Response short assignment

1

2

Introduction: Bilateral Activism in Global Environmental Politics

Speaking before Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly in 1969, congressman Guardia Hurrero bemoaned his country’s lackluster response to tropical deforestation. “Ours is the only country in Latin America without forestry legislation,” he complained (Hurrero 1969). At the time there was virtu ally no interest in conservation on the part of Costa Rica’s government or civil society. The few who took up the environmental banner faced “nearly total indifference to the problem of environmental degradation,” in the words of one longtime activist (Boza 1993: 240). Twenty-five years later Costa Rica’s national park system was widely considered to be one of the best in the world. Costa Rica had a strong environmental regulatory agency, had pioneered concepts like ecotourism and biodiversity prospect ing, 1 was home to hundreds of citizens’ environmental groups, and was led by a president who made sustainable development the conceptual under pinning of his entire administration.

The Bolivian conservation scene in the late 1960s was similarly bleak, consisting of a few scientists working in isolation and with little effect. The sense of hopelessness was reflected in a letter written in 1968 by Bolivian naturalist Noel Kempff to an American colleague, María Buchinger. “The truth is, Doctora María, that in this world the economic interests of cer tain sectors are stronger than all the solid reasoning of the conservation ists; the struggle is a considerable one, especially in an environment in which we are basically misunderstood” (Kempff 1968). By the time Bo livia hosted the Summit on Sustainable Development in the Americas in 1996, however, that country had implemented a series of conservation policy innovations including the world’s first debt-for-nature swap, 2 the world’s largest forest-based climate change mitigation project, and a na tional environmental endowment that served as an exemplar for other nations in the region. Bolivians designed an ambitious protected areas system administered by nonprofit organizations and indigenous groups, established an effective, high-profile biodiversity conservation agency, passed important laws for environmental protection and forestry sector reform, led the international campaign to protect mahogany, and had ac tive environmental organizations in every major city.

What forces brought about these dramatic changes in countries often considered too poor to care about global environmental problems, and what have been the relative roles of international and domestic actors in this process? This two-part question is the central concern of this book. It arises from two salient characteristics of global environmental problems such as biodiversity loss. First, these problems are by definition global, af fecting many people in many countries around the world. Bolivia’s na tional parks benefit not only Bolivians but people everywhere who might benefit from a medicinal compound, a scenic vista, or the knowledge that pink river dolphins have a home. The second distinguishing feature of global environmental problems is that they occur in a political setting characterized by the absence of world government and the dominance of the principle of national sovereignty (Young 1994; Roseneau and Czem piel 1992). Although the interests are supranational, the political author ity to act on these problems rests squarely with national governments. Of particular importance are the governments of developing countries, where most of the world’s biological diversity resides and where national policy can have a profound impact on environmental outcomes (Ascher 1999; Binswanger 1985; Repetto and Gillis 1988; Bedoya and Klein 1993). In ternational players have a stake, but not a say, in environmental policy re form in developing countries.

Using this context as a point of departure, this book explores the dy namics of environmental policymaking in two countries over four decades with the hope of providing a window into fundamental issues concerning the role of developing countries in global environmental politics. The book is designed to meet two needs—one theoretical, the other applied. First, I draw on insights from comparative politics and public policy theory to better understand the nature of global environmental politics—a subject of increasing interest to social scientists and more commonly approached from the perspective of international relations. Second, I hope that read ers concerned with practical problems of tropical conservation and sus tainable development will come away with an enhanced view of the domestic political processes bearing on natural resource management. Scholars and practitioners alike have long operated under the assumption, widely held but seldom examined, that developing countries are too pre occupied with the challenges of poverty and development to give serious consideration to environmental protection. This book explodes this myth, offering instead an analysis of decades-long efforts by environmental ad vocates and policy entrepreneurs working to protect biological diversity in Central and South America. It is my hope that a more nuanced portrayal of environmental politics in developing countries can inform current ef forts to enhance the effectiveness of global environmental treaties and can help us understand the macrocontext shaping the success or failure of local projects.

Costa Rica and Bolivia possess some of the richest concentrations of biological diversity to be found anywhere in the world, and the process by which they emerged as leaders in tropical conservation is a worthy topic in itself. But the goal of this study is a more ambitious one. My aim is to take a close look at two societies with temporal variability in policy outcomes, and to explain these changes in terms general enough to pique the interest of readers with expertise in other parts of the world. At present, environ mental policymaking in developing countries is rarely studied and poorly understood. Social science research on global environmental problems has clustered at two levels of analysis—international cooperation3 and local resources management4 —leaving a gap where one would hope to find studies exploring the dynamics of national policy reform in the South. The burgeoning literature on transnational environmental advocacy (see, for example, Wapner 1996; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Haas 1992) has taught us a great deal about the motivations and activities of nongovernmental actors operating across borders, but has paid less attention to the causal mechanisms through which transnational actors achieve (or fall short of) their goals.5 Moreover, works in this area have largely overlooked the role of environmental advocates in developing countries, focusing instead on the activities of highly visible multinational groups operating out of the United States and Europe. The results provide little guidance for under standing domestic-international linkages in the South, where most of the world’s people, land, and species are found.

Research on the effectiveness of international environmental agree ments has also emphasized outcomes in Northern industrialized coun tries. Recent attempts to move beyond these limitations (Weiss and Jacobson 1998; Schreurs and Economy 1997) have provided valuable country-specific insights, but have yet to produce an analytic approach that might facilitate meaningful cross-national comparisons. A theoretical framework is needed to provide a focal point for cumulative research and to help practitioners interpret their experiences in light of recurrent pat terns of political behavior.

Costa Rica and Bolivia offer several advantages for such an undertak ing. Although they share in common a dramatic rise in state and social concern for environmental protection, they have differed in the timing and nature of these changes, providing an opportunity for comparative in quiry. The choice of Costa Rica and Bolivia is also designed to take advantage of a most-different-systems approach (Przeworski and Teune 1970; Meckstroth 1975). Maximizing variance on a suite of political and social variables, my hope is to increase the potential applicability of these findings to a wide range of countries. Relative to the rest of the developing world, Costa Rica has a relatively high per capita income (though it repre sents the middle range within Latin America), while Bolivia is among the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, with income levels more typical of African societies. Costa Rica has high levels of adult literacy, while Bolivia’s are relatively low. Bolivia is a culturally and linguistically di verse society, with an estimated 60 percent of its population of indigenous origin. Many Bolivians speak Spanish as a second language after pre-Incan languages such as Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní. Costa Rica, by con trast, has only 1 percent indigenous peoples and is a self-consciously west ernized society. With respect to political stability, Costa Rica is considered the most stable democracy in Latin America, while Bolivia is among the least politically stable, having experienced well over 100 changes of gov ernment since independence (see Booth 1989; Klein 1992).

To better understand the sources of effective environmental policy and institutions in these countries, I undertook a year of field research, inter viewing dozens of environmental activists, agency leaders, elected offi cials, field biologists, park directors, indigenous rights campaigners, legislative aides, and other key players, who together provided a wealth of “insider information” on the politics of environmental policymaking over the past thirty-five years. By conducting extensive in-country research, I have taken an unconventional approach to the question of whether global environmental concerns have affected domestic policy outcomes. Students of international organization tend to select an institution of particular in terest, such as a multilateral treaty or U.N. agency, and characterize its impact in target countries (see Haas, Keohane, and Levy 1993; Bernauer 1995; Victor, Raustiala, and Skolnikoff 1998). My approach instead views international influences from the inside out. I first identify what have historically been the most important instances of biodiversity policy re form in these countries. I then analyze the relative contributions that do mestic and international players have made to these outcomes, with the expectation that for either group the answer might be “none whatsoever.”

Spheres of Influence Over Domestic Policy

The theoretical framework emerging from this research is based on two observations. First, there has been an enormous foreign influence on do mestic environmental movements and conservation policy in Costa Rica and Bolivia. The major environmental groups in these countries receive most of their funding from abroad, and international funds rarely consti tute less than a third of the budget for government conservation agencies. Their wildlife biologists and resource managers also maintain close ties with foreign scientific institutions, relying directly on international techni cal resources and expertise. The second observation, however, is that when one probes beneath the surface to see who have been the political catalysts for conservation—who started the environmental groups, who created the regulatory agencies, who convinced the politicians, who led the protests— the foreign influence suddenly disappears, or at least recedes far into the background. Moreover, the political knowledge, skills, and contacts needed to win these struggles require a long-term, in-country presence that few foreign advocates or international organizations possess.

In a context of global concern and national political authority, the re sources brought to bear on environmental policy in developing countries are of two types: those closely associated with a given domestic political system, and those whose essential productive dynamic resides beyond that society’s borders. Accordingly, we may think of two spheres of influence affecting environmental policy in developing countries: an international

Figure 1.1

Spheres of influence over domestic policy.

sphere and a domestic sphere (figure 1.1). Those with access to the re sources of the international sphere affect national policy primarily by de ploying financial and scientific resources, while those with access to the resources of the domestic sphere impact national policy with their exten sive political resources. These political resources include personal political contacts, an intricate knowledge of bureaucratic power structures, and a long-term, in-country presence needed to take advantage of fleeting win dows of opportunity, to acquire domestic political savvy, and to ensure long-term program success.

The resources of the international and domestic spheres of influence may be further broken down into institutional and ideational resources. The resources described above are of the institutional variety, with science, finance, and political know-how applied to the creation and strengthening of institutions such as national parks and regulatory agencies. But policy is also a function of ideas which imbue these institutions with a direction and purpose. Using Schattschneider’s (1960) conception of institutions as the “mobilization of bias,” we may think of ideational resources as those affecting the bias, while institutional resources are those applied toward the mobilization of this bias.

The international sphere has long served as a wellspring of policy ideas—norms, evaluations, and prescriptions relevant to the business of governance. In every country, policy reformers routinely draw on the in sights and experiences of policy initiatives abroad. Especially in develop

Figure 1.2

Bilateral activism.

ing countries where, as Grindle and Thomas (1991: 49) aptly put it, “[i]nformation is limited, needs are great, resources are scarce, and re sponsibilities are extensive,” policymakers look beyond their borders for new ideas about health care, military strategy, economic organization, so cial security, education, and environmental regulation. Accordingly, in the course of policy agenda setting and institutional design, individuals with broad exposure to international policy ideas are in great demand.

These international ideas interact in specific ways with a nation’s do mestic norms and understandings. This interaction is mediated by actors operating within that nation’s borders—in the domestic sphere—who can press the case at home and shape international ideas into something that fits domestic realities. These actors can influence environmental policy by fostering a supportive environmental policy culture—a concept I use to characterize the level and type of public attention accorded a policy issue area in a particular society.

Importantly, the major players in environmental policymaking in Costa Rica and Bolivia have always been individuals who operate simultaneously in both spheres of influence—possessing both close ties to domestic poli tics and a broad exposure to international resources and ideas. This group, which includes such key figures as Pedro León, Alvaro Ugalde, Daniel Janzen, Mario Baudoin, and Arturo Moscoso, I describe as bilateral ac tivists to emphasize their entrepreneurial role and the unique combination of resources they dispatch to promote desired policy outcomes (figure 1.2). Sometimes these are expatriate scientists who have spent decades in a par ticular developing country, acquiring domestic resources in the process.

More often they are nationals with a propensity to operate in international circles. Bilateral activists are at ease in two worlds. Cosmopolitans in the truest sense of the word, they are typically fluent in two or more languages and interact frequently with international donors and prominent foreign scientists. Compared to their fellow citizens, they are not only more likely to encounter foreign ideas by virtue of their travels, but they are more apt to embrace them as a function of their worldly outlook (see Hannerz 1990).

At the same time, bilateral activists are well known in (and know well) their home country. They can write a foreign grant application with the same ease that they might lead students to march on congress. From their offices in universities, environmental organizations, or government agen cies, they are likely to have the Rockefeller Foundation on one phone line and a presidential advisor on the other. Bilateral activists, however, are not mere “go-betweens” or guns for hire. They are self-described environmen talists, making normative claims for ecology and seeking out the foreign and domestic resources needed to advance their cause. 6

Throughout this book I will use the term activist in its broadest sense to denote reformers within government as well as nongovernmental advo cates pressing for policy change. This broad usage is necessary because bi lateral activists typically alternate between these roles over the course of their decades-long involvement. In common with most policy entrepre neurs in developing countries, bilateral activists are typically educated urban professionals. This may explain why their pivotal role has been overlooked in the literature on environmental politics in developing coun tries, which has given preferential coverage to rural resource conflicts and zero-sum interactions between state authorities and social actors (see Peluso 1992; Gadgil and Guha 1995; Blaikie 1985). Although class con flict and irreconcilable differences of interest may help to explain why many policy initiatives fail, they have little to say about why things some times go right. The findings reported in this book support the view that government can exercise discretion, leadership, and creativity, in addition to its better known traits of corruption, foot-dragging, and cronyism. To understand the origins of successful policy reforms requires that we take a closer look at the complex internal workings of “the state,” at the evolu tion of policies and institutions over time, and at the resources and re sourcefulness of the actors leading these efforts.

To lay the conceptual groundwork for subsequent chapters, in what fol lows I describe the domestic and international spheres of influence in more detail. In developing my arguments I draw on empirical evidence from four decades of policy reforms in Costa Rica and Bolivia. There is good reason to believe, however, that the spheres of influence framework can help to de scribe the political dynamics of conservation policymaking in a broad range of developing countries. This follows from the fact that the distin guishing characteristics of the two spheres are the result of institutional and historical constraints common across developing countries. Northern finance and scientific expertise will be cherished in developing countries as long as there are asymmetries in the international division of labor and in the relative economic power of nations. Likewise, domestic political expertise is very difficult for foreigners to acquire. It requires a long-term, in-country presence, and domestic laws and norms often inhibit direct po litical access by foreigners. Both categories of resources are necessary for the development of effective domestic environmental regulatory structures in developing countries. Yet it is precisely because the end of colonialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America brought significant political indepen dence without a corresponding redress of economic disparity that these resources reside in separate spheres of influence. In sum, the different ca pabilities of actors operating in one or another sphere are the result of structural constraints common across developing countries.

With its emphasis on the methods used to overcome barriers to reform, the spheres of influence framework cannot provide an exhaustive expla nation for cross-national variation in policy outcomes, because the bar riers themselves—entrenched timber lobbies, corruption, and civil strife, to name a few—vary in their nature and intensity across countries and over time. However, I maintain that on matters of global concern, envi ronmental policy reform in developing countries cannot be understood without reference to the actors, resources, and processes highlighted by this analytic framework—that, to my mind, is justification enough to de vote a book to its elaboration. 7

Institutional Resources of International Origin

Few analysts would disagree with the proposition that there exists an inverse relationship between the location of biological diversity and the concentration of financial and scientific resources needed for its conserva tion. Following a pattern known as the latitudinal diversity gradient, the greatest species concentrations in the world are found in those countries located in the tropics (Wilson 1992). As a result of the historical trajectory of capitalist development and the legacy of colonialism, global centers of capital and technology are concentrated in the Northern industrialized countries. For as long as this situation holds true, there will exist power ful incentives for concerned Northern publics to transfer money and sci entific expertise to developing countries for the purpose of slowing global extinction rates.8 I will argue later that the flow of resources and expertise is much more reciprocal than this widely recognized observation allows. But to understand the dynamics of conservation policymaking in the South, we must begin with an appreciation of the crucial role played by in ternational science and finance.

Financial Transfers

With few exceptions, donors from industrialized countries can protect many more species per dollar by contributing to protected areas in the tropics than they can by purchasing habitat at home. Environmentalists have long found this logic irresistible. In the early 1960s the World League Against Vivisection and for the Protection of Animals coordinated the first international fundraising campaign for Costa Rican rainforests, boasting to potential donors, “It can be had at the ridiculously low price of $10 an acre. . . .” Two decades later, in a fundraising appeal published in The New York Times, conservation scientists courted donors with the same argu ment. With “a diversity of animals and plants known only from the site,” they argued, “at the price of $4 an acre, the venture may well be the con servation bargain of the century” (quoted in Wallace 1992: 7, 166). More recently, recognizing that even conservation-oriented developing countries often lack the resources needed for effective environmental management, new international institutions have been created to facilitate a flow of hun dreds of millions of dollars in environmental aid from North to South (see Keohane and Levy 1996).

Indeed, it is difficult to find a major conservation policy initiative of the past thirty-five years in either country that did not receive significant sup port from overseas. Dozens of private, governmental, and nonprofit do nors are the lifeblood of Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute.

Revenues from nature-oriented tourism, estimated at $336 million in 1991 (Boza 1993), have been essential to the survival of the country’s na tional park system, while the vast majority of funds for Bolivia’s protected areas come from overseas aid. In the executive branch, the biodiversity pol icymaking arm of Costa Rica’s environment ministry is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, while Bolivia’s biodiversity conservation agency is supported primarily by the Dutch government. Within the legislature, foreign donors have provided the financial backing for national dialogues leading to legal reforms in forestry, wildlife management, and biodiversity conservation. At the local level, environmental planning in Bolivia is sup ported by the Germans, and urban air pollution abatement in Costa Rica is supported by the Swiss.

From the perspective of an environmental policy entrepreneur in a de veloping country, however, the breach between the theoretical possibility of foreign financial support and its timely application in specific settings is a wide one. To access such resources requires a particular set of skills and a familiarity with the appropriate routines and social networks. Grant ap plications generally must be written in the language of the donor organi zation, which makes individuals with foreign language skills particularly sought after. The formats, catch phrases, and accounting standards must conform to donor expectations. Personal relations with private philan thropists or influential individuals in granting agencies can make all the difference, and these relations are more easily established among individ uals sharing common points of cultural reference. This fact gives bicultural individuals a distinct advantage. There is a game to play and its most adept competitors have had considerable international exposure. 9

Scientific Resources

Environmental policy is an issue area rife with scientific uncertainties, which accords an important role to scientists in environmental policy de bates (Haas 1990, 1992). This is especially true of biodiversity conser vation, which is a technically intensive activity precisely because of the diversity of natural systems involved. 10 Apparently simple questions con cerning the appropriate boundaries of protected areas or sustainable levels of hunting and harvesting require a great deal of information. Researchers often draw on the practical knowledge (metis in James Scott’s formulation) of local resource users, synthesizing this information and relating it to the cumulative insights gained from similar studies around the world (see Scott 1998; Sponsel, Headland, and Bailey 1996). But in natural systems subjected to the myriad pressures of modern development, local knowl edge is not enough. For better or worse, the importance of the technology of conservation grows in proportion to the impact of technologies of development.

In developing countries, foreign-trained scientists play a central role in managing these uncertainties, conducting species surveys, teaching uni versity courses in ecology and wildlife management, and designing park management plans. This is true both because the relevant scientific ex pertise is concentrated in industrialized countries and because science is an inherently transnational enterprise, and has been so since the emergence of scientific communities in the seventeenth century (Crane 1971). Most developing countries lack doctoral programs in the biological sciences, and the bulk of their ecologists are trained in Europe and the United States. Moreover, the demand for foreign scientific information does not decrease with the development of domestic scientific capacity. On the contrary, it in creases as a growing body of domestic researchers seek the best available information worldwide. As a result, scientific expertise takes its place alongside finance as a resource characteristic of the international sphere of influence. Individuals with access to this resource are especially valuable to decision makers, and their credibility in policymaking circles is en hanced by their reputation as technical experts.

Given the extent of foreign involvement, it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that these countries are essentially being coerced by foreign interests. The reality, however, is far more complex. In the 1970s a suc cession of Costa Rican administrations provided most of the funding to create their now-famous national park system. It was only after these pro tected areas were established that foreign aid and nature tourism dollars began to pour in. Likewise, Bolivia’s most important protected area, Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, was initially supported by a grant of sev eral hundred thousand dollars from the regional government in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Only later did it receive assistance from The Nature Conser vancy and U.S.-sponsored climate change mitigation projects. Moreover, as the historical narratives of chapters 3 and 4 make clear, these efforts have been accompanied by high levels of social support, volunteerism, and personal sacrifices that cannot credibly be reduced to a quest for foreign aid. With this proviso in mind, it is important to grasp the extent to which cross-border relations have affected domestic policy processes: Inter national resources have had a pervasive influence on nearly every conser vation policy initiative undertaken in Costa Rica and Bolivia over the past four decades.

Institutional Resources of the Domestic Sphere

That international science and finance have been important to domestic conservation efforts in developing countries is widely appreciated. How ever, an entirely different category of resources—domestic political re sources—has been equally important yet entirely overlooked in academic analyses of global environmental problems. The lower visibility of politi cal resources stems from the reality that politics is often a shady business. The back room deals and Byzantine channels of political influence that determine whether conservation initiatives sink or swim are not polite topics of conversation in the project reports of donor agencies and envi ronmental organizations. By contrast, the visibility and legitimacy of in ternational financial resources are apparent in the menu of organizational logos decorating printed accounts of environmental projects in developing countries, and the importance of international resources figures promi nently in the causal stories told therein.

The U.S. Agency for International Development rightly boasts in its widely distributed materials that Bolivia’s Gran Chaco National Park— the world’s largest protected tropical dry forest—was created with the help of American foreign aid. The untold story is how the park owes its success in part to bilateral activist Alexandra Sánchez de Lozada, who convinced her father—the Bolivian president—to back the proposal. The foreign journalists who flocked to Central America in the early 1990s to report on Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) presented a similar causal story, reporting that INBio resulted from the intellectual leadership of prominent international scientists and the financial initiative of the MacArthur Foundation. One does not read about how INBio di rector and bilateral activist Rodrigo Gámez secured political backing for the proposal through his family connections to President Oscar Arias:

It happened that President Arias was an old friend of mine . . . because we came from the same town, Heredia. My father had been involved in politics in many ways, and during the Figueres administration he’d been Minister of Education when Arias was Minister of Planning. So there was an old familial, political, and local relationship. . . . I didn’t want to go through the minister, but to have a direct relationship with the president. This opened many doors. . . . (quoted in Wallace 1992: 155)

Access

As the above examples suggest, one of the most important types of politi cal resources dispatched by policy reformers in developing countries is extensive personal contacts with individuals in positions of influence. Al though connections to presidents provide the most dramatic examples, these contacts need not be with heads of state. In all but the most central ized political systems, there exist numerous loci of political influence. The fate of environmental policies is determined in newspaper rooms, govern ing bodies of national banks, village councils, legislative committees, party headquarters, police stations, agricultural cooperatives, and teach ers’ unions. Accordingly, individuals with numerous social contacts have the greatest such resources at their disposal. Whereas a Greenpeace pro gram director or European Community consultant may arrive in a devel oping country with a few dozen names and numbers, long-term residents possess thick webs of social relations, to use Alvarez’s term (1998), which they mobilize to win allies and punish adversaries. Geertz’s description of Morocco is appropriate here:

Morocco, once one looks beyond its absolutistic self-presentation, is (and always has been) less a monopole despotism than an irregular field of micro-polities, small, smaller, and smaller yet . . . reaching into its narrowest and most intimate social corners: families, neighborhoods, markets, tribes. Immediate, one-on-one, bargained out dependency relations between personal acquaintances, what is sometimes called patronage, sometimes clientage, and by the Moroccans sedq (which means at once “loyalty,” “trustworthiness,” “friendship,” and “truth”), lie at the base of things. What larger connectivities are achieved are brought about by establishing similar relations, similarly immediate, over broader and broader ranges of action. (Geertz 1995: 27)

Reciprocal favors and interpersonal bonds of trust are of particular importance in countries where institutions are weak, where they act as a surrogate method for resolving collective action problems. When put to public-minded uses, such resources are described in the literature with terms like social capital or village reciprocity (Putnam 1993; Edwards and Foley 1998; Portes 1998; Scott 1976). In less public-spirited contexts, they are the social technology underpinning political cronyism and good-old boys networks. Whether used for good or ill, these political resources rely on repeated face-to-face contact, and are accordingly a place-based domestic resource.

Political Expertise

Long-term studies have gained currency in the policy sciences precisely be cause the success or failure of major policy initiatives unfolds over a pe riod of decades (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Sabatier 1989). As with personal contacts, other types of political resources are available only to those who spend a great deal of time in a particular developing country. This is true of knowledge concerning bureaucratic power structures: knowledge of where the power is and how to use it. This information con stitutes the “mental maps” that policy entrepreneurs carry in their heads detailing likely sources of support and opposition to reform (Grindle and Thomas 1991). Policy reformers in India must navigate the taluks and zil las, Mexicans the party bosses and judicial politics, Liberians the village chiefs, rice growers’ unions, and mystics. They know both the formal or ganizational structures and the unwritten hierarchies and power config urations underlying them. A passage from a recent analysis of Bolivian politics conveys the complexity of these power structures:

In the complex world of Bolivian party politics, it is one thing to win an electoral plurality, an entirely different thing to be chosen president, and yet another thing to govern. This reality was captured in a joke circulating in the aftermath of the 1989 elections. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada at the head of the MNR won a plu rality, only to see Paz Zamora emerge as president in a coalition where true power was reputed to be in the hands of [former dictator] Bánzer, leader of his new right wing Acción Democrática y Nacionalista (ADN). As the joke has it, before the election the three candidates visited the Virgen de Urkupiña, who offered them one wish each. Sánchez de Lozada wished to win the elections; Paz Zamora, to be pres ident; and Bánzer, to run the country. The generous Virgin granted all three wishes. (Gamarra and Malloy 1995: 413)

Political learning—transferring lessons from one policy arena to the next—is another political resource available only to those with long-term domestic involvement. Within government, the accumulated wisdom from past efforts at policy reform—“thinking in time”—can provide crucial guidance for the architects of new policy initiatives (Neustadt and May 1986). The institutional successes noted at the beginning of this chapter are the product of many hard-learned lessons from previous failures. Among nongovernmental advocates, learning takes place in the course of venue shopping as reformers try their luck in the courts, on the radio, in the schools, and inside and outside the state apparatus. Political expertise also includes a knowledge of political culture—of “the way politics is done around here.” Political culture is manifest in the cult of consultation in Costa Rica and the sacredness of decentralization and indigenous rights in Bolivia. Those with long-term exposure to the domestic sphere of influence draw on appropriate forms of rhetoric, cultural innuendoes, a shared sense of history, and numerous other bits of wisdom concerning political tactics and the rules of engagement.

Domestic political resources are resources in the sense described by Dahl (1961: 226), as “anything that can be used to sway the specific choices or the strategies of another individual.” They are political because they are applied by actors struggling to control some aspect of the institutions of governance. Importantly, they are domestic because they not only require a long-term, in-country presence, but there also exist strong legal and normative barriers against foreign intervention in domestic political af fairs. Foreign environmental consultants and activists are quick to empha size that they carefully avoid domestic politics altogether or proceed in that arena with extreme caution. This may strike the reader as counterin tuitive, given the history of foreign intervention in developing countries. But it is precisely because of the impunity with which foreigners have im pinged on national sovereignty in areas like structural adjustment pro grams, military support for anticommunist forces, and the war on drugs, that environmentalists are both unwilling and unable to engage in politi cal arm-twisting in the realm of conservation. 11

If international scientific resources are crucial for the management of ecological uncertainties, these domestic resources are a hedge against po litical uncertainties regarding the place and timing of opportunities for re form. The creation and implementation of conservation policies takes place in numerous arenas, at different levels of government, and through the course of several administrations. It is impossible to know in advance the full range of decision makers, powerbrokers, and veto points one will encounter. When a relatively unknown figure emerges from political ob scurity to assume a position of authority in a conservation agency, bilat eral activists draw on their webs of personal connections to gain an audi ence, present a viewpoint, or offer their services as consultants. When af ter a long period of stagnation or stalemate a person of influence suddenly and unexpectedly proclaims “something must be done,” bilateral activists are on the ground, with plans in hand, enabling them to take advantage of fleeting windows of opportunity.

Ideational Resources of the International Sphere

The international sphere has for centuries been a rich source of ideas on the purpose and means of government. Long before it became fashionable to speak of globalism and the global village, rebels, reformers, and reac tionaries eagerly exchanged ideas across borders to advance similar ends. Aristotle, one of the earliest practitioners of comparative politics, sur rounded himself with the written constitutions of far off lands in an effort to distill wisdom in the art of governance. Before the Communist Mani festo was studied by resistance movements on every continent, Marx and Engels wrote of the remarkable degree to which ideas are exchanged across borders in a modern capitalist economy:

In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have inter course in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in mate rial, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow minded ness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and lo cal literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx and Engels 1978: 476–477)

In Latin America, just as the call for revolution spread like wildfire across the Spanish colonies at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the re gion has experienced contemporaneous policy experimentation in every thing from social security to import substitution industrialization to military tactics (see Jackson 1993; Borzutzky 1993; Hall 1989). Some times the exchange of policy ideas is facilitated by government institutions like the Pan American Health Organization or the Organization of Amer ican States. In other instances, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) catalyze the cross-national diffusion of policy ideas as when practitioners of liberation theology pressed for social reforms throughout Latin Amer ica following the Second Conference of Latin American Bishops in 1968 (Sigmund 1994; Della Cava 1989).

Policy ideas are conceptual constructs pertinent to government action in a particular issue area. They include (but are by no means limited to) norms, evaluations of the state of affairs, and remedial prescriptions.12 Normative positions are spread across borders with evangelical urgency by principled issue networks advancing causes like women’s rights or the abo lition of child labor (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Evaluative ideas are partic ularly susceptible to the practice of comparison as leaders and publics look overseas for metrics and mirrors of national performance. “A policy prob lem,” Charles Anderson reminds us, “is a political condition that does not meet some standard” (Anderson 1978: 19). The emergence of a new pol icy problem may therefore result from a perceived worsening of political conditions or by raising the standards—often in light of foreign experi ence—by which long-standing domestic conditions are judged.

Prescriptive policy ideas respond to the question, central to politics and policy, of “what shall we do?” The international sphere is filled with well articulated responses to national questions as yet unposed. As Kingdon (1984) has demonstrated in the American context, policymaking rarely proceeds in linear fashion from the formulation of questions to the search for solutions. There are instead numerous preexisting solutions favored by partisan advocates seeking to tie their preferred answer to whatever ques tion comes along. Solar energy, for example, has been offered as a solution to problems ranging from national security to democratization to global warming. In this respect the international sphere of influence—literally, the world of ideas—is a source of thousands of well-developed policy re sponses waiting for a question. Not surprisingly, this pool of ideas is most readily accessible to individuals who have the benefit of considerable in ternational exposure. In a period of widespread but uneven environmen tal concern around the globe, the first members of a society to advocate a consciously articulated environmental agenda are typically individuals with a cosmopolitan orientation who have been immersed in dialogue with environmental thinkers abroad. 13

In chapter 6, I provide evidence for the “neighbor effect”—the tendency for countries to look to their immediate neighbors as sources of policy ideas. Activists in Argentina closely follow political developments in Para guay, policymakers in Togo learn from their counterparts in Nigeria, and exchanges between reform-minded Malays and Indonesians are common place. But policy reformers in developing countries also look to faraway lands for models of success and failure. Though some analysts claim that developing countries have little to learn from rich countries (Rose 1993), this is plainly at odds with the historical record. Just as Chilean secular re formers in the nineteenth century were influenced by the revolution of 1848 in France, India’s forest policies were modeled after the German ex ample (Rajan 1998), and Che Guevara studied the guerrilla tactics popu larized by Spaniards resisting Napoleon’s advance in the previous century (Loveman and Davies 1985). Hirschman (1981) has argued that the propensity of poor nations to borrow policy ideas from abroad is a reflec tion of their dependency. But even the most autonomous nations routinely gather information on the experiences of others. Before we equate bor rowing with dependency, we should bear in mind that Latin American intellectuals elaborated dependency theory partly in response to the short comings of Western writings on imperialism, which portrayed developing countries as passive recipients of foreign influences. In practice, modes of borrowing range from intelligent tinkering with the ideas and experiences of others to uncritical parroting of foreign institutions.

A detailed analysis of the impact of foreign environmental policy ideas on contemporary conservation policymaking in Costa Rica and Bolivia is the subject of chapter 6. Suffice it to say here that this influence has been pervasive and long-standing. In addressing the normative, evaluative, and prescriptive questions of environmental management, policy reformers have felt little need to confine themselves to ideas of national origin. Dur ing congressional testimony surrounding Costa Rica’s Forestry Law of 1969, speakers cited the experiences of dozens of foreign nations, draw ing lessons from nature tourism in Eastern Africa, forestry practices in Venezuela and Mexico, and environmental advocacy in the United States and Western Europe. In turn, Costa Rica and Bolivia have served as ex emplars for other developing nations interested in learning from their ex periences with innovations such as participatory park management, pharmaceutical uses of rainforest products, national environmental funds, debt-for-nature swaps, and user fees for ecosystem services.

Ideational Resources of the Domestic Sphere

The mere existence of a deep well of international policy ideas does not preordain the timing and degree of their acceptance in specific national

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0 1960 1965

Figure 1.3

0

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995

Environmental news in Costa Rica and Bolivia. Source. La Nación in Costa Rica and Presencia in Bolivia. See methodological appendix for details. Note. The two newspapers differ in size, therefore intercountry comparisons are based on the tim ing of changes rather than absolute numbers of articles.

settings. This is apparent in figure 1.3, which shows that environmental protection was not seriously discussed in Bolivia until a full decade after its appearance as an issue of public concern in Costa Rica. Based on a con tent analysis of over 3,000 environmental news stories (see chapter 6 and the methodological appendix for details), this result is widely corrobo rated in interviews with long-term observers of environmental politics in these countries. This is the simplest result of the content analysis, and it is perhaps the most important for it poses the question: Why did an active popular interest in environmental issues—what I term an environmental policy culture—arise a full decade earlier in Costa Rica?

I will argue in subsequent chapters that bilateral activists are responsible for the variation observed here. Inspired by environmental movements around the world and deeply embedded in domestic debates, bilateral ac tivists recognized early on the importance of garnering widespread public support for their policy initiatives. They not only worked to buttonhole politicians and experiment with institutional designs but they also spread the word by creating university programs, organizing seminars, and lead ing discussion groups. They worked with members of the media, and in spired others to create radio and television shows broadcasting the merits of environmental thinking, for the concientización of the public at large. The lack of an environmental policy culture in Bolivia in the early 1970s is directly attributable to the absence of a well-developed community of bi lateral activists in the country at this time. This begs the question of the origins of bilateral activism, which will be taken up in chapter 6.

While the international sphere of influence provides the raw material for domestic policy ideas, these ideas are translated domestically to match na tional circumstances. The political salience of policy ideas is affected by their perceived “fit” with existing national institutions and understand ings (Goldstein 1993; Sikkink 1991). The process is a dynamic one, in which political opponents argue that an international policy idea like environmental protection (or feminism or socialism or free market capi talism) is an absurd foreign import that bears no relation to domestic re alities, while partisans argue that it is entirely consonant with national traditions and needs. Translation occurs as domestic advocates package the idea to appeal to important political constituencies and to plug into legitimizing national discourses (Snow and Benford 1988). International policy ideas are also stretched and molded as domestic regulatory agencies and social organizations devote preexisting organizational resources (and their attendant biases) to the cause (see Dalton 1994; McCarthy and Zald 1977; McCarthy 1997: 244–247). Moreover, each country has its own particular environmental and social conditions, and different countries may embrace a policy issue in different historical periods, thereby affect ing the content of the policy idea. Translation also results from the fact that many intellectuals and activists in the South, delighting in innovation and sensitive to cultural imperialism from abroad, simply desire to make the idea their own.

Two extremes characterize the translation process. At one extreme, in adequate translation may lead to a careless adoption of ideas from abroad, as occurred in the 1960s when the Bolivian government copied verbatim Venezuelan hunting season regulations despite the fact that the seasons are reversed across the equator. At the other extreme, an international policy idea may undergo so much adaptation that the original idea literally gets lost in the translation (see Steinberg 1998b). Bilateral activists occupy an interesting position in this regard. All else equal, they are more likely than actors who operate purely in the international sphere to ensure that at least some translation occurs, and they are more likely than their com patriots to ensure that the crux of the original idea is not lost. Conversely, they may be more likely to push inappropriate ideas than would actors op erating purely in the domestic sphere and more likely than purely interna tional players to let the original idea go. Only by pursuing a compromise between the two extremes, however, can they simultaneously meet the needs stemming from each side of their dual identities. They are the only ones held accountable by both international and domestic communities, in a face-to-face, “what are you doing?” kind of way. To the extent that their effectiveness depends on legitimacy in both spheres, bilateral activists face incentives to stake out a middle ground.

Studying Policy Change

In medical research, the first step in identifying the causal agent of disease is to select sick patients and attempt to isolate the cause of the observed effects; this enables subsequent studies to test for the effects of the posited causal agent in other patients. Geologists wishing to understand the na ture of volcanoes do well to study those actively erupting; using this data, they can then make predictions concerning the volcanoes’ dormant cousins. In like manner, to understand the uncharted territory of environ mental policy reform in developing countries, I have deliberately selected countries with “successful” policy outcomes in an attempt to delineate the forces at play. The sources of variation on these successes are threefold: the change in Costa Rica from the 1960s (a time of scant political interest in environmental themes) to the 1970s; the variance between Costa Rica and Bolivia in the 1970s, during which time only the former witnessed signif icant environmental policy reforms; and the subsequent temporal change within Bolivia, which saw the rise of an active environmental policy cul ture and institutional reforms in the late-1980s.

To understand the dynamics underlying these changes, I employ a tri angulation approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods ap propriate to the task at hand. 14 To generate insights into mechanisms of political influence, I conducted several dozen semistructured interviews, using a technique that we might term “revealing inertia.” This method takes advantage of the fact that there is a certain amount of inertia in any significant social undertaking—meetings are missed, funds are misap propriated, leaders are distracted—and considerable directed energy is needed to overcome this inertia and usher initiatives toward a desired end point. Inertia includes the “clearance points” discussed by Pressman and Wildavsky (1973), Grindle and Thomas’s (1991) “slippage,” and Hirsch man’s (1970) “slack.” Yet interview subjects may recount an event as if it arose as part of the natural and inevitable progression of events. With the revealing inertia technique, the researcher imagines potential barriers and sources of inertia common to efforts at policy reform and poses these as questions: “The senate has many pressing matters, so how did your bill get to the front of the queue?” “Alliances among environmental groups can be difficult to maintain—how did it work?” “Why did the city council listen to your proposal, when there is an active forest lobby in this town?” “Bud gets are so stretched, how did you get the Ministry of Agriculture to pro vide funds for the new park guards?” From the nature of the response it is usually obvious whether one has revealed or merely invented a source of inertia. Revealing inertia allows the researcher to learn more about the barriers themselves and to learn about the mechanisms whereby difficul ties are overcome.

Historical materials were gathered by searching through numerous government and private archives, seeking materials—letters, news clips, government reports, written testimony—that could provide a glimpse into modes of influence. I was the first researcher to study the private archives of Bolivian environmental pioneer Noel Kempff, who maintained a thorough record of his written correspondences dating back to the early 1960s, now maintained by his family. Qualitative research was comple mented with a quantitative analysis of environmental news stories ap pearing in these countries’ major daily newspapers from 1960 to 1995. Eleven research assistants, organized into four teams, collected and ana lyzed over 3,000 news articles. Absent longitudinal public opinion data, this is the most complete data set available for tracing changes over time in the attention given environmental issues in any developing country.

Chapter Overview

The organization of this study is as follows. In the first half of the book I describe in more detail the phenomenon to be explained—the historical emergence of Costa Rica and Bolivia as leaders in biodiversity policy. In chapter 2, I take a critical look at one of the most widely held assumptions concerning the role of developing countries in international environmen tal policy: that developing nations are too poor to care about environ mental protection absent foreign financial inducements. This perspective emanates from several distinct sources, which I label “theories of environ mental privilege.” This assumption is so widely held, and so completely at odds with my findings, that I felt it necessary to address it systematically in its own chapter. I argue that there is little reason or evidence to support the view that developing nations are predisposed to consider environmen tal protection a luxury.

It is one thing to argue that environmental movements and policy reform can arise in poor countries and quite another to show that they do. The historical narratives in chapters 3 and 4 should leave the reader with no doubt that important changes have taken place over the past four decades in the level of social and government commitment to biodiversity conser vation in Costa Rica and Bolivia. This sets the stage for subsequent chap ters that provide an explanation for how these changes came about. Chapters 5 and 6 detail the institutional and ideational components of the spheres of influence framework. Chapter 5 explores the process of institu tional reform: how these countries have managed to establish conservation agencies, regulatory structures, and national parks that operate reason ably well despite the enormous odds facing policy reformers in poor coun tries. This chapter demonstrates that despite their lower profile, domestic political resources have been indispensable assets in efforts at institution building, easily rivaling in importance the more widely recognized assets of international science and finance. A focus on political resources also renders the contributions of domestic environmentalists in developing countries more visible, which I have found necessary not for fairness so much as accuracy. In Chapter 6 I elaborate on the concept of policy cul ture, which provides an entrée for studying the cross-border movement of environmental ideas and the relationship between changing social percep tions and institutional reform. In Chapter 7, I consider the implications of these findings for social science research on global environmental prob lems and make some tentative suggestions for how they might be used to improve the effectiveness of international environmental institutions.