In the balance: the future of sustainable development

From the Editors

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) that will be held in Johannesburg between 26 August and 4 September will bring together negotiators from more than 150 countries to try to make practical, targeted agreements that will help bring closer the prospect of a fairer, more sustainable world.

The summit comes ten years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. The ‘Earth Summit’, as it was known, achieved binding agreement on two major global environmental issues – climate change and biodiversity. Three other, non-binding, agreements were made on the relationship between sustainable environment and social development.

Agenda 21, an assessment and plan of action for advancing the agreed environmental and social goals, was also secured at Rio, with a recommendation that all countries should produce national sustainable development strategies.

Ten years on, four preparatory meetings (or ‘PrepComs’) were held in New York and Bali, Indonesia, bringing together stakeholders – governments, NGOs, business groups – to plan the agenda and prospects for the Johannesburg conference.

One of the people who has been most active in trying to ensure the summit’s success is Felix Dodds, executive director of Stakeholder Forum For Our Common Future. With a focused understanding of the agenda and practical issues at stake, and an unmatched insight into the often delicate relationships between non-governmental organisations, corporations and governments, Dodds is uniquely qualified to speak about the problems and opportunities of the summit process. Here, Felix Dodds talks to Caspar Henderson, Globalisation editor of openDemocracy.

open – The latest meeting in advance of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) recently ended in Bali. What was the meeting essentially about?

FD – Bali was the final preparatory meeting, or PrepCom, before Johannesburg. It was expected to have two governmental outcomes: to finalise a programme of action, and to start the negotiations on a political declaration.

A further goal was an agreement or a framework for enabling partnerships, involving both governments and other stakeholders, to be recognised at the summit.

The uneven road to Bali

open – Some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have suggested that Bali was a tremendous letdown. Do you think this is fair?

FD – In general terms, yes. There were a number of problems at Bali and these go back to the previous meeting, PrepCom 3 in New York in April. At that time, there was a disagreement about the way that the Programme of Action should be designed. The chair of PrepCom 3, Emil Salim, the former Environment Minister of Indonesia, had approached it in an unusual way. Instead of producing a document outlining specific actions and spending plans along with means of implementing them (as documents such as Agenda 21 are designed), Emil Salim simply offered a set of paragraphs under various topic headings (Draft Plan of Implementation for the WSSD).

This caused a lot of frustration to the WSSD hosts, the South African government. In response, they distributed another document in the run-up to Bali under what are called non-paper terms. In theory, a non-paper is one that is not attributable. But the South Africans made it clear to everyone in Bali that they had written it. This non-paper was an attempt to refocus the Bali discussion around a coherent agenda for following through decisions: timetable and targets, specific activities, means of implementation plus clarity on the finance and resources required.

The non-paper was a good piece of work. Many NGOs and stakeholder groups reacted positively to it, the UK government made it clear that they supported the South African government position, and even the vice-chairs from Canada and Egypt suggested that the chair should redo his own document accordingly. But, instead, the chair just tinkered with the text, and left it substantially unchanged.

Some governments went as far as actually asking us, the Stakeholder Forum, to try to get the G8 to intervene. We actually had a meeting with the G8 sherpas to help get things back on track. And the UN Secretary General was so worried that he issued a statement suggesting the summit should focus on five areas – energy, biodiversity, food security, health and fresh water – as a way of trying to help push it in the right direction.

But it became very difficult to change course. Once government representatives arrived in Bali, they had to approach the chair’s text in good faith. Thus, by the time we went into the Bali meeting we had, essentially, the wrong document.

open – Why do you think this was allowed to happen?

FD – I think that the UN – and we’ve made these comments to the Secretary General’s Office – should actually have instructions on what a programme of action should look like so that it is not reinvented each time we start this process. Many documents of this kind are relatively similar in the way that a programme of action is developed, and the learnings they embody need to be shared.

For example, if the PrepCom document had been structured along the lines of Agenda 21, the gaps that needed to be filled in would be clear. We could go through the document and see if questions, say, of regional level actions on fresh water were missing. Instead, at Bali, all we had was a series of paragraphs with no context or standard of comparison.

Even at this stage, there is hope that the Secretary General’s five areas might be developed into another document. What status that document would have is unclear. There was discussion in the corridors that the G8 might in some way endorse the Secretary General’s call for these five areas and that some work could be done to produce a kind of hybrid document that might be available for negotiating in Johannesburg.

But time is now desperately short. We are now in a situation where there is no bureau to lead the process, because after Bali the political bureau was dissolved and the bureau for the WSSD will not be elected until the first day of the summit itself. Basically, the only people in place now are the host country, South Africa. In this context, this might actually be a blessing – they have been enormously impressive throughout this process. Their clearness of direction in trying to push this conference in the right direction deserves an enormous amount of credit.

From Bali to Johannesburg: leaving it to the politicians?

open – Looking here at the programme of action or implementation document of the WSSD, there are a huge number of bracketed areas. Why is this? Is the essence of the document just a wish list, and in no way really a deliverable text?

FD – This, too, was very badly managed in Bali. The problem was that the Bali document did not lend itself to the kind of agreements between the various stakeholders that are a necessary part of making progress at the summit. For example, it is likely that both the Group of 77 and the US were ready to agree a financial deal over the TransNational Conference convention, based on money released under the Monterrey Conference on Finance and Development. The chance of such an agreement was lost by the inadequacies of the PrepCom document.

Visit the Water Aid site. Photograph: © Caroline Penn

To make the point in more general terms: donor governments do not want to commit money to things they cannot deliver. So, on water, a clear programme of action would have entailed specified mechanisms to deliver it – such as a set of partnerships on rainwater harvesting, on water delivery for countries in sub-Saharan Africa that will require aid. All this could have been quantified in terms of numbers of people and resources. We know, for example, that to halve the numbers without access to clean water by 2015 means that, globally, 300,000 people a day have to gain access.

One of the things that have become clear during this process is that the Millennium Development Goals were too aspirational. In contrast, we very much wanted incremental targets, and a work-orientated approach – something the South Africans, too, have argued for. If we are serious about hitting a target for 2015, we must know where we want to be in 2005. And if we know where we want to be in 2005, then we must have some idea of the kinds of activities that are required now.

This has not happened. Partly because the US representatives have actually been taking out some of the targets. Their argument, and I have some sympathy with it, is that unless there is a serious attempt to achieve something, that we really mean it and have a programme of action to do it, then what’s the point? They don’t want to support targets that are not founded on a firm scientific basis, and with no evidence that the international community intends to deliver them.

open – Was the issue of greenhouse gas emission targets one of the US’s sticking points?

FD – There were several. The US have also been arguing against sanitation targets, which is something that the Bonn Freshwater Conference endorsed. It requires 380,000 people a day to be given proper sewage systems to reach the target. Well, to deliver this enormous target would mean reorientating aid giving to both the millennium and later targets. The governments of northern countries don’t seem to be prepared to do that. They have lost their political belief.

I think that one of the hopes for Johannesburg, precisely because it is a meeting of heads of government, is that the leaders can use their political weight to put it back on track. If, for example, we could have a proper programme of action and intention to deliver, then the head of a government could then instruct the development ministry to relocate its resources to the relevant area. There is hope that the Secretary General’s five areas (food security, fresh water, health, biodiversity and energy) might be able to do that to some extent.

open – Four of these are primarily but not exclusively development targets. The fifth, energy, though it has important development aspects, is also very much in the environmental category. In that regard it seems unlikely the US would endorse the kinds of proposals the European Union has put forward.

FD – I look at it slightly differently. In the original discussions in 1999 about this summit, it was felt that it should have a poverty focus. The component parts of poverty – food, water, energy, shelter, work, healthy environment – are essentially contained in the Secretary General’s proposal. In the context of the work on energy, the US are not unsympathetic to looking at renewables and different forms of energy provision for developing countries. For example, one of the US initiatives is the Energy Village Network, which is an attempt to link villagers into alternative forms of energy.

The US administration is approaching this summit seriously, and with money to spend. We don’t know exactly how much – but at Monterrey they promised some $4 billion. Now, even if far less than this is put on the table, it will require the European Union to be prepared to match it. But the problem we have is, as I’ve indicated, that the summit document does not lend itself towards helping to spend that kind of money.

Getting round the rich men’s roadblocks

open – The call for a charter for corporate accountability has received some attention. What is going on there?

FD – Friends of the Earth have come out for a convention, in one of the most impressive campaigns I’ve seen by an NGO for a long while. It has really opened up a debate, which will have to be addressed. A number of companies would be very sympathetic to such a discussion, because they feel that many of their colleagues are freeloading on the voluntary initiative agenda. Now voluntary initiatives on social and environmental responsibility are very important. But, unless you create a baseline which you can move off, then there is no reward to companies that actually are delivering.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a shift within the leading companies on this question. We raised this issue in 1999, and produced a non-paper then on the summit process, which the International Chamber of Commerce responded to. Some companies feel dissatisfied with the existing Global Compact, which has nine areas that companies are meant to be abiding by – but they only have to abide by one in order to join. There is no system of incremental improvement built into it, where the commitments and standards that companies have to meet on environmental and social responsibility show a clear progression.

There are different possible ways of making progress here. I do think that the issue of a convention for companies may not be fully dealt with by Johannesburg, but it is now at least firmly on the agenda.

open – The trade agenda for poverty reduction is still a crucial aspect but it’s not developing in a way many people have hoped. In this connection, something in the Draft Plan of Implementation presented in Bali made me, in the context of what’s been happening in the last few months, laugh out loud – the agreement to “achieve substantial improvements in market access… reductions of, with a view to phasing out, all forms of export subsidies and substantial reduction in trade distorting support for agricultural products”. Do you think the spotlight of Johannesburg may help to change the political temperature and ultimately the way that trade and subsidies are handled in Europe and the US?

FD – This is one of the major issues that wasn’t resolved. There was a deal on the table, which was put forward by the South Africans. I wasn’t…well, none of us were allowed in the room! It’s my understanding that two countries within the European Union blocked the deal – France and Ireland. It’s probably not surprising why that was the case. We don’t know enough about the ins and outs of the deal. But we understand the Americans were prepared to go with it, as was the rest of the European Union.

On the Indonesian Island of Slayar, the message is clear: two children is best. Photograph: © Galen R. Frysinger

This is an issue that will be one of the major issues in Johannesburg. One of the problems that we suffered from in Bali was a selective use of agreements. For example, the Americans often went back on previous agreements such as the Beijing and Cairo Conferences on women, population and development. Meanwhile, they and others were refusing to move back on the Monterrey Consensus or the Doha Agreements. And so you have a schizophrenia: either we agree that everything that has previously been agreed stands and we move forward, or we pick and choose which previous agreements to overturn in order to get what we want this time round.

In the context of trade, in Johannesburg we need to lay down what the sustainable development criteria should be for the next round. But, so far, we have merely put all the key points in brackets in the text and so postponed their resolution. This is because of a disagreement over whether the World Trade Organisation (WTO) or the WSSD is the proper place for that conversation. It’s unclear what will happen in Johannesburg on that.

We also have to factor in what happens at the G8 meeting this week in Canada, because there are five African heads of state going – led by Thabo Mbeki, the South African President. It’s the first time we have had such a meeting, and the main item on the agenda is to map out the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). There may be some deals on trade being done there.

NGOs criticise the G8 for being opaque, when its impacts on the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are enormous. There have already been conversations with the French, who hold the next G8 presidency, to try to open up some space for more creative debate with all the other stakeholders.

After Rio: one step back, two forward?

open – What achievements from Johannesburg would satisfy you?

FD – We need a new text based on the five issues of the UN Secretary General, drawn up in a proper programme of action format. With the right political will from the G8 and others, it could still be achieved because the Americans would then be told by their President that they had to deliver something.

I’d like to see timetables and targets on energy, biodiversity, freshwater, security, health – with tranches of money then delivered to implement these, whether these come through government initiatives, UN initiatives, intergovernmental bodies, or from stakeholders. I think this is a very exciting agenda around which we could all start to rally.

open – Are we back to where we were in Stockholm in 1972?

FD – No, we’re not. For one thing, the world is a lot more complicated now. If you look back to 1992, the Soviet Union had only just dissolved. The impacts of that were not yet known. We had also not really experienced globalisation – and we have called for a UN commission on the globalisation of sustainable development.

One of our arguments to the people involved in drawing up the Johannesburg programme of action was that we should have addressed globalisation in each of the areas. What does globalisation in energy, water and health mean? This would allow putting some tangible good and bad into our understanding, rather than the ungraspable discussion on globalisation that often occurs. So I think that 1992 in a sense was easier compared to where we are now. We’ve had a large change in governments in developed countries prior to this summit, which has caused a definite change of mood. But the other thing that we potentially have, which we did not have in 1972 or 1992, is money. In theory, we should be able to do something with that!

open – But there have been declarations in the past to increase aid as a proportion of GDP from the leading industrialised countries. This hasn’t happened.

FD – Well, in 1992, governments agreed to try and deliver a $125 billion transfer from north to south. This amounted to 0.7% of GDP. It was amazing how close it got to what was meant to be the UN target for official development assistance. Yet the only new money that was committed at Rio was for the Global Environment Facility – and lo and behold, at the same time, aid dropped by an equivalent amount. The year 1997, the five-year review of Rio, was a wake-up call; after that, aid flows started to go back up.

In 1992, northern governments used the recession and dissolution of the Soviet Union to postpone action and, after the economic upturn started, they then declared foreign direct investment to be their favoured route to help the poorer countries. But foreign direct investment only went to ten countries in the world – none of them in Africa. They simply weren’t addressing the poorest at all. Meanwhile, we had no understanding of what the impact of foreign direct investment was, positive or negative. Basically, the developed countries didn’t do what they promised in 1992.

After 1997, the UK did start to push up its aid. I understand the French have set a date for 0.7%, over a ten-year horizon, according to the French ambassador in Canada. If this happens, two major European right-of-centre governments would actually be committing to aid increases in a way that left-of-centre governments have not.

In Dan Issa, Niger 50 women formed a peanut processing cooperative in 1992. Photograph: © Nicole Gaymon, ADF Staff

open – There is a tendency for governments of rich countries to make nice promises, but when the time comes for them to deliver, there are problems – a new US recession, say, or a serious security situation in the Middle East. I was struck by a comment reported from Thabo Mbeki at the World Food Summit (WFS) recently held in Rome, to the effect that all the heads of NATO had managed to attend an extravagant jamboree in Rome the previous week, yet only two bothered to turn up for the WFS – and this at a time when 800 million people suffer serious food insecurity, hunger and worse! That spoke of a real divide, and anger on his part. Is there a division developing between the rich countries and the rest of the world, that actually things are much less promising than we would like to believe?

FD – The WFS was a five-year review, which you would not expect a large number of heads of government to attend. Around seventy of them were at Rio Plus Five in 1997. Not many were at the original WFS. Not many countries regarded it as being at a level for heads of government. Johannesburg, in contrast, is a world summit, not a five-year review, and we already have forty-five heads of government committed to coming, including Chirac, Schroder and Blair, with the promise of seventy in toto.

There is a second point that relates to your fundamental question. I’ll give you a negative outcome from Johannesburg – that it’s the end of the sustainable development process as we know it, basically not something that people are prepared to put money into. Compare this with the way governments responded to the challenge of terrorism, by quickly delivering a massive amount of money for security-related policies – even where the intimate link between problems of security and poverty is widely recognised.

But if Johannesburg does prove to be the end of sustainable development as we know it, what are the implications? It may mean that those of us committed to the agenda may have to retreat, to spend the next ten years fighting for every marginal point, and to accept losing in many cases along the way. But even if this negative outcome occurs, it could be profoundly important in its own way. Because it may force people to fundamentally address some of the real issues that are not at present being addressed.

For example, we in the north are not facing up to consumption and production issues. We are losing the chance of making progress because of a lack of political leadership. No head of government is taking the lead in calling for society to address its fundamental problems. In this perspective, even if the outcome is negative, Johannesburg may actually be a wake-up call for the world. In which case, we have to go back to the grass roots and rebuild a movement that is able to generate leaders newly willing to take political risks.

Ideal outcomes and real prospects

open – What then would be the positive outcome for Johannesburg? You mentioned earlier partnerships you were working with to deliver practical results at a grass-roots level. What do they involve?

FD – Many organisations today need to change their focus. The Stakeholder Forum has, overall, been a policy wonk organisation. We are now changing as much as we can into a development organisation as well, whose concern is with the implementation of ideas. We want to contribute to, say, the water target in a quantifiable and practical way, rather than just talking about it. As an organisation we want to work in areas such as energy, food, security, health and fresh water.

open – The role of the private sector in water and sewerage provision, especially in urbanising environments is a hot topic. It has been discussed a good deal in the city of Johannesburg itself. Do you have any thoughts as to how that debate has evolved?

FD – We were contracted to organise the NGO involvement in the Hague Fresh Water Conference, then by the German government to hold the multi-stakeholder dialogues for the Bonn Fresh Water Conference which finished in December 2001. At The Hague, there was a lot of infighting but, by the time we got to Bonn, we had been able to create a positive dialogue. In fact, for the first time ever in a fresh water conference, we persuaded ministers and the private sector to discuss corruption in the water industry.

The debate on water privatisation falls into different areas. One is that most water companies will say, not that they favour privatisation, but that they favour being contracted to deliver water – and that water should remain in the ownership of local or national governments. If a government is prepared to sell off water as a commodity and the ownership shifts, then the companies of course will go in and bid, because it’s a market. The key point is that the debate has to be won at the political level. I think a coalition can be drawn together, which would include some of the major companies, in favour of ownership of water remaining in public hands while service provision can be from the private sector.

At present, only 5% of water is delivered by private companies. The other 95% is delivered by public sector or by other community means. The issue of service delivery is about how we can ensure water gets to people. There are different possible models, involving a mix of community-based, private and public agencies. With water, as with the other key issues on the sustainable development agenda, there may be many options. Governments need to set up a scheme which really involves the local stakeholders in a decision-making process and which reflects what is best for the country and its people.