D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 3, May/June 2002, p. 8-11)

The UN World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Johannesburg,
August 26 - September 4, will take stock 10 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and intends to get 'action-oriented' decisions underway. But all indications from the preparatory process are that there are few hopes for substantial progress on achieving the goal of sustainable development.

An agenda and the working method for Johannesburg are gradually taking shape. Important subjects such as the social and ecological impacts of globalisation and unsustainable production and consumption patterns are to be discussed. The agenda will also include some key sectors such as water and energy, which are of special importance for a policy that is to be both sustainable and aimed at reducing poverty.

An interesting and partly controversial debate has broken out on the way the World Summit sees itself and on what kind of results it should deliver. At PrepCom 2 in New York (January 28 - February 8) it was clear that the summit is being seen not as a purely intergovernmental event but as a broad-based social project. On the one hand, there is to be a final communiqué agreed by the UN member nations. At the same time the UN will also accept 'partnership initiatives' between countries or regions as well as between all other 'stakeholders' in the process. Every 'participant' at the conference is to make a commitment to something and stop delegating 'responsibility' for sustainable development solely to politicians. In UN jargon, these initiatives are called 'Type 2 results'. So far absolutely no criteria of such agreements have been established. Evidently, in order to boost the number of the initiatives and projects everyone can bring their ideas for rescuing the planet to Johannesburg.

Stakeholder appreach to substitute
for government failure

It seems that encouraging and presentable best practice initiatives are to divert attention from the fact that the governments' success story 10 years after Rio probably will not be all that positive. This approach is most welcome as a complementary level to the summit. But it threatens to become a substitute to make up for the governments' inability to establish the right framework conditions and prerequisites for a global policy on sustainability.

This strategy of embracing the civil stakeholders has sparked some disputes among NGOs. Major international networks such as the International Forum on Globalisation, Friends of the Earth International and the Third World Network view this new variant of the "privatisation of politics" with great concern. They aimed to clarify their position on it by PrepCom 3 in New York (March 25-April 5). Others such as the British organisation UNED, which has backed up the Rio follow-up process very actively for years, are already organising a big conference in Johannesburg at which 'partnership initiatives' with corporations such as Aventis are to play a central role.

Regardless of these differences on strategy and concept, NGOs worldwide are using the opportunity of the UN summit to make the public more aware of the global and local environmental and development problems. In Germany, a broad alliance of NGOs formed under the umbrella of the Environment and Development Forum aims to point out ways to achieve social-ecological development and influence the official preparatory process by making its own constructive proposals and demands. The NGOs also hope to benefit from stronger mobilisation of the German public as part of their 'Rio+10' campaign when the German political parties are at the hustings for Federal elections due in September. They intend to make an issue of Germany's responsibility for solving global environmental and development crises and step up pressure on the government to be active in designing the agenda for Johannesburg. Their main expectations on the political side include that the summit will result in a fresh push for a social and ecological shaping of globalisation, and that it will adopt concrete action plans or even strategies binding under international law for sustainable energy and water supply.

At the beginning of the 1990s, buzzterms such as 'peace dividend' and 'global sustainable development' stand for a new mood of euphoria for an international policy which at last was to deal with the questions of humanity's future - overcoming global poverty and the destruction of the environment. The many agreements and compromises achieved between the governments of North and South in Rio initially fuelled this hope. But the balance sheet of the Rio process looks extremely meagre.

Deforestation continues

Only about 10 per cent of the world's forests are officially protected. At present, 149 countries are engaged in international initiatives to draft criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management. The most successful initiatives so far are the private ones of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The FSC was founded in Toronto in 1993 by representatives of environmental groups, the timber industry, foresters, indigenous people's organisations, communities that use forests, and certification bodies for forest products, from 24 countries. Its goal is to promote environment-friendly and socially acceptable forestry worldwide.

So far there are no plans to discuss in Johannesburg how deforestation can be halted by international agreements and treaties. The entrenched business interests of the timber companies have pervaded international negotiations for years. NGOs have also for years demanded a forest protection protocol to the UN convention on biodiversity which would recognise the forest's manifold protective and utilisation functions.

The global energy and climate crisis also goes on. Worldwide, two billion people have no access to energy services. Low-income families in rural areas in particular have no supply. Guaranteeing a continual supply of electricity is a main challenge for economic development in Eastern Europe (where in principle basic supply is ensured), and in almost all developing countries. Precisely for climate policy and social reasons, basic supply with energy services for a growing population must be linked with an aggressive global drive for a policy of efficiency and promotion of renewable energy. Despite technical feasibility and awareness of the huge potential for effectiveness in the energy sector, worldwide investment in energy efficiency and energy-saving has declined in the last decade. Global liberalisation of the energy market and colossal subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy sources (estimated to total 180 billion euros worldwide), put downward pressure on energy prices and thus reduce incentives for investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy. The global share of renewable energy, not counting hydroelectric power, is only almost 2 per cent of total output.

Even if it is to be hoped that the national ratifications needed for the Kyoto Protocol to come into force will be on hand in time for the Johannesburg summit, with all its loopholes and concessions the international agreement falls far short of what is needed in terms of climate protection policy if the impacts of global warming are still to curbed. It was agreed in Rio that emissions of greenhouse gases should by 2000 be reduced to the level of 1990. Instead, up to 1999 worldwide CO₂ emissions rose by an average of 7 per cent. The Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) obliges the industrialised nations to begin reducing their greenhouse gas emissions only from 2008. And in the meantime the USA, the country with the world's highest per-capita emissions which for years managed to water down the protocol, has pulled out of the entire process.

That is why NGOs demand a global energy strategy which formulates framework conditions for a worldwide sustainable energy policy that takes account of climate factors and the 'right to development' recognised in many UN resolutions. This should lead to precise demands on the various government and private sector actors, as well as on multilateral finance institutions and export credit agencies. Such a strategy would be urgently needed to complement international climate protection, which is advancing only at snail's pace.

The global water crisis is hitting above all the poor people in urban and rural areas. Millions of them suffer from severe water shortages and sanitary conditions unfit for human beings. Half the world population is already affected by diseases caused by polluted drinking water. At the same time, there is a wasteful use of the precious asset of water. Particularly in irrigation farming, the potential for higher efficiency is immense. The NGOs demand that the goal of a global water strategy must be water supply and waste water disposal for all by 2015 in order to honour the right to clean drinking water and access to sanitary facilities in the context of the human right to food. A comprehensive reform of the water sector in developing countries is an urgently needed precondition for that. In the NGOs' view, the participation of the private sector in attempting to resolve the international water crisis is praised too much as a cure-all. Instead, the NGOs demand a comprehensive and independent review of past experiences with privatisation policy in the water sector and an analysis of possible alternatives with users' participation. Even for this crucial sector of effective poverty reduction and simultaneous saving of scarce resources it still is not clear what concrete proposals and action plans the governments will take to Johannesburg.

Financing for the environment and
development

The North's credibility gap includes the fact that the industrialised nations have in no way kept their promise to provide more money for the global fight against poverty and for environmental protection. At the Rio conference in 1992 the allocation of fresh and additional funds was seen as a core condition for the success of its decisions. It was estimated then that implementing Agenda 21 in the developing countries between 1993 and 2000 alone would require US$ 600 billion. Against this background, the way things actually turned out in the 1990s is appalling. The funds for international development cooperation stagnated at first at a low level, and then dropped to their current level of 0.22 per cent of the OECD countries' gross domestic product - an all-time low.

Stagnating funds from public budgets for international development policy and the erosion of national tax revenues in general, triggered off a debate on new sources of finance long ago. The UN Conference on Financing for Development held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March and the upcoming Johannesburg summit have led to a number of new ideas which seek to link the raising of fresh funds for global public tasks with ecological steering effects. Besides the Tobin tax demanded by globalisation critics, which would help to slow down global financial transactions, other instruments such as levies, certificates and taxes (such as on CO₂ emissions and aviation fuel) are conceivable or necessary. In its latest appraisal, the German Federal government's Scientific Advisory Board for Global Environmental Changes proposed levies on the use of global community assets such as international airspace and the world's oceans. The levies would raise money which could be invested in meaningful ecological and social projects and have an ecological steering effect. They would also be a start to internalising external environmental costs, and as a main building block of a global sustainability policy would be indispensable. It cannot be assumed that these innovative financing mechanisms will achieve a breakthrough in Johannesburg. But they could certainly be part of the summit's upside if it commissions feasibility studies for their introduction.

Design global justice
in ecological terms?

The conceptual designs of the Rio conference's Agenda 21 and the ratified and further negotiated conventions and their respective protocols since then suffered from weaknesses. They did not have the potential for drawing clear ecological limits which would match the power of economic globalisation, particularly in the forceful way it is driven by other institutions of the world economy such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This is true even if some successes have been achieved here and there such as the Biosafety Protocol, which attempts to curb dissemination of genetically modified organisms. But Agenda 21's much-cited paradigm of sustainable development never clashed greatly with the neoliberal economic policy of the 1990s. At any rate, the compromises and contradictions of the Rio process never really contained anything to counter the dynamism of liberalisation and privatisation.

The daily functioning of the world economy and its concomitant flow of materials, consumption of resources and emissions (including waste) are the core of the ecological dimension of globalisation. With the opening of markets, the scraping of many import restrictions, and so on, a technology transfer and global trade began which is resulting in growing consumption of resources and increasing emissions. What we have long known in national terms applies internationally. Successes in achieving efficiency, which are now taking place worldwide due to technological innovation, also open up other prospects for growth. But these efficiency effects are sapped by the impacts of growth and expansion.

No priority for environment

Although the industrialised nations clearly still bear the main responsibility for both high consumption of resources and greenhouse gas emissions, and their credibility gap is huge, it is astounding how little the chief negotiators of the developing countries' governments actively table proposals for resolving the dual crisis of the environment and development. As a rule, like their counterparts from the North, they negotiate in environmental agreements and within the framework of the WTO to gain competitive advantages for their modern sectors that are capable of competing on the world market. That they fail on issues such as market access for their agricultural produce and textiles in the face of the hegemonic position of the big economic blocs is only one side of the coin of their weak bargaining power. It cannot hide the fact that improving the living conditions of the poor in terms of equal access to resources, the right to clean drinking water, and so on, is not one of the top priorities of most governments of the South, nor the fact that they see environmental and social standards as obstacles to development.

In view of this constellation of interests, the many demands from NGOs for an investment regime with clear and binding social and ecological standards for transnational companies, and their call for environmental law finally to be given precedence over the WTO's trade rules, probably have little chance of realisation. It appears that also in Johannesburg the governments will subject global sustainability policy to free trade provisos instead of finally analysing the social and ecological impacts of the free trade doctrine. The European Union (EU), which otherwise likes to claim that it is the trailblazer on environmental policy, also has so far not distinguished itself in the slightest way by playing an active role in the preparations for the summit. The Rio process was and is an integral part of existing constellations of power and interests. For civil society, which champions emancipatory goals and a just social and ecological development, there is no alternative but to articulate its demands loudly in the run-up to and during the Johannesburg conference and change the summit's present and hardly encouraging agenda.