Background:

Poverty reduction and ultimately poverty alleviation are partly a function of the distribution of resources, including public revenues and other benefits generated from natural resources. Distributional equity of natural resource benefits can promote broad-based, sustainable development. In countries with local and national natural resource-dependent economies, revenues from natural resources have important roles in poverty reduction. Consequently, natural resource revenues warrant distributions that favor the needs of the poor. Productive and high-value natural resources are rarely accessible to all citizens and their benefits are rarely evenly distributed across peoples and geographically across nations. Equally important, revenues from natural resources have a long history of being mismanaged and misappropriated – with political and economic elite often capturing a large share of the benefits while the nation’s disenfranchised must often absorb a disproportionately large share of the associated social and environmental costs.

Strategy:

The Poverty, Environment, and Distributional Equity Project (PEDEP) works to reduce poverty by establishing public policies, laws, and practices that favor the nation’s poor regions and peoples in the allocation of revenues and other benefits from critical natural resources. PEDEP partners with national and local governments, NGOs, and donors to move governments to adopt allocation and distribution policies for natural resource revenues that increase benefits to the poor and promote greater equity both among local jurisdictions (inter-jurisdictional equity) and within local jurisdictions (intra-jurisdictional equity). The links between natural resources and poverty are complex and poverty reduction requires a range of policy and programming interventions. The Distribution Equity project contributes to this WRI objective by focusing specifically on the distribution of fiscal benefits, which is a specific, narrow component of poverty reduction. It is an aspect, however, that is particularly important for reducing poverty in the natural resource-dependent economies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The focus of this project also capitalizes on WRI’s unique capabilities and comparative advantages.

Accomplishments:

Our partners are increasingly utilized by governments as a source of knowledge, advice, and technical support. MPs have requested our partners’ support to draft environmental bills, provide testimony, attend public hearings, and make presentations at seminars organized by MPs (e.g., ACODE/Uganda was requested by the Speaker of Parliament to draft a bill banning the use of polythen bags, CEPA/Malaw was requested by the Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources to provide training on environmental matters).

WRI and the Lawyers’ Environmental Action Team (LEAT) in Tanzania have been addressing gold mining issues since the mid-1990s. LEAT has been the leading voice in Tanzania on these issues. In 2006, a new President was elected into office and immediately began implementing several long-standing LEAT/WRI recommendations.

WRI and our partners’ (Ateneo School of Government and the Environmental Legal Assistance Center (ELAC)) work on Palawan natural gas has had profound influence over the discourse on natural resource revenue distribution in the Philippines. Political leaders have agreed on the need to `depoliticize` the Palawan provincial share of gas revenues by creating a trust fund mechanism to hold the revenues and implement projects identified in a consultative planning process.

With the recent discovery of oil in the Albertine Rift in Uganda, WRI’s work with the Uganda Wildlife Society on a natural resource derivation fund has been well received, especially by the local authorities in the oil-producing regions. The King of Bunyoro will present the EPE recommendations to the President and to the district chairmen in his kingdom.