Background

When power over nature is centralized, as it still is in most African nations, influencing central government is key to affecting public policy and state actions. At the national level, effective representation of citizens in central government becomes essential for communicating local needs to policy processes and for promoting pro-poor, pro-sustainable development public policies and government actions. In this regard, the legislature is arguably the most important of central government branches, and legislator-constituent links are among the most important of government-citizen relations.

Due to the importance of land and natural resources to the rural population in Africa, effective legislative representation helps ensure that government policy recognizes local environmental views and that state actions address local natural resource needs. While legislators- most now elected by their constituents - have multiple roles, representation is arguably the most basic of functions.

Case Studies

Over the past three years, WRI, in collaboration with its African partners, has conducted policy research on the incentives and disincentives that influence the decisions and actions of these legislators in representing the environmental interests of their constituents within the national government and at the Parliamentary level. WRI and its partners recently completed case studies in nine African countries including Cameroon, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The results of these studies indicate that legislators are most likely to meet their responsibility to represent constituency interests when they are downwardly accountable to their voters, have sufficient autonomy from political bosses and special interests, are empowered with appropriate authority and capacity to act, and have the personal attributes and motivations to champion their constituents’ causes. The finalized and published case studies from Cameroon and Uganda can be found under background documents. WRI will be posting the additional studies as they are finalized and published by our partners. Upcoming publications include case studies conducted by the Institute for Law and Environmental Governance (ILEG) in Kenya, the Center for Environmental Policy and Advocacy (CEPA) in Malawi, and the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (ZELA).

 

Monitoring Environmental Representation

A consistent recommendation that resulted from the case studies was the need to launch independent assessments of Members of Parliament (MPs) to evaluate their performance in representing constituents’ environmental concerns and interests in order to increase the Members’ accountability to their constituents and, therefore, strengthen the representation roles of MPs. Over the last few months, WRI has mobilized its partners in Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, and Zimbabwe to begin work on developing indicators for evaluating the environmental representative performance of Members of Parliament.

 

 

Greening Political Parties

Another consistent recommendation cited the need for political parties to adopt environmental platforms and include environmental issues in their manifestos. WRI has initiated work in Cameroon, Uganda, and Zimbabwe to survey and evaluate the environmental component of political party manifestos and encourage parties to incorporate environmental issues into their manifestos and platforms.