The environment in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report: a critique.

• Author: Selim, Mohammad El-Sayed

THE 2002 ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT (AHDR) referred in its third Chapter to three main dimensions for Arab human-capacity building. These were population, health, and environment. The section dealing with the environment dealt with the main characteristics and issues of the environment, and the main strategies pursued and recommended to deal with this it. It referred to three main environmental issues in the Arab world. These are water scarcity, scarcity of arable land, and pollution of the shores. It also reviewed the main factors which constrain the ability of the Arabs to deal with environmental problems, and suggested a six-dimensional strategy to deal with the environment. It also reviewed the strategies of environmental protection adopted by Council of Arab Ministers Responsible for the Environment (CAMRE) in the Abu Dhabi Declaration of 2001, that advocated an institutional approach to deal with the question of the environment, and finally recommended a pan Arab cooperation to deal with the question of the environment.

In this essay, we will evaluate the extent to which the AHDR was able to diagnose the question of the environment in the Arab world, account for it and suggest proper solutions. Such evaluation will deal with the following issues: the attention given to the environment in the AHDR, the AHDR's environmental paradigm, the analytical value of the AHDR, the comprehensiveness of the issues outlined in the AHDR, the strategies advocated in the AHDR, and it will finally refer to the question of the environment within the framework of the Middle East peace process, a dimension which was bypassed in the AHDR.

THE ATTENTION OF THE AHDR TO THE QUESTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT

The section dealing with the environment in the AHDR covered 6.5 pages out of 129 pages, which means that the environment was allotted 5 percent of the total number of pages of the Report. We understand that the AHDR deals with other concerns and that it should not be evaluated as if it were dealing only with the question of the environment. However, given the seriousness and urgency of the question of the environment, something which the AHDR itself has acknowledged, we believe that the AHDR should have given the question of the environment more attention.

The limited space allotted to the environmental issues resulted in a highly generalized pattern of analysis characterized by the lack of an innovative approach to the environmental issues of the Arab word. This was because the AHDR subscribed to the Arab tradition of viewing environmental issues as residual ones, that is, issues which would be dealt with once other issues were solved. This was not directly articulated in the AHDR, but it was reflected in the low level of attention given to the question of the environment and the failure to move beyond the traditional environmental paradigm dominant in the Arab world.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL PARADIGM OF THE AHDR

The attention to the question of the environment in the AHDR is a part of an overall trend in the Arab world which has been emerging since the late 1970s to attend to the environmental hazards in the Arab world. By this time Arab policy makers and academicians were beginning to articulate concerns about the quality of the Arab environment. In 1976, Al-Sharnouby published a book entitled Al-Insan wa Al-Bee'a (Man and the Environment) which was a sort of introductory book on the question of the environment. By the early 1980s, a number of books had been published dealing with the following issues: the relationship between the environment on one hand and education, development, and mass media on the other, the social dimension of the environment, the relationship between the environment and Islam, and the environmental issues. In 2000, the first book dealing with environmental security was published by King Saud University.

Elsewhere we have surveyed Arab literature dealing with the question of the environment (Selim, 2004). It was found that such literature subscribes to a managerial-technical paradigm of the environment. Such a paradigm views environmental issues as mainly resulting from the processes of industrialization and modernization, and the lack of proper state control and governance. It deals with environmental issues at the organizational level of analysis, as it focuses mainly upon relationships among state organizations. The state is viewed as the major reference point in dealing with the problem. The essential tools for addressing environmental concerns is improved state management and control, and better coordination between various state organizations. Further, Arab literature on the environment is characterized by its apolitical-technocratic nature in many respects. It focuses mainly on the technical issues related to the environment and does not frame them within a conceptualization of national security. In few cases, there is reference to the question of environmental security. But environmental security in the Arab literature means a set of measures to protect the environment. The book written by Ragab Sadek entitled Environmental Security and published by King Sand University in 2000 focuses only on the technical issues of environmental protection, even though it introduced the concept of "comprehensive environmental security." The author, being a specialist in microbial environmental pollution, did not identify...