Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Slum/Squatter Areas
As already noted, in all the seven countries these
areas must be given a fair share of the total municipal infrastructural/services
investment, and in addition the planning of all municipal infrastructure/services
projects must be reoriented, through use of EIA process, so that these projects
give due attention to poor people problems. Virtually all conventional (Western)
infrastructure/service design criteria, which were developed for use in essentially
urban affluent areas, are not applicable to DCs in that the resulting projects almost
invariably advantage the affluent and disadvantage the poor (for example, urban
highways invariably create serious poor people severance problems that are only
partially offset, and they compound poor people/low area drainage problems with
no offsetting).
There is increasing recognition by most DCs that the only practical solution to
the squatter areas (instead of doing away with them because they are “illegal”) is
by upgrading the slum community infrastructure/services and letting the individ-
ual householder attend to his housing, which is a far cheaper solution than public
housing or relocation to remote condominiums. Indonesia has made impressive
progress in this, and South Korea, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are beginning to
believe it. The trend is certainly in this direction.
Better Use of Informal and Private Sectors
There is increasing recognition
in the DCs of the need to make much more effective use of the informal sector
for helping to create jobs (at relatively very low capital investment cost per job),
of the private sector for helping solve infrastructure/services problems, not only
through financing taking on O&M assignments which can hardly be handled by
government agencies because of low salaries, and of NGOs for aiding/abetting
the government agencies to get action on urgent critical problems.
Economic Instruments
As already noted, while NEcPAs have tended to
ignore environmental degradation in the past (i.e., to give it only a kind of
add-on-attention), there is beginning recognition in all DCs that deregulation
alone can hardly be expected to solve problems of environmental degradation.
Rather, the need is for optimal use of reoriented economic policies. This includes
adjustments not only in investment policy but in virtually all economic policies
involved in DC development, including trade policies, energy policies, access to
resource policies, and so on. There is urgent need, also, for preparation of a new
“Manual of Appropriate Economic Analysis for DC Project Development,” for
use both by DCs and IAAs to ensure due consideration of the sustainable/E-c-E
approach in future project planning.
Effective Control of Environmental Degradation
The NEcPAs must give No. 1 priority to seeing to it that E-c-E principles become
an integral part of all governmental operations, including its own operations,
including giving guidance/support to the NEnPA and NEcPA to enable them to
develop and work effectively, including establishment of meaningful environ-
mental units in the planning divisions of the major governmental implementing
