We write against a background of depressing news items. The latest round of WTO negotiations over trade tariffs and subsidies has been suspended amid mutual recrimination by the EU and USA. At the same time, as unauthorised landings of desperate and destitute African migrants on the southern shores and outposts of the European Union reach an annual peak, EU countries are concluding multi-lateral and bi-lateral ‘sustainable fishing’ deals with governments along the West African coast for access to their waters by EU trawlers. There are also reports of destructive floods in Ethiopia, Somalia and Burkina Faso; continuing (maybe even worsening) conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta; electoral tension in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and menacing demands by Chad's Idriss Deby for an immediate 60 per cent majority stake (currently held by Petronas and Chevron) in the local oil producing consortium. By comparison, last year's ‘bad’ news was dominated by coverage of post-drought floods, locust infestation and famine in the Sahel, alongside Zimbabwe's Operations Restore Order and Murambatsvina; remarkably, forced evictions and demolitions affecting several million urban Nigerians failed to make the international news. Clearly, the challenge for ROAPE remains, as always, how to use environmental issues to bear witness to Africa's complicated political struggle, while not ignoring the cultural and other forms underpinning that struggle in particular environments. It is an undertaking which is complicated by the increasing mainstreaming of the notion of sustainability in environment and wider development policy and debates, particularly as there are distinct traditions of sustainability. The first is ecological, and refers to sustainability at either the genetic, species or ecotome level. The second derives from conventional market economics, and attempts to guarantee both the stock and flow of resources. The third seeks to explore the political economy of the environment, recognising that environmental conflict is usually a proximate cause of deeper problems in the body politic. It is this third tradition, with its emphasis on capital, class and power, which has traditionally preoccupied us at ROAPE. And, as the ten main contributions in this issue show, it continues to inform our deliberations, albeit to varying degrees and in different ways. It is worth taking the opportunity presented by this, ROAPE's third ever issue devoted specifically to environment-related questions (and first of the current century), to reflect on the evolution of the environment debate in the journal and more widely.
ROAPE's environmental roots
Nearly twenty years have elapsed since this journal first devoted an entire issue to the African environment. The subject had shot to global prominence in the wake of widespread and recurrent drought-famine, and the publication of Africa in Crisis (Timberlake, 1988) and the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), among other things. ROAPE No. 42, 1988, appeared at the height of what Timberlake (1988) had described as Africa's crisis of environmental bankruptcy, and in an era when ‘few critics ha[d] paid attention to the environmental aspects of capitalism's impact on rural livelihoods in the Third World’ (Turshen, Barker and O'Keefe, 1988:1). In the event, a preoccupation with neo-Malthusian explanations for a perceived increase in the incidence and intensified impact of drought, famine, desertification and deforestation – seen collectively as constituting Africa's environmental crisis – came in for sharp criticism. This was seen as delaying the emergence of more progressive alternative analyses involving both the production of environments under capitalism, and the latter's impact on livelihoods. Issue No. 42 thus set out to ‘reshape the environmental debate by seeking to place it in a new analytical context’ (Ibid. p.2).
That context was two-fold. First, the ‘naturalness’ would be largely taken out of so-called ‘natural disasters’. And, second, environmental deterioration would be understood as an integral part of the process of capitalist development, and not as the unwanted side-effect of development-as-modernisation. Consequently, Issue No. 42 framed Africa's environmental crisis as a side effect of the articulation of capitalist with peasant modes of production and non-capitalist institutions (O'Keefe and Wisner, 1977); and as the product of underdevelopment which, in eroding local control over resources, frequently undermined the physical basis of natural resource-based livelihoods, notably those of women and/or the poor in society. ‘In the end’, the editors concluded, ‘it would seem that the logic of capitalism, which is private profit, and the long-term conservation of the environment, which can only be managed collectively, are mutually exclusive’ (Turshen, Barker and O'Keefe, 1988:4).
By the time ROAPE revisited the subject of the links between nature and society a decade further on in 1997, the notion was already well established that environmental crises were part of the overall process of the production of uneven development, and thus ‘the product of long-term political and economic policies and systems’ (Timberlake, 1988:x). This was due, as Figure 1 suggests, as much to advances in political economy and political ecology thinking (Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Smith and O'Keefe, 1980; Watts, 1983), as to an expansion in the literature on the moral economy (Hewitt, 1983; Sen, 1981); it was also a reflection of the heightened role which ideas about individual and group vulnerability and entitlements (O'Keefe, Westgate and Wisner, 1975; O'Keefe and Wisner, 1977; Sen, 1981) had come to assume in discourses on the environment, alongside increasingly influential thinking on local knowledge and institutional economy (Chambers et al. 1989; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Leach and Mearns, 1996; Richards, 1985). Yet, not even the shift from seeing environmental disasters as ‘acts of God’ to understanding them as ‘acts of wo/man’ succeeded in eliminating either neo-Malthusianism, or the restrictive/exclusionary policies and punitive practical interventions it informed, from mainstream environmental discourse and praxis (Wisner, 2005).
Not surprisingly, this persistence served as a useful starting point for subjecting environmental orthodoxy anew to close scrutiny and critical challenge, notably in its manifestation as crisis narrative which both blamed the poor for land degradation and identified overpopulation as the root cause of environmental crisis. Thus Issue No. 74 did not only raise searching questions about the ‘efficacy of scientific explanations for Africa's environmental crisis’; it also advocated a wider stock-taking of both ‘characterisations’ of this crisis and the strategies suggested for its amelioration (Bush, 1997:503). Appearing as it did in the wake of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED), the Issue underscored two key shortcomings of the post-Rio environmental orthodoxy. When applied to Africa, the ‘universalising’ of environmental problems did ‘nothing to help an understanding of different … crises, or whether they [we]re crises at all’; also, such a ‘globalising’ discourse failed to address
how particular … solutions c[ould] be promoted without simply accepting the agenda of the environmental crises set … by the donor community (Bush, 1997:504 and 505).
the first summit meeting to have been held on important environmental issues and one of the few designed, at least in theory, to pay attention to the problems of world poverty (Middleton, O'Keefe and Moyo, 1993:1).
Above all, perhaps, in the promotion of environmentally sound socio-economic development, and its insistence that current development needs should not be met at the expense of those of future generations, the Brundtland report both profoundly influenced ideas ‘about the state of the world’, and ‘set the limits to contemporary thinking about development’ (Ibid. pp. 17 and 21). This influence was evident, for example, in the convening of the Rio Earth Summit as a follow-up to, and update on, progress with the goals and aspirations of Our Common Future. Similarly, the language of, and claims in Agenda 21, one of five documents adopted at Rio, are reminiscent of the Brundtland report, as the following excerpts from the preamble show:
[W]e are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being. However, integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future.
Agenda 21 addresses the pressing problems of today and also aims at preparing the world for the challenges of the next century. It reflects a global consensus and political commitment at the highest level on development and environment cooperation.
No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can – in a global partnership for sustainable development (IISD, undated, a).
Adopting the limitations of this post-Rio environmental orthodoxy for Africa as a focus, then, Issue No. 74 argued strenuously that the continent's environmental difficulties were related to its intractable underlying development crises (unequal aid and trade regimes, heavy primary commodity dependence, poor infrastructural development, etc.); and that the reification of an international environment-development agenda, particularly one founded on orthodox neo-liberal principles, would neither improve the understanding of local environments nor enhance Africa's ability in shaping its own environmental destiny. And, in calling for the opposition between nature and culture to be transcended in this way, the Issue effectively returned us to ROAPE's environmental roots identified in Issue No. 42, notably its concern with justice, equity and resource (re-)distribution; structural explanations of poverty and underdevelopment; and the value of nuanced understandings of the social production of the environment, including the ‘political practices and economic institutions’ which precipitate environmental degradation and crises (Bush, 1997:505). Furthermore, the hope was expressed that future issues of ROAPE would continue to explore the social and environmental consequences of capitalist growth and expansion, and strategies for ameliorating environmental problems.
21st century perspectives on the environment
Much has happened in the nearly ten years since, providing ample justification for another of ROAPE's periodic explorations of the complex links between nature and society. For one thing, a recent more optimistic update on Lloyd Timberlake's vision of a continent in crisis has recently appeared (Wisner, Toulmin and Chitiga, 2005), as has a less sanguine assessment of progress with the agenda agreed at Rio (Middleton and O'Keefe, 2003). For another, South Africa played host to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), which reviewed progress since Rio, in addition to planning for a sustainable future for both nature and society. Furthermore, Africa was in the spotlight of international policy attention during 2005. Our Common Interest: An Argument, the report of the Africa Commission was published. The Commission was set up by Tony Blair to review Africa's development experience and examine the contribution of the rest of the world to this history. The year also saw the convening of the G8 Gleneagles Summit in Scotland, at which Africa and climate change were on the agenda. Concurrently, the Make Poverty History protests and Live8 concerts were held at various locations around the world, with the aim of pressuring G8 leaders for increased aid, fairer trade and debt cancellation for poor African countries. Finally, although the continuing aftermath of the ‘War on Terror’ has been complex and diversified, it has not been without direct and indirect environmental implications in Africa, as elsewhere, although this was clearly not the primary consideration which drove the United States to insist on the inclusion of terrorism as a threat to sustainable development at the Johannesburg summit. However, while the implications for nature and society of several of these events have already been the subject of recent critiques in ROAPE (Furniss, 2005; Hoogvelt, 2005; Keenan, 2005), a notable exception thus far has been the WSSD.
In addition to acknowledging a debt to the principles and plan of action of sustainable development established at Rio, the WSSD affirmed a commitment to the implementation of Agenda 21 and the achievement of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). Its Programme of Implementation identifies a need for integrating ‘the three components of sustainable development – economic development, social development and environmental protection – as interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars’ (UNO, undated). Yet, declarations of intent aside, and despite a pre-summit promise by organisers to focus on action and detailed schedules for implementing previously-agreed goals, post-summit assessments suggested widespread disappointment and disillusion among NGOs and Southern governments. For not only was there an unmistakable tendency toward unilateralism and self-interest by rich countries, notably with regard to climate change, trade liberalisation and subsidies, etc., but there was also a noticeable failure to agree clear timetables and firm targets for poverty reduction, increased renewable energy consumption, expanded access to potable water and improved sanitation, and reduction in biodiversity loss, among others (UNEP DTIE, 2002). However, while there was particular dissatisfaction with a perceived lack of progress on environmental questions, the most important issues addressed were, unlike Rio, both environmental and developmental. Nonetheless, like Rio before it, the WSSD was emasculated, with ‘[t]he needs of many … once again compromised to accommodate the demands of a powerful few’ (Sharma, Mahapatra and Polycarp, 2002:25).
Like UNCED, too, while there was open acknowledgement of the growing threat posed to sustainable development and global stability and security by an increased polarization of wealth and associated power and influence, there was also an absence of acceptable and truly radical alternatives to dominant economic, political and policy structures and processes. Instead, official declarations and statements of intent opted for promoting the notion of partnerships for sustainable socioeconomic and environmental development, which encompassed governmental and non-state actors and interests in a variety of arrangements involving links within and between African countries, and between them and the rest of the world. Thus the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation identified NEPAD (the New Economic Partnership for African Development) as an African-owned and driven framework for sustainable development. NEPAD's programmes, partnerships and initiatives were presented as worthy of strong support from an international community committed to the implementation of Agenda 21 and, more generally, Africa's pursuit of sustained economic growth. Represented as a suitable complement to development frameworks embodying poverty eradication measures (including Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers), the implementation of the NEPAD ‘vision’ was also considered potentially valuable in conflict prevention and resolution, economic integration, HIV/AIDS prevention and care, debt management and relief, etc. (UNO, undated).
At least four key issues arise from the foregoing. First, the ‘non-natural’ basis of environmental crises is acknowledged in the observation that essential requirements for sustainable development include poverty eradication, the modification of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and the protection and management of the natural resource base for economic and social development (UNO, undated). Second, ‘solutions’ proposed for preventing and ameliorating environmental crises, often prescriptive but just as frequently imprecise, increasingly reflect recognition of the implications of this complexity for the nature and content of environment and development intervention. Third, sustainable development in and for Africa is represented as one of the benefits of a process of ‘fully inclusive and equitable’ globalisation (surely a contradiction in terms!!), whose wheels are oiled by partnership structures and processes like NEPAD and the development agenda of Our Common Interest. Fourth, the adoption of national sustainable development strategies was recommended by the WSSD as part of wider country strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction. But, despite their slow and distinctly uneven implementation by African countries since 2002 (UNDESA, 2006), their incorporation in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) has elevated them into a mechanism for the de facto mainstreaming of the environment in development policy, planning and implementation, given that PRSPs constitute the main means for negotiating access to technical and financial assistance (Anon, 2005).
Within this overall context of globalisation (little discussed in Rio) and the transformation of sustainable development into a policy objective at all levels, the role reserved for the sustainable and wider development agendas appears to be a primarily enabling rather than transformative one, reflecting an overarching vision designed to serve rather than contradict global capitalism (Fraser, 2005; Harrison, 2004; Hoogvelt, 2005). Indeed, through facilitating political and economic liberalisation (particularly privatisation), bi- and multi-lateral partnerships like NEPAD and PRSs (both incorporating an environment initiative), the US Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, the Strategic Partnership with Africa, and the Tokyo Agenda for Action help to create sustainable markets and environments for capital. In the process, as discussions at the 2003 ROAPE conference on Partnership as Imperialism demonstrated, they foster corporate expansion into environment-related (and other) activity. The investment of South African corporate capital in mining in Ghana and Sierra Leone; or the new petroleum boom in West Africa; or the recent influx of new international mining investors in the Democratic Republic of Congo following World Bank-driven mining sector reform, the introduction of a new mining code, and a constitutional referendum (Bailey, 2006) – all readily attest to this. Alternatively, there is the operation of China's new capitalist model for accessing natural resources in Africa, described by an African ambassador in Beijing as follows:
They just come and do it. We don't start to hold meetings about environmental impact assessment, human rights, bad governance and good governance. I’m not saying that's right, I'm just saying Chinese investment is succeeding because they don't set high benchmarks (Hilsum, 2005a).
A ROAPE perspective
The papers in this issue reflect some of these 21 st century developments, although to varying degrees and in different ways. Ramsamy examines low cost housing programmes financed by the World Bank in Zimbabwe, indicating that access to urban housing ranks alongside access to employment as a major survival challenge. And, in a powerful critique of the World Bank, he notes that Structural Adjustment contributed to structural collapse in Zimbabwe, while arguing a case which shows that the current crisis of squatter removal is closely linked to the Bank's policy framework. Indeed, Bracking (2005) has recently ventured even further to argue that it was initially forced and then unplanned liberalisation which hastened descent into the kind of authoritarianism which resulted ultimately in these evictions.
The papers by Middleton and O'Keefe, and Marchal, act as timely reminders that there are sometimes cross-border dimensions to environment and development problems. The former shows how the crisis of self-selection to enter camps for security reasons in Darfur can be traced directly to the political economy of access to resources in Sudan, while the latter's explanation of the diverse origins and varied trajectories of the linked crises in Chad and neighbouring Darfur insists on their complex and dynamic transnational character. While undoubtedly political in origin, both papers argue, these crises also have clear ‘natural’ components to them, notably the interplay between demography, recurrent drought and tenure (land and water) conflict. In addition, the discovery and exploitation of oil has contributed to the outbreak and/or funded the continuation of conflict in one as in the other case. At the same time, conflict has in turn prompted environmental degradation and disrupted livelihoods, with major implications for the scope and nature of both humanitarian assistance and political mediation. All three authors would no doubt agree that their analyses amount to a case for a continuing transboundary approach to conflict resolution, humanitarian intervention and the management of natural and societal resources of a kind which, as the paper by Jones shows, is more usually associated with the conservation of wildlife and their habitat.
Another environment in which oil plays a central role is Nigeria's Niger Delta, a favoured study area of ROAPE authors. Idemudia and Ite offer an ‘integrated explanation’ of the causes of ongoing conflict, indicating how past development efforts have been compromised by single-factor explanations. In their place, the authors suggest the adoption of an approach to the design and implementation of development efforts for the region which is both cognisant of
the triple pillars of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental sustainability)'; and capable of addressing the components of the ‘economic-environmental nexus to the conflict … the role of poverty, the geography of oil and the economic impact of environmental degradation on host communities.
In an intriguing argument over the use of environmental impact assessment (EIA) and public participation in environmental decision making in South Africa, Death explores the limits of a positivist western, scientific tradition to settle environmental dispute surrounding nuclear power generation. It is a sharp critique of how the state attempts to avoid environmental conflict by the use of EIA methods, which include a presumption that there is a single correct answer to the complex problems of the political economy of energy provision. While the argument shows clearly the value of engaging with as wide a range of opinions as possible to ensure that interests beyond those of predominantly white middle class environmentalists are represented, it makes the equally important point that its environmental regulation role and appeal to popular participation notwithstanding, EIA is not necessarily an effective tool for resisting neo-liberal hegemony. Convery provides a case study of Mozambican forest resource use, detailing the worldview implied in resource management which underlies traditional (but not unchanging) local thinking about the interaction between nature and society. It can be considered a response to the call in ROAPE No. 74 to engage with the cultural forms underpinning particular environments, in this case a rural forest environment in which the Régulo system, with its complex institutional structures, acts as broker in environmental resource claims and guide in resource allocation and use.
While Convery prefers the notion of the production of ‘lifescape’ to that of the more familiar ‘landscape’, the latter continues to attract much attention, as in the piece by Jones. She summarises major debates in, and changing practices of wildlife conservation using political ecology as her organising framework. Her task, to chart the politics of struggles over the control of, and access to natural resources in ‘conservation environments’, highlights ‘the importance of considering ways in which power and meanings conferred on the landscape play out in the realm of conservation’. The fraught question of balancing the competing interests of private-public partnerships and public-community partnerships encountered here is analogous to that confronted by Whitfield in the context of urban water privatisation in Ghana. In both cases, too, there is a clear sense of global impulses being mediated through local prisms, raising once again the complex issue of the contested nature, dynamics and outcomes of development partnerships. These are of course subjects in which ROAPE has a long and continuing interest, as indeed it also does in conflict resolution and post-conflict recovery. Kimble uses the peace process in Angola to highlight how an economy based on two natural resources, oil and diamonds, poses formidable political challenges for the delivery of a sustainable development transition. Thus repeated government crackdowns on informal commercial activity, ostensibly on public health and traffic circulation grounds, have particularly negative effects on poor urban women and their dependants. Similarly, state privatisation of land is resulting in a land grab by elite groups, but with no commensurate increase in tenure security for the vast majority of peasant producers (but particularly women), and without eliminating the prospect of land conflict. Kibble concludes that whether and to what extent the country embarks on widespread economic recovery and poverty reduction would depend, even if only partly, on world oil prices and the local pursuit of its capitalist model by China which, as in Zimbabwe, Chad and Sudan, is a significant development partner.
Overall, these papers represent a first concerted response to the challenge thrown down in No. 74, for ROAPE to continue to explore the socio-environmental consequences of capitalist growth and expansion, even if ameliorative strategies receive only limited coverage. In particular, the selection provides confirmation of the continuing close links between environment and development; highlights the complex and dynamic role of politics and economic institutions in precipitating environmental degradation or aggravating environmental crises; and reinforces the long-standing impression of persistent underlying environment and development difficulties, despite policy and other interventions designed to promote liberalisation and globalisation. Moreover, there is a suggestion that modernisation thinking and practice, so comprehensively discredited in both Nos. 42 and 74, has persisted in new guises, sometimes as a cover for oppressive policies, undemocratic interventions or disempowering practices. Above all, perhaps, the extent of autonomous African input into the international agenda which drives global and local responses to the continent's multiple and interlocking environment-develop-ment problems remains unclear.
Producing African environments by & for Africans?
Radicals have historically approached the study of the environment from the perspective of several distinct academic traditions. Figure 1 summarises one of a number of possible mappings of these traditions. While much of this radical scholarship has represented a significant contribution to the literature, there have also been inevitable absences. For example, the local knowledge and institutional economy literature often lacks detailed treatment of political process, while there is generally an absence of analyses of economics in discussions of political ecology. Similarly, moral economy arguments celebrate political activity which is grounded in local struggle, but there is generally an absence of broader global trends. Nonetheless, a shared concern of all was, and remains, how to determine what kind of African nature African people wish to produce.
This appears to be one of the functions of the UNEP Africa Environment Outlook Reports (AEOR-1 and AEOR-2). Published respectively in 2002 and 2006 as part of a process for promoting sustainable environmental management within the context of PRSPs and NEPAD, they offer ‘a comprehensive scientific assessment of the [continent's] environment, policies, and environmental management programmes’; represent valuable monitoring and reporting tools; and provide inspiration for dialogue within and between countries and (sub-)regions around the linked themes of sustsinable development and Africa's insertion into a globalising world economy (UNEP-DEWA, undated). Not surprisingly, press releases for the launch of AEOR-2 emphasise its value as a tool for defining realistic environment-development policy options, strategies and programmes (Sanyang, 2006). They also highlight the report's role as a showcase for priorities and initiatives requiring private and other investment, preferably of a kind encompassing creative market instruments like debt-for-nature swaps and tax incentives which balance economic concerns with environmental ones (Steiner, 2006). At the same time, the content of AEOR-2 which was, like that of AEOR-1, compiled by African scientists and researchers, includes repeated suggestions of significant and continuing African input to sustainable development policy and programme design and content at all scales as well as in all priority areas identified in NEPAD's Environmental Action Plan.
Not surprisingly, in tracing changing African policy and legislative attitudes to the environment and its place within development thinking and practice, the report attributes this evolution equally to the influence of Stockholm, Brundtland, UNCED, the MDGs and WSSD, on the one hand, and the impact of the Lagos Plan of Action, a rejuvenated African Union, renewed regional integration and a NEPAD credited with ‘seek[ing] to balance the neoliberal economic reforms it is promoting with support for social services, particularly health and education’, on the other (UNEP, 2006:28). Indeed, this theme of African ownership of the policy process and, by extension, the authority to represent the hopes and aspirations of the continent's people pervades the report. But while the report might well represent an authoritative view on sustainable development, does it also encompass an exhaustive picture of the different kinds of nature which Africans of all categories wish to produce? For example, while it notes that an increasing number of countries currently grow or are field-testing genetically modified crops, and is complimentary about the role of citizens' juries in facilitating female participation in local GM debates, the report is silent on the rejection of the idea of introducing these crops during some of these non-binding civil society consultations (Anon, 2006). Similarly, the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia has recently imposed what is the latest in a number of recent (and thus far ineffective) bans on the largely unregulated and unrestricted export trade in charcoal and wildlife (principally live birds of prey) to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States on environmental grounds, citing an overwhelming need to counter the threat of desertification and biodiviersity loss (BBC, 2006). Yet the questions this raises are as much to do with sustainable environmental management, as with governance and popular representation under conditions of state collapse. In one as in the other example, however, livelihood concerns of various kinds appear to be the key to explaining the dynamics at work. It is significant, therefore, that both AEOR-1 and AEOR-2 acknowledge the central role of livelihoods in the pursuit of sustainable development.
A subsidiary question raised is thus whether and to what extent livelihood thinking can be a useful tool in studying the political economy of the production of nature. Notably, livelihoods received passing attention in ROAPE Nos. 48 and 74, the two previous ‘environment issues’. They have also been the subject of substantive articles in recent issues. Above all, perhaps, livelihoods have emerged as an integral element of the ongoing mainstreaming of the environment in development theory and practice, even as the concept and its application undergo continuing refinement, with a view to sharpening their focus on inequality and power relations as complements to existing strengths in the areas of vulnerability, marginalisation and sustainability (de Haan, 2006). There might be room therefore for fruitful interaction between political economy and livelihood studies, notably in exploring the uneven production of society and nature in the pursuit of economic and environmental goals within the current context of globalisation (Ifeka and Abua, 2005). Now that would be environment and development mainstreaming to truly conjure with.