However, there have been some NGO efforts that have seen dramatic shifts in achieving population control and poverty eradication when they have empowered the woman through livelihoods. There is enough empirical evidence to prove that women’s empowerment through livelihoods and education are the key factors behind the smaller family sizes besides various other factors -theoretically, a number of converging initiatives such as, improved mortality rate through health services, energy security for livelihoods and basic needs, old age security that contribute significantly to cost effectiveness and long term sustainability of the programmes and its impacts.

The sustainability requirements are better understood if the determinants of decisions on family size, decision making ability of women are studied. In view of the economic crisis, such a study needs to focus on the systemic changes as a package of interventions that can help governments achieve their targets. The study could also focus on the relative cost effectiveness and of systemically oriented packages when compared to stand alone welfare / sectoral measures and the related institutional processes for attaining sustainability.

This requires analysis of the social, economic, and institutional dimensions of rural poverty and their linkages with the natural resource base and the environment. Such understanding allows proper design and adaptation of superior technological, institutional and policy options that could remove constraints which limit rural peoples’ abilities to fully utilize those options and improve their livelihoods.

Ecosystem services are a lifeline for the poor in rural communities, who often do not have clear rights to the land, fisheries, forests, minerals or other resources they use and often do not have the ability to influence decisions on resource management. As the rural population is largely dependent on agriculture, the provisioning and regulatory functions of ecosystem services are extremely important (according to economist Jayati Ghosh, soil quality in India has dropped 30% in the last 10 years). A number of converging environmental trends and short sighted economic decisions are not only degrading the resource base but are also reducing both on-farm and off-farm livelihood options. Particularly in the most marginalized areas (e.g., high lands in mountains and deserts) the situation is further aggravated by driving migration and threatening the future sustainability of livelihoods.

Decisions on management and use of ecosystem services are no longer feasible and sustainable if they are limited to establishing parks and protected areas or based on servicing the narrow, short term commercial interests of few sections and few interest groups of society. It is increasingly being recognized that more bottom-up approaches are required to involve local communities in decision-making processes. Similarly, efforts to reduce poverty and promote biodiversity conservation should pursue a common goal and need to synergize for more harmonized development policies.

For decades, GDP growth has been measured by merely calculating all the marketable goods and services an economy produces. It takes no account of how it is produced or how it is distributed or its fall out environmental costs - thus making it a flawed yardstick of progress or wellbeing. It is clear that just technology and emissions trading alone cannot drive the desired effects unless we use this crisis to shift towards a low-carbon economic pathway and eco-system rejuvenating life styles and green growth. While the West needs to ease off the economic accelerator, the developing countries need to find their development trajectory without compromising on their dual goals of poverty reduction and protection of ecosystem services.

Such a trajectory requires inherent transformation leading to investments in eco-practices ( eco-agriculture), resource efficient production and consumption, convergence of competing interests of society for a more cooperative, inter-dependent model based on mutual benefits (eg: raising money to buy off ecologically hot spot zones for protection from further degradation, land owning farmers collaborative to bargain investments for a mutually beneficial eco-cities, special economic zones etc., with corporations). Development Alternatives over the years has been exploring such inter-dependent models including Public-Private-Community Partnership (PPCP) models in securing water, energy, habitat, literacy, livelihoods, information, waste management for the rural poor, specially by the women’s groups. q