From Rio to Johannesburg and Beyond:
Assessing the Summit
by Hilary
French
WASHINGTON,
DC October
15 , 2002 -Compared
to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, this summer's World Summit
on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg was bound
to be somewhat disappointing. The negotiations leading up
to Johannesburg had not provided any reason to expect dramatic
break-throughs, and there were none. After the meeting, many
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) denounced the WSSD as
a failure. Even seasoned U.N. officials, while relieved that
the Summit had not broken down completely, were rather muted
in their responses.
But it would be a mistake to brand Johannesburg
a failure merely because it lacked some of the excitement
and energy of the Rio Summit. Negotiating new agreements,
the main task at Rio, is a far easier job than actually putting
them into practice in the farms, fields, and factories that
form the backbone of the world economy. If Rio was a coming-of-age
party for environmental issues on the global stage, Johannesburg
was more like a mid-life birthday party, where the optimism
of youth has been tempered by the realities of hard-won experience.
At a minimum, the World Summit was a valuable
opportunity to assess progress, or the lack thereof, in the
decade since the Earth Summit first put sustainable development
onto the international map.
The news was not good. In the aftermath of
the 1992 Rio Summit, diplomats and NGOs alike had high hopes
for the several landmark agreements reached there, including
international treaties on climate change and on the loss of
biological diversity, and a voluminous action plan for sustainable
development called Agenda 21. But in Johannesburg, delegates
knew that global environmental trends for the most part deteriorated
markedly in the subsequent decade. On the social front, some
important indicators improved, such as school enrollment and
illiteracy rates, but others threats worsened substantially,
such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic. And poverty rates remain stubbornly
high, with 2.8 billion people-nearly half of humanity-living
on less than $2 per day.
Although little forward movement was discernable
on the sustainable development agenda in the decade following
Rio, this does not mean that the world stood still. To the
contrary, powerful forces of globalization were unleashed
in the decade following the Earth Summit that posed major
new challenges, as well as some new opportunities, for sustainable
development.
Critics of globalization maintain that many
of the noble paper achievements of the Rio conference were
subsequently undermined just a few years later by the agreement
on a package of new trade accords at Marrakech in 1994 under
the aegis of the newly created World Trade Organization (WTO).
Many of the WTO's provisions contradicted the spirit, and
in some cases arguably even the letter, of the Rio accords.
And new dispute resolution procedures adopted as part of the
Marrakech package gave the new WTO rules teeth by authorizing
the imposition of trade sanctions to punish violators, in
contrast to the far less binding nature of international environmental
and social treaties.
The Johannesburg Summit offered the possibility
of a change in course that would rebalance today's emerging
structures of global governance away from a single-minded
focus on freeing international commerce and towards a broader
conception of progress that takes environmental and social
sustainability into account. But did Johannesburg deliver?
Targets and Timetables
Unlike at the Rio Earth Summit, there were no major treaties
up for negotiation in the run-up to Johannesburg. The most
extensive document agreed to by governments in Johannesburg
was a 54-page paper called the "World Summit on Sustainable
Development Plan of Implementation." In addition, the
100 world leaders who gathered there adopted a short "Johannesburg
Declaration on Sustainable Development." (These documents
and many others from the Summit can be downloaded from http://www.johannesburgsummit.org.)
Many governments pushed for the inclusion
in the Plan of Implementation of new targets and timetables
related to sustainable development that would complement and
build upon the Millennium Development Goals adopted by nearly
200 heads of state in 2000. Among other targets, the Millennium
Development Goals call for, by 2015, reducing by half the
share of the world's people living in extreme poverty as well
as those suffering from hunger and those lacking access to
clean drinking water; cutting infant mortality rates by two-thirds;
and ensuring that all children are enrolled in primary school.
The Millennium Development Goals, while laudable in their
own right, were weak on environmental protection and sustainable
development, and many people hoped that the World Summit would
fill in the gaps.
Several of the targets discussed during the
negotiations were eventually either eliminated or weakened
substantially. In one particular disappointment, a proposal
by the European Union, Brazil, and other Latin American countries
to adopt a numerical goal for the amount of energy to be obtained
from renewable sources was strongly opposed by oil-exporting
countries with a strong assist from the United States. In
the end, the fossil fuel defenders won: the final compromise,
although it endorsed increased reliance on renewables, did
not set a specific target. Nonetheless, the fact that the
debate got as far as it did was an indication that renewables
are coming of age internationally, with a number of countries
subsequently announcing plans to join together in a "coalition
of the willing" that will meet in Bonn, Germany, next
year to develop a concrete action plan for pushing renewable
energy forward.
Despite its shortcomings, the WSSD Plan of
Implementation does include some time-bound targets, including
halving the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation
by 2015, restoring fisheries to their maximum sustainable
yields by 2015, eliminating destructive fishing practices
and establishing a representative network of marine protected
areas by 2012, reducing biodiversity loss by 2010, and aiming
by 2020 to use and produce chemicals in ways that do not harm
human health and the environment. Although many of these targets
are rather vague, at least they provide benchmarks against
which future trends can be measured.
Partnerships
One area in which Johannesburg differed markedly from Rio
was the introduction of roughly 280 "partnership initiatives,"
agreements among national governments, international institutions,
the business community, labor groups, non-governmental organizations,
and other actors to carry out sustainable development activities.
These partnership initiatives are a significant
departure from earlier approaches, where the emphasis has
been on accords among nation states. Illustrative examples
include a partnership for cleaner fuels and vehicles announced
at the Summit that will involve the U.N., national governments,
NGOs, and the private sector and a European Union "Water
for Life" initiative that will harness diverse partners
to help provide clean water and adequate sanitation in Africa
and Central Asia. (For an extensive list of partnership initiatives
linked with the Summit, see http://www.johannesburgsummit.org/html/sustainable_dev/type2_part.html.)
The hope is that the partnerships will help
to ensure that the targets agreed to in Johannesburg are in
fact met. But it is not yet clear how successful the numerous
partnerships announced at the Summit will be in reversing
today's deteriorating environmental and social trends. Not
all of the announced initiatives were entirely new. Criteria
for partnerships and procedures for monitoring and assessing
them were discussed in the course of the Summit preparations,
but watered down substantially in the end. And while some
of these partnerships may accomplish worthwhile results, they
are still no substitute for binding commitments from governments.
Strengthening the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Machinery
A key to ensuring that the various commitments made in Johannesburg
actually happen will be continuing international oversight
and monitoring. The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation gives
the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development a major hand
in this task, including a mandate to track implementation
of the Summit's partnership initiatives. The Plan of Implementation
also endorsed a decision earlier this year to strengthen the
U.N. Environment Programme and to provide for more effective
environmental coordination for the U.N. system at large. But
there was no decision made in Johannesburg to create a World
Environment Organization on a par with the WTO, as has been
advocated by a growing number of scholars and NGOs in recent
years, as well as by some governments.
The WSSD Plan of Implementation does call
for more cooperation between the United Nations and the international
financial institutions that are most closely identified with
globalization-the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF. But it
remains unclear exactly how this new collaboration will be
brought about and what its practical implications might be.
On the hotly contested question of clarifying the relationship
between environmental treaties and global trade rules, the
final agreement reasserts the importance of both bodies of
international law, but fails to provide clear guidance for
what to do in cases where they clash.
Broadening Participation
One of the lasting legacies of the Rio Earth Summit was a
heightened level of involvement of NGOs and representatives
of other major groups (such as farmers, local officials, and
labor representatives) in U.N. environment and sustainable
development deliberations. The organizers of the World Summit
aspired to build upon this tradition and take it to new levels.
Over 8,000 civil society participants were
officially accredited to the Summit. In addition to civil
society participation in official summit meetings, there was
a broad range of parallel events, such as
meetings of parliamentarians, Supreme Court justices, local
government officials, and trade unionists. There was also
action in the streets: an estimated 20,000 people representing
landless peoples and other social movements marched from one
of Johannesburg's poorest areas to the glistening convention
center on August 31st in protest of what they saw as the conference's
lack of meaningful attention to their plight.
The business community was also out in force
in Johannesburg. According to Business Action for Sustainable
Development, the organization that coordinated business input
into the Summit, an estimated 1,000 business representatives
participated in the Summit, 120 of them CEOs, Board Chairman,
or those of similar rank. In comparison, there were 100 world
leaders in attendance. The extensive industry involvement
in the Summit met with a with a decidedly mixed response,
with some viewing it as positive sign of growing engagement
by the business community in issues of sustainable development,
while others saw it as a worrisome sign of growing corporate
influence at the U.N.
On the critical issue of citizens' rights,
the World Summit made little official progress. The Rio Earth
Summit set the standard with the path breaking Principle 10
of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which
affirmed that individuals should have access to environmental
information, the opportunity to participate in decision making,
and effective access to judicial and administrative proceedings.
The WSSD Plan of Implementation speaks of furthering Principle
10, but then proceeds to give it only a qualified endorsement.
And an earlier proposal for global guidelines to promote broader
public participation was left on the cutting room floor.
Although many governments remain wary of citizen
scrutiny of their decision making, civil society is beginning
to take matters into its own hands. In one particularly promising
initiative, the Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute
launched a "Partnership for Principle 10" initiative
that encourages national governments, international institutions,
and NGOs to make commitments of their own aimed at putting
Principle 10 into widespread practice. (For more information,
see www.pp10.org.)
So was it all worth it? Only time will tell,
as we see what concrete action flows from the commitments
made in the World Summit's Plan of Implementation and through
the multitude of associated partnership agreements and other
initiatives. Although there can be no illusion that forging
a sustainable development path will be easy, the task is becoming
ever more urgent as the human costs of environmental degradation
and social despair continue to mount.
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