Anthem EnviroExperts

Reviewed by Saleem Ali, University of Queensland

Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth.

The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations, by Michael Ross, Princeton University Press, 296pp

The distortions in economic development that  natural resource wealth can cause have been well-studied for many years by social scientists. UCLA political scientist Michael Ross’s new book, The Oil Curse is premised on his view that hydrocarbon wealth has four key attributes that lead to its potential for being “cursed”: scale, source, stability, and secrecy. Hydrocarbon projects have massive capital investment (scale), are not funded by citizen taxation or innovation incentives and are hence less connected to democratic parameters (source),  are beholden to volatile commodity markets (stability) and have easily concealed revenues from oil, due to the contract norms between companies and governments (secrecy).

Ross further contends that the curse started to gain traction when state-run oil companies became more common. Such companies have much less accountability than privately held firms, and Ross considers their structure a major cause for perpetuating the “oil curse.” Therefore, although corporate executives may find Ross’s negative revelations about the essential lubricant of modern capitalism to be troubling, they can gain some solace that he strongly blames this outcome on government control of industry.

However, Ross remains nuanced about assigning culpability by also noting that private-sector management still needs some government oversight to be constructive. Ross’s key prescription to grapple with the oil curse is developing mutual accountability between the private and public sectors. Though he tends to make some broad causal statements and relies far too much on regression for his insights, Ross’s work is an important contribution to the literature on the consequential role of oil in development planning.

Reviewed by Ric Richardson, University of New Mexico

This book offers an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of what attracts people to community-based collaboration.

Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice, by E. Franklin Dukes, Karen E. Firehock, and Juliana E. Birkhoff, Eds., University of Virginia Press, 240pp

This book is one of a kind. Dukes, Firehawk and Birkoff, leading researchers and practitioners in community-based collaboration, provide insightful guidance on solving local environmental and natural resource management problems. Community-Based Collaboration, the culmination of a decade of work, is an accessible compendium on U.S. experience with collective management of land and water resources.

The book focuses on the importance of creating change through collaboration between environmental groups, landowners, Indian tribes, farmers, ranchers, and local, state and federal agencies. The authors address thorny environmental issues leading to local management systems that result in sustainable and ecological resilience.

Community-Based Collaboration is a valuable resource providing new knowledge about the community-based collaborative movement from on-the-ground experience. Except for a chapter about the theory of collaboration, the book is accessible to both academic and lay audiences. Duke’s concluding chapter is especially valuable in laying out an agenda for action and providing his view on the promise for the future of community-based collaboration. The book stands apart from other publications about land use and natural resource dispute resolution by accepting the assumption that the best problem solving strategies lie in community collaboration. However, this may also be the book’s weakness as it overlooks complementary strategies and higher-level policy dialogue to create and implement environmental policy.

Reviewed by William Moomaw, Tufts University

A forceful argument against America’s vicious circle of growing inequality by the Nobel Prize–winning economist.

The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, by Joseph Stiglitz, W.W. Norton Company , 448pp

Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality offers a remarkably insightful analysis of the economy that has major implications for sustainable development. One of the fundamental premises of sustainable development is equity, but Stiglitz demonstrates that the growing inequality of incomes in the United States is extracting a high cost not just from the economy, but also  from the environment and  society.

Using solid data, he lays bare the means by which the dramatic shift in income disparity has occurred. Wealth increases at the top have resulted from rent-seeking in the financial and other industries, changes in tax policy that favor the already wealthy and reductions in the negotiating capacity of labor. Stiglitz documents the financial instruments that lead to the transfer of wealth and ultimately caused the recent collapse of the global economy.

Of comparable importance are recently enacted governmental policies that externalize more of the environmental costs of doing business onto the public, and the destructive incentives that have flowed to resource-based industries. Subsidies include direct payments, but also enhanced profit from the very low prices paid to the government by extractive industries for leases on federal lands. This shift in governmental policies has been fuelled by the ability of top income earners to pay the “re-election costs” of politicians who will favor their economic interests. As Stiglitz notes, these anti-society and anti-environmental policies actually reduce the viability of the economy rather than enhance it. Not a strategy for a sustainable future.

Reviewed by Lawrence Susskind, MIT

In Beyond Consensus, Richard Margerum examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning and environmental policy.

Beyond Consensus: Improving Collaborative Planning and Management, by Richard Margerum, MIT Press, 368pp

It might come as a surprise that consensus is not the final step in the work of a collaborative trying to generate a plan for the management of a watershed. Consensus means agreement, so once there’s agreement what else is there to do? It turns out − in the world of natural resource management − that reaching agreement on how to proceed must be followed by on-going efforts to implement whatever has been proposed. According to Richard Margerum, beyond consensus one should hope to find collaboratives aimed at implementing (or making adjustments in) plans, policies or project designs.

Margerum has reviewed almost sixty case studies of collaborative resource management, about half in the United States and half in Australia. His focus is mostly on watershed management efforts that took place between 1993 and 2010. He begins by examining the dynamics of collaboration. From there, he moves to consensus-building strategies, especially the various forms of deliberation that stakeholders can use to reach agreement, not merely share their views.

When deliberations go well, Margerum believes they lead to high quality plans with clear goals, solid factual justification and sound intervention strategies. He emphasizes the importance of social, inter-organizational and political networks in sustaining collaboratives and ensuring plan implementation. He concludes by attempting to translate his findings into prescriptions for practice. The prescriptive part of the book is less successful than his very instructive efforts to develop a typology of collaborations.

This review was originally published in full in Review of Policy Research 29, no. 5 (2012): 663–5.