Greening up and the Political Manifestos: A Review of Political Party Manifestos on Issues of the Environment in Malawi

Abstract

Environmental mismanagement or inequality, or both are a cause of havoc and risk vulnerability to most countries across the globe with the worst hit being the developing ones. Issues of water and food supply crises, extreme energy volatilities, greenhouse gas emissions and its impacts, severe income disparity, chronic fiscal imbalances among others are such examples of risks encountered by countries. Lack of political parties’ substantive ideologies, and that their policy positions are almost identical and often times centered within their political will, has seen the environment being crippled with little to no attention within their manifestos. This study involved a review of 5 political party manifestos in the Malawi 2019 Tripartite Election (TPE) by utilizing the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) methodology of counting the number of environmental sentences in party manifestos for national elections. Total number of statements with those for the environment were compared. Quantitative data management used Microsoft excel and IBM® SPSS® statistics version 23.0 for organization and to further analyse and answer the research question(s). From a total of 5 manifestos whose statement were studied especially on the issues of the environment, a revelation showed that only 60% of the manifestos had a standalone section with the majority of those with sections/chapters registering less than 10 statements on issues of the environment as compared to other sections like for example health and sustainable economic growth. 33% of the available standalone sections had no statement as a commitment in combating issues of the environment. Lack of commitment by parties has been displayed through their manifestos in helping to address problems that surround our environment by having scanty or no section at all. Having an environmental section/chapter with not even one statement on it has evidenced lack of seriousness and prioritization by parties. This just shows that there is little commitment by parties to fight issues of the environment that are a cause of most economic havocs. Parties in Malawi, must therefore consider the environment seriously right at the onset of manifesto development in order to inform proper policy development and implementations.