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From Mario Kart to pro-poor environmental governance

Nature Sustainability volume 4, pages 376–378 (2021)Cite this article

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Improving environmental stewardship requires improvement of the options available down to the poorest resource users. Agriculture will no longer be the path to development and better options that it once was, without rethinking how and where to intervene. An iconic video game provides a lens into how this can happen.

Historically, the principal path to economic diversification and growth for many poor states has been through agriculture. States pushed first for food security, then agricultural diversification; diversified production enabled agricultural commercialization and thenceforth the strengthening of non-agricultural sectors of the economy. Agriculture then faded in economic importance, much as an early successional species in this economic ecosystem. Peter Timmer1 shows that this path held true through the decades of the Green Revolution, leading to major growth in East and Southeast Asia, but that it won’t hold true today. The Green Revolution followed a ‘best first’ approach for investing in irrigation and the planting of high-yielding seed systems; the remaining poor spaces — states and poor areas within states in the infrastructure-poor regions of Africa and Asia, in particular — are harder and more remote. Moreover, post-Green Revolution grain prices are too low to encourage new innovation and development. ‘Pro-poor growth’ (both poverty alleviating, to lift groups up, and pro-equity, to keep groups together2,3) for the remaining poor will need a different path forward than what lifted the recently poor.

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Fig. 1: Causal loop representation of rubber-banding in different systems.

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Acknowledgements

I thank S. McDermid, D. Kanter and faculty at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) for comments on earlier versions of this concept.

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  1. Department of Earth & Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Andrew Reid Bell

  2. Department of Environmental Studies, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Andrew Reid Bell

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Correspondence to Andrew Reid Bell.

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Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks Peter Newton and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Bell, A.R. From Mario Kart to pro-poor environmental governance. Nat Sustain 4, 376–378 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00685-8

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