Developing pro-poor markets for environmental services in the ...

not one of them had yet been implemented. Projects that were in the implementation stage
were of other types, such as health infrastructure, waste disposal, and water-supply systems.
Hence, socio-economic impact of investments in watershed protection could not be
ascertained. What was assessed instead was the distribution of the funds between
environmental and social investments, and the potential of the fund to increase welfare
among its beneficiaries through more efficient delivery of basic services and environmental
investments.
As can be gleaned from the types of projects being funded under RWMHEEF, improvement
of the standard of living of people, through the provision of basic necessities, seems to be the
main objective of the fund. Environmental protection and conservation do not seem to play a
major role, given the very scant projects in this category. Nor is the fund being much used for
livelihood- and productivity-enhancement activities, but then again there is a separate fund
that addresses directly these objectives. Thus, it appears that in situations where government
is remiss in fulfilling its duties of provision of basic infrastructure and services,
environmental conservation will not be addressed by poor communities until their basic needs
are met. It is thus only logical that environmental-management programmes will have to
integrate upliftment of the poor if they are to be successful.
On the other hand, such a scheme allows for a more efficient delivery of basic services by the
local governments concerned. Because the local governments themselves determined what
could be funded under this mechanism, it paves the way for the most pressing needs of the
host communities to be met. Furthermore, since the local government has to deal only with
the DOE and the generating company, the approval and implementation process is much
shorter relative to projects that source funds from either the national treasury and foreign
sources. Based on interviews with DOE personnel, payments for the RWMHEEF, along with
the other types of funds, are made directly to the treasury division of the DOE (see Figure
4.4). The money does not have to pass through other accounts of the national government. As
a corollary to this, disbursements are made directly from DOE to the LGU concerned, upon
the opening of a special account exclusively for ER 1-94 funds.
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