Prospects for establishing environmental satellite accounts in a developing country: The case of Rwanda

In this paper, we discuss the beginning of Rwanda's current work on natural capital accounts. Many developing countries began similar work on environmental satellite accounts in the 1990s and early 2000s, only to abandon them a few years later when the initial political interest waned. The question arises, therefore, as to whether renewed interest in these accounts has the potential to have a longer-lasting impact on national accounting practices. In Rwanda's case, the decision was to begin satellite accounting work by focusing on resources where key economic trade-offs between different uses had already begun to be identified by policymakers, and where the gathering of economic statistics had already been improved as a result. It seems likely that this approach could lead to more durable satellite accounts, and that a similar approach would be feasible in many other countries.