What Is Brown Agenda?

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The Brown Agenda, which is concerned with conventional sanitary or environmental health agenda, depicts one of two aspects of issues or agendas.

Most such problems have impacts that are more dispersed and delayed, and often threaten long-term ecological sustainability.

Conflicts arise between the proponents of these two agendas in regard to which environmental problems should receive priority. The conflicts can be especially acute in the urban areas in Africa and in much of Asia and Latin America, where environmental health problems are particularly serious and where the capacity for environmental management is generally weak. However, provided both agendas are taken seriously, these conflicts can be minimized. Table X-1 highlights some of the contrasts between these two agendas.

From a radically green perspective, a focus on the brown agenda is shortsigheted:

• What about future generations?
• What about the impact of city-based consumption on rural resources and ecosystems?
• And might not a focus on improving environmental health conditions in cities encourage more people to move there?

From a radically brown perspective, emphasizing the new concerns on the green agenda is elitist:

• What about the needs and priorities of the poor?
• What about the very high environmental health burdens suffered by those lacking adequate provision for piped water, sanitation, drainage and garbage collection?

Environmental hazards remain among the main causes of ill-health, injury and premature death among lower income groups in most urban centres in Africa, Asia and Latin America; in urban centres with the least adequate provision for basic infrastructure and services, they remain among the main causes of ill-health, injury and premature death for the whole urban population (Bradley et al, 1991; Hardoy et al, 1992a; WHO, 1992 & 1996).

Equity

Graham HaughtonOpens in new window has identified five interconnected equity principles that can apply to environmental problems in urban areas (Haughton, 1999) and these help to clarify the different perspective from which the proponents of the brown and the green agendas work.

For the proponents of the brown agenda, the main priorities are:

For the proponents of the green agenda, the priorities are:

Working from this recognition of the different aspects of equity that the two agendas prioritize allows a better understanding of how progress on both the brown and the green agendas can proceed, and how potential conflicts can be minimized.

It provides a common language for addressing both sets of concerns and potentially a common goal (reducing inequity). It helps to identify the conditions under which pursuing one agenda is likely to undermine the other — if, for example, the needs of low income groups are ignored, they are likely to bear a disproportionate burden of any efforts to protect future generations and vice versa.

Moreover, by framing the problem in terms of equity, it is easier to see why in some cities (where intragenerational and procedural inequities dominate) the brown agenda deserves more attention, while in others (where the other inequities predominate) the green agenda should prevail.

Contrasting Brown and Green Priorities

Both green and brown proponents have reason to criticize many existing approaches to urban environmental managementOpens in new window, even if their priorities differ. At a superficial level, the brown and green agendas are in direct opposition to each other.

For example, the brown agenda would seem to call for more water use, more sewage connections, more waste collection, more urban residential land and more fossil fuel use (to replace smoky biofuels).

By ways of contrast, the green agenda would seem to call for water conservation, less water-borne sewerage, less waste generation, less urban expansion and less fossil fuel use.

While these potential contradictions should not be ignored, a review of existing policy problems indicates that the trade-offs need not be as sharp as such generalizations seem to imply.

Water

Urban water supply planning has been preoccupied historically with how to increase supplies to meet growing demand, given the physical and financial constraints of the city. By and large, demand has been assumed to be beyond the influence of water sector policies.

For those households and businesses connected to piped water systems, water is generally provided far below its full cost. For example, there is little incentive for users to conserve or encouragement to the industries that are the largest water users to recycle waste water or seek less water-intensive systems of production.

In some of the wealthier cities, subsidized water supply systems have brought major benefits to most of their populations, including a high proportion of their lower income populations.

For instance, there has been a considerable expansion in the proportion of the population with piped water supplies in many of the wealthier Latin American cities. In cities such as Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Curtiba and Porto Alegre, most of the population receives piped water supplies to their homes (Jacobi, 1994; Mueller, 1995).

However, the proponents of the green agenda can rightly point to the serious consequences this often brings. The emphasis on increasing supply and keeping the price of water ‘affordable’ has resulted in major cities throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America overexploiting local water resources. For instance, in many coastal cities local aquifers have been overpumped, resulting in saltwater intrusion.

Overexploitation of underground water has also caused serious problems of subsidence for many buildings and sewage and drainage pipes in many cities (Damian, 1992; Postel, 1992). As local ground and surface water sources are overused (or polluted), meeting rising city demands generally means having to draw on ever more distant and expensive water resources.

This can be to the detriment of the populations (and often ecosystems) in the areas from which the water is drawn and with the higher water costs rarely reflected in higher prices for the largest city water users.

Proponents of the brown agenda often share this green agenda concern for unrealistically low water prices.

They can point to how the discrepancy between water utilities’ costs and revenues (from water sales and public subsidies) often inhibit expansion to low income areas and help to ensure that high proportions of the population in most cities remain unconnected to piped water systems.

Indeed, a combination of price controls and very limited public funds is a recipe for intragenerational inequities, with the subsidies that do exist flowing, along with the water, to those who least need them. Even for those low income groups who have access to connections, water supplies are often irregular or of poor quality or difficult to access – for instance, as dozens of households share each standpipe.

At least 300 million urban dwellers in Africa, Asia and Latin America remain without piped water supplies (WHO/UNICEF 1993) and tens of millions of those whose governments include in their statistics as having access to piped supplies still face inadequate, irregular or unsafe supplies which are often difficult to obtain (Satterthwaite, 1995; WHO, 1996).

While the water-related priorities of the green and brown agendas are different, their goals are not inherently incompatible. The often unmet minimum daily needs for health (about 30 litres per capita) amounts to about two flushes of a conventional toilet or one slowly dripping faucet.

The international standard of 150 litres per capita per day is only a small fraction of the typical usage in affluent cities in the North. Providing sufficient water for health needs is not the reason that many cities are overtaxing their water supplies.

Indeed, in many cities programmes encouraging water conservation and ensuring the better management and repair of piped water systems can often free up sufficient new supplies to allow regular piped water supplies to be extended to unserved households with no overall increase in water use. Intragenerational water inequities need not be solved by creating intergenerational or transboundary water inequities or vice versa.

It is politics and policy instruments, not physical imperatives, that create a stark trade-off between environmental health and ecological sustainability. Moreover, for most cities it is relatively clear whether environmental health or ecological sustainability ought to be the more pressing concern.

Sanitation

Proponents of the green and brown agendas can also point to problems in provision for sanitation, although, as in water supplies, they emphasize different problems. Here the conventional approach has been to promote water-borne sanitation systems, or steps in that direction, with the ultimate aim of providing all households with a flush toilet connected to a sewer.

Again, households obtaining connections receive considerable benefits, often at subsidized prices. But in most urban centres, sewage systems are characterized by significant inequities, relevant to both the brown and green agendas.

There are some cities in Latin America, Asia and parts of Africa where most of the population is adequately served by sewers. These are also generally the cities with low infant mortality rates and high life expectancies. However, the (generally) high unit costs of such systems also means that these cities are in the minority and very few cities have sewerage systems that serve most of their residents.

In many cities, sewers only serve a small proportion of the population (generally those in the more centrally located and wealthier areas). Most small urban centres have no sewer systems at all.

Estimates suggest that close to one-half the urban population of Africa, Asia and Latin America lack adequate provision for sanitation. Tens of millions of urban dwellers have no access to any form of sanitation or have only such poor quality, overcroweded public facilities that they have to resort to defecation in the open.

Proponents of the green agenda point to the environmental costs that conventional sewer systems can bring, especially the large volumes of water used to flush toilets and the problem of disposing of large volumes of sewage.

In Latin America, Asia and Africa only a small proportion of sewage is treated before disposal (WHO/UNICEF, 1993; WHO, 1996; Bartone et al, 1994). Untreated sewage is a major contributor to highly polluted water bodies in most cities, although it is generally difficult to determine its contribution relative to that of untreated industrial wastes and storm and surface run-off.

Fisheries are often damaged or destroyed by liquid effluents arising from cities. Thousands of people may lose their livelihood as a result as some of the largest cities are close to some of the world’s most productive fishing grounds.

Sewage systems also require large volumes of water to function and, as such, help to build into city sanitation systems high water demands. And although there are many examples of cities where some of the sewage is used for crop or fish production, the proportion of sewage used in such a way is limited by the sheer volume of such wastes and the difficulties (and costs) of transporting them to areas where they can be used productively.

Proponents of the green agenda often point to alternative sanitation systems that do not require sewers. These include many that bring ecological advantages such as requiring no water at all and some that are designed to allow the conversion of human wastes into safe fertilizers, allowing the recycling of nutrients in the food system.

These limit water demand and remove the problem of sewage disposal. Simple sewerless sanitation systems are also generally much cheaper than sewered systems, especially when account is taken of the cost of sewage treatment.

But here there is a serious potential conflict between the brown and the green agenda. Proponents of the brown agenda can point to the hundreds of millions of urban dwellers who currently rely on sanitation systems that do not use water—for instance, pit latrines—which bring serious health risks and often contaminate groundwater.

They often contaminate piped water supplies too, as inadequate maintenance of the piped water network means many cracks and leaks and water pressure is not constant (many city water supply systems have irregular supplies, with water available in many districts for only a few hours a day), so sewage seeps into the pipes.

Pit latrinesOpens in new window can be particularly hazardous in areas that regularly face floods as the pits become flooded and spread human excreta everywhere. There is also the problem in many cities of the lack of services to empty them (or the high price that has to be paid for doing so), while space constraints inhibit provision for solutions which limit this problem — for instance, twin vault systems or larger pits.

There is also the question of cost; in many cities, even a good quality pit latrine within their home (or plot) is an unattainable luxury for many low income households. This includes the large proportion of low income groups who rent accommodation and for whom there is no rented accommodation that they can afford with adequate provision for sanitation.

A stress on sewerless latrines may mean that the importance of adequate water supplies are forgotten (the latrines may need no water, but the households who use them certainly do, including the water needed for washing and personal hygiene).

A stress on dry latrines may also mean that the problem of removing waste water is forgotten; one of the key advantages of a sewer system is that it also conveniently and hygienically removes waste water other than sewerage after its use for cooking, laundry or washing.

Brown agenda proponents can also point to instances where the unit cost of installing sewers was brought down to the point where they no longer far beyond the price that low income households could pay (Orangi, 1995) and to community level sewer systems that do not require high levels of water use and with local treatment which greatly reduceds the ecological impact of the effluents on water bodies.

In assuming that all waterborne sanitation systems have unacceptable ecological impacts, there is a danger of promoting alternative sanitation systems that bring inconvenience, higher maintenance costs and greater environmental risks to the users, or of simply producing latrines that the population do not use.

In short, an excessive reliance on conventional water-borne sewerage intensifies the discrepancies between the brown and green agenda: as a tool of urban environmental management it can reduce intragenerational inequities, but typically at the cost of transboundary and intergenerational inequities.

Undoubtedly there are many instances where extending water-borne sewerage systems is justified, especially in high-density residential areas. There are also the measures that can be taken to reduce greatly the ecological disadvantages of such systems, as noted above.

However, proponents of both the brown and the green agendas can take issue with measures that subsidize sewerage systems for relatively affluent urban dwellers, diverting public funds from low income dwellers and imposing environmental costs on those living downstream and even future generations.