Desertification and the political agenda

Why, more than ten years after the United Nations Conference on Desertification, can so little progress on implementing the Plan of Action be reported? The answer lies, in part, in the characteristics of the issue. As an issue, desertification lacks definitional clarity, and geographic and resource specificity; it is intractable, long-term and latent; and it has a technical bias and no clearly defined villain. These characteristics make it difficult to muster the requisite political support needed to generate sustained policy attention from the public and decisionmakers. If the real problems encompassed by desertification are to be solved, the issue needs to be reframed and recast into a set of manageable and feasible objectives.