Public actors need to monitor the state of the environment in order to assess the effectiveness of their actions, prioritize policies and management measures, and thus objectively establish their contribution to the conservation of natural capital. To do so, they must be able to rely on scientific standards enabling them to define the thresholds from which environmental functions can be considered sustainable.

The ESGAP (Environmental Sustainability Gap) is an innovative tool that assesses the state of a territory’s environmental functions and their level of sustainability. For all critical components of natural capital in the territory concerned (air or water quality, pollution, forest resources, fisheries, etc.), this indicator calculates the difference between their current state and a state that would be sustainable (that is, a state compatible with a sustainable functioning of the processes necessary for the preservation of life, human activities and well-being). This allows the calculation of an “environmental sustainability gap”, which highlights the path that remains to reach the stage of environmental sustainability. This can then serve as a guide for public policy to estimate and preserve the natural state of a given territory.

Within the framework of the ECOPRONAT research program, AFD wishes to develop methodologies for assessing strong sustainability, that is to say adopting demanding criteria concerning the non-substitutability of natural capital by other forms of capital (physical and other) in a territory or country. AFD would also like to promote their use in international settings and contribute to the emerging international standards on the good ecological status of ecosystems.

 

This project aimed to test the relevance of the ESGAP framework in developing countries, where not all data on natural capital are always available. In collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Paul Ekins' team at University College London (UCL) supported two pilots of this indicator in Vietnam and Kenya.

These pilots were carried out by teams of experts both from national research institutes responsible for monitoring and reporting environmental data: the Kenya National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) and the Institute of Strategy, Policy on Natural Resources and Environment (ISPONRE) in Vietnam. This work enables better integration of strong environmental sustainability principles into global environmental assessments.

These pilots also sought to better document the challenges of strong environmental sustainability in the series of Measuring Progress reports published by UNEP.

 

The ESGAP framework is based on a dashboard that provides information on changes in the functional state of 23 components of the environment, focusing on the differences between these changes and the objectives of maintaining or achieving “good ecological status”. These components cover the four main categories of critical and essential environmental functions: the provision of resources, the reprocessing of pollution, biodiversity and human health. The scores of the 23 components are then aggregated to form a synthetic indicator and a dynamic indicator. 

The two pilots revealed the general lack of standards for maintaining biodiversity in both countries, as well as significant gaps in environmental regulation, both in Kenya and Vietnam. The lack of historical reference points to measure the good state of the environment is a serious obstacle to the establishment of protection policies and prevents the debate on narratives and development trajectories respectful of the natural heritage.

Moreover, the analysis shows a worrying situation in both Kenya and Vietnam about pollution of natural environments, despite the very limited availability of data on these issues. In Kenya, the results are rather good on natural resources, but many essential and critical contributions of natural capital to human well-being and health are greatly degraded, both for water and air quality, as well as for access to natural amenities. In Vietnam, fish resources, soil erosion, and air and water pollution appear to be the most degraded dimensions.

According to ISPONRE and NEMA, the ESGAP framework has great potential as a tool for communicating the state of a territory and for monitoring public policies in both countries. It offers a framework for broadening the range of topics covered by public policies and proposes a high-quality standard for the establishment of environmental sustainability assessment frameworks.

This research project also supported a flagship UNEP report on the environmental content of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Measuring Progress: Environment and the SDGs, which incorporates the lessons learned from these two ESGAP pilots. This has shown that, of the 231 SDG monitoring indicators, 77 can be linked to an environmental theme from near or far, but that only 11 of them really describe the state of the environment.

Download the reports: 

• Environmental Sustainability in Kenya: A Case Study in the ESGAP and SESI (June 2022)
• Environmental Sustainability in Vietnam: A Case Study in the ESGAP and SESI (June 2022)

Initial feedback indicates that the ESGAP pilots need to be backed up by real capacity-building exercises of the administrations in charge of environmental monitoring and natural capital management, in order to hope to improve environmental diagnostics in the long term.

The concepts of “scientific standards” and “diagnosis of the state of natural capital contributions” also need to be refined, explained and adapted to the available contexts and data: if, ideally, these standards are derived from international frameworks and legitimated at the national level, often alternative indicators must be used to adapt the standards to different contexts.

These lessons complement those from a pilot of the ESGAP indicator, led by AFD and WWF in New Caledonia. Following another ECOPRONAT call for projects, two more ESGAP studies are underway:

• A first study aims to develop indicators for biodiversity and the health of natural ecosystems, as well as an ESGAP methodology in South Africa and Colombia.
• A second study aims to refine socio-economic indicators and study the relationship between the economy and the environment, with Vietnam as a case study.

Contact: 

• Oskar Lecuyer, research officer at AFD

In 2015, the private sector accounted for 13% of students in higher education in Vietnam and 60% in India. To the extent that these figures are reliable (higher education institutes not always being registered in some countries), they indicate the significance the private sector has taken on at this level of education. In Peru and Mexico, nearly 7 out of 10 universities are private. The development of the private sector seems to have in part involved a movement toward democratization of access to higher education in the past 15 years. But this movement is not necessarily synonymous with reduction in inequalities in access or with conditions of academic success becoming more equal. For example, in the poorest quintile of Mexico, only 1% of the age 15-24 segment pursue studies in higher education, compared to 32% in the wealthiest quintile. 

This project is part of the first phase of the Research Facility on Inequalities, coordinated by AFD and funded by the European Commission's Directorate-General for International Partnerships over the 2017-2020 period. The first phase of the Facility has led to the conduct of 22 research projects and the publication of around 100 research papers and policy briefs.

The objectives in this research program are to:

• describe trends in both public and private higher education;
• identify to what extent and the way in which public policies take inequalities in higher education into consideration, and if so which inequalities;
• identify to what extent and the way in which these public policies take into account the growth and/or consolidation of the private sector of higher education, as well as its role in reducing or increasing inequalities at this level;
• detect whether the actors of private-sector higher education include the fight against inequalities in their objectives and, if so, how and why. 

This multidisciplinary research program (covering sociology, economics, demography and educology) is original in that it analyzes data from different sources and of different types using a purposive sample of so-called developing or emerging countries: India and Vietnam for Asia; Mexico and Peru for Latin America; Senegal, Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Africa.

This work will help establish an international research network on the theme of higher education and inequalities. The countries were selected based on the different degrees of development of their system of public and private higher education and the way this teaching is structured (co-existence between public and private, porosity between the two sectors, competition, etc.). They also differ in terms of their social structure (unequal development of the middle classes, for example). The study will compare these regions and countries: the material collected in the various countries will be of the same nature and will be analyzed using the same methodological approaches.

This research will give rise to conferences and seminars, a collective publication, country-documents, policy briefs, and research articles. The expected outcomes are:

• development of a typology on the current  public and private offer of higher education in the selected countries;
• development of a conceptual framework and typologies on inequalities and private higher education;
• identification, in the different countries, of policies whose goal has been to work to reduce inequalities in higher education in the course of the past 15 years;
• qualitative analysis of the criteria for access to public or private higher education, for the different categories of students or populations concerned, the conditions in which they study, the processes of certifying school diplomas, etc.;
• identification of the factors of production of inequalities in higher education, and the indicators that might be used to measure and correct them.
  
   

You may find the research papers here (in French):

- Inégalités et enseignement supérieur : entre politiques publiques et développement du secteur privé en Argentine 



- Universités privées au Mexique: entre reproduction, production et réduction des inégalités 



- Le paradoxe de l'enseignement supérieur privé au Sénégal: réduire les inégalités tout en les maintenant

 

- Des inégalités éducatives à la mise en question de l'opposition public/privé dans l'enseignement supérieur congolais, un défi documentaire et conceptuel 



- Enseignement supérieur au Vietnam: privatisation, démocratisation et inégalités 



- Complexité et inégalités de l'offre universitaire privée au Pérou. Regard sur la diversité sociodémographique des étudiants et des conditions d'insertion professionnelle des diplômés d'universités privées 



- L'expansion de l'enseignement supérieur privé et le creusement des inégalités sociales 



- Enseignement supérieur et inégalités sociales en Inde

Contact :



Linda Zanfini, Research Officer, AFD

Rohen d’Aiglepierre, Research Officer, AFD

Étienne Gérard, Research Director, IRD and Director of the CEPED (since 2014)

Contactos:

• Linda Zanfini, encargada de investigación, AFD
• Rohen d’Aiglepierre, coordinador de investigación, AFD
• Étienne Gérard, director de investigación en el IRD y director del Ceped (desde 2014)