Sustainable Resources Management Journal

01-14

Authors: Weston D. Sakala and Jacob Mwitwa

Donors have played a significant role in the environmental sector in Zambia. They have over the years provided financial and technical resources for environmental management. Purposive stratified sampling was employed in selecting the respondents for the study. The sample population of the study consisted of government departments, statutory bodies, donors, non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations. The research employed semi-structured and key informant interviews, focus group discussions, field observations, and review of existing literature. The results revealed that policy making and implementation was an expensive implementation hence government depended on external financial and at a foreign technical support. As a result of inadequate resources, most policies in the environmental resources sector had not been reviewed for some time. Other challenges in policy making include; conflict of interests among different stakeholders and weak linkages between research and policy making. Public policies in the developing countries possess certain challenges and peculiarities of their own. It is as a result of these various challenges that most developing countries need donor support when making and implementing.This compromises environmental resource governance and consequently, there is a high probability of donor driven policies influencing how environmental resources are managed as the new policies have the potential to reflect a broad range of international interests at the expense of local interest.