There is some general awareness among government agencies and business houses of the possibilities offered by cleaner production. The Bhopal gas tragedy and other similar events have led a growing number of decision-makers to a realisation of the need for integrated approaches to industrial environmental management.

The objectives of a rational cleaner production policy in a developing country like India should be to maximise and sustain production of goods and services to fulfil basic needs; reduce the negative environmental impact of industry; reduce the cost of environment protection; conserve resources and minimise waste. In due course, other objectives will also become important, including self-reliance, competitiveness, etc.

The barriers to attaining these objectives are social, financial, psychological and technological.

Among the social barriers, the one that is predominant is the general indifference towards environmental protection on the part of most entrepreneurs essentially due to their lack of awareness and education. The concept of social responsibility or corporate citizenship has not, with a few remarkable exceptions, penetrated the business community.

As for financial barriers, (i) some investment is required for the introduction of cleaner production technologies. Very often credit is not easily available and hence business enterprises tend to overlook environmental considerations; (ii) the financial incentives for environmental protection and cleaner production have not made a dent on the attitude of business houses to adopt cleaner production practices; (iii) in the current situation, pricing mechanisms do not reflect the real cost of resources used in industry. As a result there is no real incentive to adopt cleaner production practices. Besides, most industries do not have to pay for waste disposal costs.

The psychological barrier is that industrialists, especially small enterprises, fear loosing their competitive edge by adoption “more costly” cleaner production techniques. Very often labour unions who are not fully aware of the principles and benefits of cleaner production, tend to obstruct enterprises from converting to cleaner production practices.

The technological ones may be listed as (i) technologies imported from foreign suppliers are rarely state-of-the-art. In fact, they are usually already obsolete in the countries of origin, mainly because of environmental and resource management considerations. Even when resource efficient technology is made available, the royalties and technology costs are usually prohibitively expensive; (ii) practical research on cleaner production technologies is rather limited in India. Besides, the incentives for developing indigenous technologies are also limited. As a result, cleaner production technologies adapted to Indian conditions are not easily available; (iii) even for those technologies that exist, lack of information, know-how or finance limits access to them by most, especially small scale, enterprises.

The opportunities for entrepreneurs to introduce cleaner production technologies are several. These include:

1.	Since the Indian economy is undergoing rapid transition involving the accelerated setting up of new plants, technological decisions promoting cleaner production are relatively easy and inexpensive to adopt.
2.	Since a large part of the existing industrial base depends on obsolete and highly inefficient technologies, changing to state-of-the-art cleaner ones could in some cases by economically attractive for entrepreneurs.
3.	A range of economic and recognition incentives for industry to adopt cleaner production practices can be designed and implemented.

Here it may be instructive to examine how environmental industrial development policies are influenced.

The industrial development policy in developing countries is largely influenced by key industrial houses including multinationals. This influence is primarily channelled through the political leadership and the bureaucracy. In the area of environment, however, there are other actors as well. Environment NGOs and academic research institutions contribute considerable input to environment aspects of industrialisation. Two other reasonably important actors include industrial associations and chambers of commerce and trade unions. A particular group that is unusually effective in this sphere is environmental consultancy organisations, the group that has significant potential multiplier for the future.

The ultimate stakeholder for rational environment policy must in India, as elsewhere, be the citizen. This will require a massive programme for public awareness and empowerment to demand environmentally sound products.

More than 200 national laws touch on various aspects of the environment in India. The Environment Protection Act, complemented by the Water and Air Pollution Acts provide umbrella legislation for most of the environmental aspects of industrialisation. There is no law, however, that addresses the specific issues of cleaner production as such.

The government has begun to show interest in issues of cleaner production but these have not yet been formalises in policy statements. The basic approach to environmental assessment and management is still geared to specific case-by-case project level studies. While the legislation and control activities of government are generally geared to prevention, the resource management aspects of cleaner production have not yet been adequately addressed.

To accelerate the process of adopting cleaner production practices, improved access to the needed technology and demonstration projects would be most useful. However, these can only lead to results if there is also a body of expertise available to make full use of them. This requires building research and development capacity at the national level.

Legislation and institutionalisation of cleaner production approaches in India require:

¨	A strategic and comprehensive treatment of industry and environment issues.
¨	Preventive approaches rather than punitive action after the damage has already taken place.
¨	Emphasis on incentive-based compliance rather than policing and enforcement.
¨	Upgrading regulatory mechanisms to match the complexity of environmental problems in high technology industrial activity.
¨	More explicitly stated social objectives of industrial activity.
¨	Close monitoring of industrial performance in the field of environment and resource conservation.
¨	A more positive approach to adopting alternatives for cleaner production rather than prohibiting specific actions.
¨	Building of technological capacity in cleaner production.
¨	Building of strong, independent watchdog institutions.

At the national and state levels, there is a great need for a clear and explicit policy statements to promote cleaner production. This must be complemented by the requisite legislation, institutions for monitoring and agencies for implementation. Some of the essential components of these are:

Regulatory: The policy and legislation should be backed by strong subordinate legislation including rules and regulations. These should set specific, monitorable, verifiable environmental quality targets and the consequent emission standards.

Policy should initially be based on maintaining the present environmental quality and subsequently to enhancing it. Where possible these should rely on negotiations among the different constituencies involved. But there are limits on the effectiveness of flexible procedures, particularly in softer economies.

As a result of the rapid pace of industrialisation (7 percent to 10 percent per year), more than three quarters of the plants in existence 20 years from now will be new. There is strong case, therefore, for policies promoting cleaner production to concentrate on new, green field projects rather than existing plants.

Economic instruments: Economic incentives including tax relief, concessional credit for technology upgradation and hazardous waste by holding not only the generator but also the transporters and receivers of such wastes responsible. Legislation to ensure liability and compensation should be designed to encourage adoption of cleaner production techniques.

Education and training: The establishment of education and information programmes that enable industries on the one hand and the public on the other to promote cleaner production. The most urgent need in developing countries is technically qualified personnel capable of selecting, designing and implementing cleaner production techniques. To develop such a cadre of professionals, technical education must be supplemented by adequate R & D facilities for their professional development.

Cleaner production, once introduced, has to be an ongoing process. The only way to ensure continuous corporate commitment to it is, ultimately, to internalise the basic principles into corporate policy and professional practice. To do this, technical education and training programmes, professional associations and codes of conduct and technology development activities in each country must be geared to promoting cleaner production goals as a central and integral part of business objectives.

The full disclosure and the right to know: There is no substitute for adequate, objective and timely information as the basis for informed decision making either by the industrialists or by other concerned persons.

The issues and activities needed to promote cleaner production policies and action have been outlined in some detail above. The possibility of implementing these, however, lies in the hands of specific role players in the economy, and effective action in the future must be geared to strengthening those who can make a significant contribution to the goal of cleaner production.

Primarily, the role players are international agencies (particularly UNEP), governments, industrial co-operation, research and consultants, NGOs and advocacy groups.

NGOs & LCAs

If LCA is to play a credible role in decision-making, it is important that key environmental stakeholders, including leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs), should be involved in the process. During the production of the LCA Sourcebook, we contacted 120 European NGOs and ‘green’ research organisations to find out whether they were active in the field of LCA. (For a discussion on LAC, see page5).

The response was worrying: the overwhelming majority are not currently involved - nor do they have plans to become active. Very few NGOs have, like the UK Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), commissioned their own LCAs and used them to challenge those produced by major companies.

Most NGOs knew little about LCA and were often intensely suspicious. One Dutch campaigning group feared that these techniques would be used to “direct attention to the wrong questions - and divert it from the necessary actions”. It argues that “the outcome of an LCA is the reuslt of the input (and) the input is a result of the preferences of those who are paying for the study.” Agrain and again, NGOs including France’s Les Amis de la Terre, insisted that the assumptions built into LCAs should be made absolutely clear.

Most respondents, however, saw it as a legitimate management tool with which companies can identify environmetnal ‘hot-spots’. But, while there was a recognition that LCA can help in the task of eco-labelling, providing consumers with more information on the environmetnal performance of products, and as a management tool for environmental improvement, there was a good deal of concern about the use of LCAs for ‘green marketing’ purposes.

Inevitably, some NGO-commissioned LCAs will be at least as imperfect s industry-commissioned LCAs, partly because of the lack of resources and partly because NGOs also bring their own pre-conceptions to bear on such projects. In the long run, such orgnisations will develop the capacity to play a central role in life cycle management. For the moment, however, the relative weakness of their LCA capability could create real problems for companies and other organisations genuinely wishing to involve environmental stakeholders in their work.

John Elkington
Co-author, The LCA Sourcebook

Currently, the message to promote cleaner production comes from a small group of cognoscenti, concentrated in the first group, i.e., the international community. This group has a clearly defined objective, technical knowledge and some limited financial resources. An effective strategy to amplify its efforts in the developing world would be to:

¨	Select a small number (half a dozen?) of countries where maximum impact of industrial policies could in principle be achieved.
¨	Select agents of change in those countries that can, at a small investment, promote change towards cleaner production, through influencing government policy and corporate action
¨	Provide to those agents of change materials, technical advice and financial support to build their capacity for effective advocacy and action.
¨	Monitor and evaluate the results and subsequently use the more successful ones for demonstration to expand the impact within those countries and elsewhere.

Ideally, the first contact for promoting change should be the governmental environment agencies and large corporations. Unfortunately, the costs and time scales of achieving fundamental change in policy direction in such organisation is relatively high and not always permanent.

Experience over the past two decades clearly shows that the most effective agents of change in a developing country like India are environment and development NGOs, consumer protection advocacy groups, environmental consultants, academic and research organisations.

We would strongly recommend that in each of the selected countries, one or two technically oriented environment/development consultancy organisations/professional associations be brought into a regional or international network of working partners with a medium term strategy to build their capacity to effect change in government and corporate thinking. The technical capacity of these agencies must be enhanced to a level where they can provide detailed engineering and economic inputs on the basis of which the advantages of cleaner production become clear and transparent.

We believe that the most cost effective way to achieve real and lasting change in government policy and corporate action is to build independent sector capacity within each country to identify the alternatives, to provide solid technical advice and to evaluate and demonstrate the economic implications. It is only thus that each country will have the ability to tailor economic measures, design institutional framework and choose technologies appropriate for its specific requirements and within the context of its own socio-economic development priorities.

(This paper is based on a report presented at the
UNEP workshop held in Paris last month)