J. Soussan
John Soussan is associated with the ETC Foundation in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and with Reading University, UK
This article analyses policy issues associated with the role of biomass as an energy resource, focusing on the relationship of wood energy problems with other development issues. The article is drawn from a paper prepared for the FAO/Regional Wood Energy Development Programme Seminar on policy instruments for the implementation of relevant programmes, held in Chiang Mai Thailand, in March 1993. The policy proposals in this paper are based on several years' work in analysing wood fuel (fuelwood and charcoal) problems and solutions in South and Southeast Asia and elsewhere - work which includes a series of projects covering policy analysis and field studies for official development institutions such as the World Bank, the Commission of the European Communities, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Overseas Development Administration and other organizations in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Policy reforms are the main focus of this article. This does not mean that we are not concerned with the formidable challenges of implementing local wood fuel interventions but, increasingly, it appears that the real barriers to effective fuelwood interventions lie at the policy, not the project, level. In turn, the policy focus cannot be approached through a single sector such as forestry or energy.
Wood energy policies require an environment for intersectoral cooperation, which creates a problem: wood fuels have tended to slip into the gap between forestry and energy departments, resulting in a situation where either both ignore the issue or, if external funding is available, both claim proprietorial rights. Wood fuel is often assigned to special units that have little effective clout despite the key role played by biomass fuels in both sectors.
Throughout Asia, fuelwood is both the principal source of energy and the main use of wood but commercial fuels and commercial timber production dominate the attention of energy and forestry ministries. Other important ministries such as agriculture and finance often play no part at all.
Developing effective answers to wood fuel problems must include both the national and supranational levels, where broad policy goals are established, and local levels, where the details of implementation projects are worked out; and they must entail the transformation of broad policy principles into realizable mechanisms for change, including a clear analytical process that sets out the actions required at the different levels. This is true for most types of development planning, but is particularly important for issues such as fuelwood, where both the nature of problems and the scope for successful interventions are interwoven with other dimensions of the local production system. Combining this local specificity with an approach that involves the local community and does not set a priori the type of intervention (both prerequisites for effective local planning) contrasts with traditional policy-making, which seeks to develop policies and programmes that are applicable over broad swathes of territory.
Wood fuel problems are primarily a consequence of the interaction between environmental and economic forces at a local level (Soussan, 1988; Munslow et al., 1988; Agarwal, 1986). Interventions that operate at a local level will be doomed, however, in the absence of an appropriate policy environment that:
· creates an economic and political climate conducive to local control over the resource base and the sustaining of local solutions;· provides effective external support to ensure the availability of deficient material and technical inputs for initiating local solutions.
The context of energy policies (including wood fuel) has changed in recent years with the shift in focus on energy's contribution to sustainable development (Soussan, 1991a; O'Keefe and Munslow, 1988; Leach and Mearns, 1989). The central issue is not how to supply more energy (in whatever form) but rather how to ensure that the energy needs of sustainable development paths are met in the most effective manner.
Policies for sustainable energy supply will have some distinctive characteristics; for instance, they will encompass a long-term time horizon, in which needs are assessed and resources valued in relation to a development path based on lasting and secure patterns of growth and change. Real tensions exist between long-term development goals and short-term economic necessities; resolving these tensions is a prerequisite for establishing the vision needed to achieve sustainable change.
Another key characteristic is consideration of the environment as a central factor in policy formulation (Pearce, Markandya and Barbier, 1989; Barde and Pearce, 1991; Barbier, 1989). The real cost of different forms of energy needs to be assessed while the true worth of environmental stocks, flows and sinks must be evaluated and accounted for. To achieve this it is necessary to price different fuels correctly, to take account of these costs in investment decisions and to recognize that development involves more than simple economic growth. The quality of life and the maintenance of the environment are as important policy goals as the growth of per caput GNR
Sustainable development approaches are based on the need to reduce inequalities in both current livelihoods and future prospects. Development policies must strive to provide sustainable livelihoods for all sections of the community as a goal which stands alongside, or even takes precedence over, increased production and enhanced economic growth. Growth that excludes the disadvantaged can be attractive in the short term, but it will accumulate problems and injustices and will rarely be sustainable in the long term. This is particularly true for needs, such as wood fuel, where the resource can be exploited for short-term benefits in a way that will ultimately destroy the resource base or, alternatively, utilized in ways in which some short-term benefits are sacrificed to retain the long-term integrity.
This goal of meeting the needs of disadvantaged population groups gives rise to the final characteristic of sustainable energy policies: the recognition of the need to devolve as widely as possible the control over development resources and decisions.
Specific policy initiatives should be judged by these characteristics, although they are not rigid criteria. One of they key tasks of the policy-maker is to find an effective balance between the complex and often contradictory impacts of an individual policy option. The formulation of policy should be a flexible, consensual process in which as wide a level of consultation as possible is undertaken. There are, of course, practical limits and policy formulation should not be a hostage to any one particular set of vested interests. Nevertheless, it should take account of the full range of effects of the measures involved.
Most governments and donor agencies have included wood energy as a planning issue only since the oil crises of the 1970s, considering it primarily a problem of energy demand and supply. From this perspective, the answers were self-evident: if projected demand outstripped potential supplies, then either the supply curve was to be shifted outwards by planting more trees or the demand curve was to be shifted inwards by introducing more efficient utilization technologies. Both of these approaches are essentially technology-focused (whether forestry or stove technologies) and, with a few notable exceptions, have failed to have a lasting effect in reducing wood fuel scarcity, whether real or predicted (O'Keefe and Munslow, 1988; Leach and Mearns, 1989).
The frequent failure of many such policy initiatives has led to a reappraisal the issue. A number of key studies (see ETC, 1987; Leach and Mearns, 1989; Soussan, 1988; Munslow et al., 1988) argue that biomass fuel production and use are intimately integrated into broader processes of resource management in local production systems. Wood fuel problems emerge gradually as people respond to a variety of resource stresses, rarely manifesting themselves as a simple shortage of fuel (Soussan, 1988; Mercer and Soussan, 1991; O'Keefe and Munslow, 1988).
The causes of these stresses are rooted in more fundamental failures in rural land, labour and capital markets as well as urban energy markets. The issue of control over decisions concerning land, finance and other resources lies at the heart of effective wood energy policies, but has rarely been recognized as a matter of legitimate concern for wood fuel policy-makers.
Although the activities undertaken in any wood fuel strategy will vary according to local conditions, policy interventions should generally seek to ensure the following conditions:
· secure property rights, whether customary, communal or private, especially to those groups experiencing the most difficulties in access to biomass resources;· improved access to and the management of local land resources, including actions to remove factors that limit local people's access to communal or state land;
· the provision of knowledge and inputs to enhance the quality of existing land management practices;
· improved market functions and reduced uncertainty through more stable and predictable policies - these policies are particularly important where biomass fuels are treated as commodities;
· effective structures to ensure that local people have an influential voice in the decisions that affect their lives.
To move from broad reform to the development of specific policies and the subsequent implementation of local strategies, a number of basic requirements must be addressed:
· information bases on which policies are developed must be improved;· market failures must be corrected and the functioning of markets improved;
· wood fuel institutions (including planning, research, extension and training) must be strengthened;
· strategies for local implementation must be developed.
Improving information
This is an essential step, given the variety and complexity of wood fuel and other household energy systems. The "tool kit" of conventional energy (or forestry) planning is not well suited to this area, and many policy mistakes of the past have reflected the fundamental failure to understand the dynamics of biomass fuel production and use (Leach and Mearns, 1989; Mercer and Soussan, 1991). These policies have too often been based on highly aggregated data and ill-informed assumptions about the forces driving biomass fuel production and use.
In most cases, the information available does not allow an accurate (or even crude) assessment of likely future mixes of biomass and other fuels, nor of the economic benefits and costs associated with different forms of fuel provision and consumption. Among the most pressing information needs are better data on household energy use, wood fuel markets, the resource base and tree and woodland management systems.
Much has been written on how households respond to energy scarcity and the factors that influence their fuel choices, but little empirical information exists. Although a number of household surveys have been undertaken, most are "snapshots" of one point in time and are notoriously poor at providing insights into processes of change and into the specific character of localized fuelwood production and use as well as the subtle, non-quantitative interactions between people and their resource base.
In-depth surveys of household fuel markets (both for biomass and other fuels) are needed to ascertain how fuels are produced, distributed, marketed and priced and to determine which stages of the marketing process are most susceptible to policy interventions. Information is also needed on land, labour, agricultural and forest products if the relationships between biomass fuels and the wider production system are to be understood. We have very little reliable information on the wood fuel resource base and, in particular, know little about sustainable offtake levels from different land and tree formations. A specific information gap concerns trees and shrubs outside the forest, which are often the main sources of rural fuel. Ongoing monitoring of the state and change over time in the biomass resource base as a whole (not just commercial timber in forests) should be a priority action for forestry institutions.
Woodland and tree management systems are the starting point for a good policy, as they will form the basis for community-based interventions. Local resource management systems are best understood through long-term participatory studies that seek ways to forge a partnership between empirical science and local people's knowledge. These studies also provide a basis for building trust between local people and outside institutions.
This may sound like a bottomless pit of research expenditure, but approaches that combine rapid-appraisal field techniques with data from remote sensing sources can produce surprisingly good results quickly and relatively cheaply. They can be repeated periodically to assess processes of change.
Correcting market and policy failures
Economic manifestations of wood fuel stress often reflect market and policy failures that produce situations in which benefits are disassociated from costs, prices from scarcity, rights from responsibilities and actions from consequences. The key market and policy failures involve property rights, resource prices, price distortions in capital, labour and commodity markets and overvalued currencies. Property rights need to be clear, secure, enforceable and transferable. Resolving land tenure insecurities is an essential prerequisite for effective wood energy (and wider development) policies and practices (Soussan, 1991b; Shepherd, 1988; Acharya, 1989; Armitage and Scharamm, 1989).
Valuing and enforcing economic prices for biomass resources is problematic. This is especially true when dealing with communal resources. Reforming policies that distort markets and resolving property rights, while not a complete answer, will go far in producing prices that reflect the true costs of resource exploitation. Collecting stumpage fees is difficult but may be possible where an effective forest department has control over a clearly defined area of forest. In other areas, the effective control of wood resources by the local community is the basis for achieving prices that reflect the total value of these resources, so long as their exploitation is managed on a sustainable basis.
Many policies outside the energy sector can also lead to fuel price distortions. Taxes and subsidies on different fuels rarely reflect a considered analysis of the development of a coordinated energy policy and they often tend to be biased towards the interests of the urban-based elite. Similarly, access to capital for investments in small-scale, dispersed energy systems has been constantly sacrificed to large, centralized investments.
The widespread underpricing of rural products (especially foodstuffs) has tilted development towards the urban sector, resulting in the undermining of the rural production systems within which wood fuels are produced. The resultant increases in rural-to-urban migration flows have produced serious labour shortages for rural production and maintenance of the rural landscape. In some regions, the drive for a short-term extraction of profits from rural resources is leading to a bias towards the monoculture of cash crops, the clearance of woodlands and forests and the unsustainable exploitation of land resources, which are the rural poor's main source of fuel (and other needs).
At first glance, these market and policy distortions may appear to have little to do with wood fuel problems, but they are key factors in the processes of change that cause the deterioration of the resource base.
Strengthening fuelwood institutions
In many countries, an improved institutional capacity (in terms of planning, research, extension and training) is needed if the broad principles for wood fuel policies outlined above are to be translated into effective action. Although movement in this direction has begun in recent years, these initiatives need to be supported and built on, a process to which this article is intended to contribute. Central to this is capturing the diversity and dynamism of local wood fuel situations. The different stages of policy development outlined above form a starting point for the process of institutional development.
Institutions should be structured to permit multisectoral cooperation; energy and forestry ministries will continue to take a lead role in the process, but other institutions may be the most appropriate executing agency. Institutions should be responsive to energy needs and demand. This requires an end-use approach in which production capabilities are based on defined needs with no predefinition of technical choices and flexibility over the timing of interventions. In terms of human resource development, positive action is needed to create effective management structures and enhanced skills. Institutions also need to strengthen channels for the participation of wood fuel users and providers in the planning process, allowing effective bottom-up participation in all stages of planning as well as in the research and development of practical strategies.
Especially in the areas of extension and training, the state's role as a facilitator requires an effective process of decentralization. The development of local solutions and use of local networking options rather than a dependency on already overloaded agricultural or forestry extension workers may be of key importance.
Many countries will need external support for developing their institutional capacity to design and implement effective fuelwood-centred strategies. This support can and should come from the international donor community. However, the role of external donors may need to be revalued to ensure that their participation does not force "standardized" and often inappropriate technical approaches on the recipient country or institution.
Developing local implementation strategies
Effective wood energy policies must be translated into action through strategies that capture the local specificity of wood fuel problems and opportunities. This will determine the appropriate mix of technical packages, containing supply enhancement, conservation and fuel-switching options. It will also provide a structure for prioritizing efforts and the institutional relationships between planning agencies and local communities. Again, simplistic and prescriptive technical methods must be avoided in favour of strategies that integrate approaches to wood fuel problems with the management of the wider production system. An assessment of the economic, social and environmental suitability of technical alternatives to local and regional conditions should form the starting point for interventions designed in the strategic planning exercise.
This article provides an overview of wood energy policy issues and indicates how such policies can begin to be applied to local circumstances. The approach outlined here is intended as no more than a starting point for effective planning, in that it provides pointers for action. Even so, it is clear that developing wood fuel policies is a complex process and the one-dimensional, technical blueprint approach is consequently inappropriate. The need to create the preconditions for planning must be accepted and acted on if we are to see real, sustainable solutions.
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