| Environmental assessment (EA) has been undertaken in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia since the late 1970s but EA programmes are largely ineffective. Due to political pressures for economic development, considerable power and authority is vested in development agencies and relatively little in environmental management agencies. The public is excluded from project planning and decision-making, mission agencies are isolated from demands for environmental protection, and environmental agencies have difficulty enforcing EA requirements. Except in Thailand, effective public advocacy supported by the press is uncommon. EA effectiveness is better where extra-national influences are significant determinants of performance.; While technical factors contribute to EA ineffectiveness, socio-cultural and political factors provide complementary explanations. A cultural reliance on paternalistic authority, hierarchy and status as principles of social organisation; a dependence on patron-client relationships for ensuring loyalty and advancement among political, bureaucratic and private-sector actors; and a strong desire to avoid conflict and maintain face in personal relations all reinforce the power of elites and circumscribe that of individuals and communities. They also result in government bureaucracies lacking the interagency cooperation needed for effective EA.; Hampered by poverty, illiteracy and a lack of access to information, public environmental advocacy is growing but still new, largely unappreciated by government, and relatively ineffective in challenging development proposals unless supported by extraordinary local resistance and the publicising efforts of domestic and foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Environmental agencies lack the support of an informed, active public which has kept EA programmes "honest" elsewhere. However, by generating information that does, at times, become public, EA may be prompting Southeast Asian decision-makers to take account of other than economic development objectives. External agencies can enhance EA performance by strengthening NGO capability to research and comment on the environmental aspects of development, by assisting governments to find ways to incorporate public participation in their development planning, and by making public the EA reports they fund.; The research demonstrates the importance of considering socio-cultural and political factors when examining the implementation of policies or programmes which, like EA, are invented in one culture and transferred to another. |
