (1998). Report of the International Workshop on Population-Poverty-Environment Linkages: Key Results and Policy Actions. Gland: IUCN.

http://www.gcrio.org/online.html

FAO's SD Dimensions Web Site: Report on FAO's thematic workshop on population, poverty and environment with related background papers:

http://www.fao.org/sd/wpdirect/WPre0086.htm

The Pilot Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) report:

http://www.ciesin.org/indicators/ESI/pilot_esi.html

Alex de Sherbinin

Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, Palisades, New York, USA.