All posts tagged Sustainable development

Posted:
June 5, 2012
Author:
COA Students

Expectations, Expectations

Why global summits matter: Rio+20

by Ana Puhač

When last December TIME magazine featured the “the protester” as the person of the year, I thought how in the future, that publication could be seen as one of the most symbolic images that marked the start of a new global era. The world is in crisis? Isn’t that what every generation before us, facing a transition into a new global paradigm has said: “the world is in crisis”? Generations are born with crises like people are born with birthmarks – some have it, some don’t, some may symbolize something positive, some cause complications. But none have yet turned fatal, and completely eroded this civilization. We’ve learned from the past that there have been justifiable fears of global existential risks because of the warfare, the threat of nuclear mass destruction and epidemic diseases. But never before have we faced such global systematic disrepair because of the way we’ve decided to develop.

Evidently, the world is starting to crumble under the weight of growing social and economic inequality while polluting the environment and hitting the limit of natural resource depletion. The disrepair is irrefutable, but we persist in our failure to see the protests, collapses of economies, and ecocides that are surging up all over the world as part of one common problem.

The 1992 United Nations Human Development Report (HDR) called for “a world summit on human development that should be convened to enlist the support of the world’s political leaders for the objectives of the compact and their commitments to the resource requirements it will entail.” In response, the Earth Summit was created in Rio de Janeiro the same year. That summit has paved the way in forming a trajectory of global discussions on sustainable development.

Still, no such discussion has saved the world from the crisis. In the public eyes, global mega-conferences simply don’t deliver any success and suffer from exaggerated claims.

After so many disappointing conferences, the Rio+20 summit enjoys an excellent advantage over the other global conferences: incredibly low expectations. There is a little bit less than a month left, and the buzzing question in the media that is actually following the Rio process, is: What are the expectations?

What a trap. By asking the wrong questions, the media encourages standard and disappointing responses. This is how the world remains deemed a melting pot of malevolent disparity that yet again fails to attain utopia. The use of the word “expectation” in the question immediately assumes a direct and concrete “outcome” in response. No wonder that we read in the news how Rio+20 is framed as yet another impasse even before it has even happened. No wonder there are no expectations.

If global summits themselves don’t deliver real outcomes, why do they matter at all? They matter because they are the only acknowledgment that the world’s problems are interlinked and that only with collective commitment toward common goals are we all much better off.

The problem with expectations of global conferences such as Rio+20 is that they are not realistic. As Steven Hale writes in the Guardian: “We overestimate the importance of formal outcomes, and underestimate the importance of the progressive coalitions that summits can inspire.”

It is true: there will be no legally binding document coming out of Rio, there will be no serious political commitment, there hasn’t been improvement in the past twenty years, there is no organization around providing sufficient funding, a sinful carbon trade off will be made so that we can fly to the conference, only the privileged ones will be able to be there. What is maybe most striking is that, as I am writing, the majority in the world is barely surviving this day through hunger, war, injustice and disease, let alone expecting some outcome document they have probably never heard about to make everything better.

However, there are some key things we mustn’t forget. First and foremost, these conferences would not exist if there were no demands from civil society. Therefore, the civil society has as much of the responsibility for pushing the outcome as do the politicians and other power-holders have for making it possible. The responsibilities are different, but their magnitude is equal. Second, the engagement of civil society at the local and national level reflects in the discourse on the global level. Domestic politics decide whether and what outcomes from these negotiations will be implemented. Third, we must distribute our efforts wisely and understand that at this level of urgency, the world is more likely to be changed by deeds, and less by opinions or words.

Finally, the last Rio summit in 1992 has proved something to us. We haven’t seen the real change ever since, but it brought the notion of sustainable development into the mainstream. It’s sealed into politicians’ and public’s minds, and the lack of our common commitment just increasingly outlines its significance. The only sober expectation we have to have for the “outcome” of those couple of days is that there will be a strong prod to the world that we have entered a new era, marked by the global crisis that is curable only if we join our collective efforts. Therefore Rio+20 must, and will be, important.

What will happen after and between those big events is the real outcome. We must embrace the fact that those conferences hold high value of political symbolism more than they do immediate political intervention. Still, it is crucial to make that symbolism reflect the needs of people and the planet impeccably. This is why we need to unite, clearly state what we want and compel our political leaders to show genuine commitment.

Rio will be a moment in time. It won’t save the world, but even if we succumb to disaster or overcome the challenge, our descendants will know that we cared.

Posted:
June 2, 2012
Author:
Nathan Thanki

The Road to Rio+20

by Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler

In less than a month Rio+20 will begin. Government delegations from nearly every country in the world will arrive in the RioCentro put on their translation headsets and try to find common ground on the future of humankind’s place in the environment. Thousands of people will flood the streets for the People’s Summit – which promises to foster an alternative, bottom-up vision of sustainable development – and a myriad other meetings that will take place alongside the main event. A village erected in the city will host a caucus of indigenous peoples flying in from around the world. Business and civil society groups – from multinational corporations to mom-and-pop NGOs – will jockey to make their voices heard. Young people will tweet, blog, and lobby. Some will likely be thrown out of the official negotiations for making more ruckus than the government ministers can handle. Thousands and thousands of people will descend upon Rio de Janeiro to negotiate, exchange ideas, discuss in back rooms, document, criticize, promote, and scream for and against sustainable development.

A lot of what will be said won’t be understood. Even by the people like myself in Rio. Even by the people who are doing the talking. A lot of what will be said will amount to nothing. At this type of UN conference, acceptance of the final outcome document is by consensus – that means every country, all 190 some of them, has to eventually agree on every part in order for it to go into effect. And even then this is international soft law, which means that how much is enforced is determined by each individual country and the pressure put on them by the international community. No wars will be fought and no one will be arrested if a nation doesn’t live up to their promise on renewable energy.

But as a rule of thumb in international affairs: most international law is followed most of the time. The Millennium Development Goals are international soft law and their creation has set concrete targets for improving people’s lives –like reducing by half the number of people without access to sanitation – and have set the rules for the allocation of billions of dollars. And many of the Goals, which expire in 2015, will be met. But because the negotiations at Rio+20 are grappling with this kind of international law – and because sustainable development means a lot of things to a lot of people –much of the arguments in the official negotiations will be about really obscure language and may sound vague even after being interpreted by reporters in the world’s newspapers. A little background on the history of the negotiations that have led up to Rio+20, and on the evolution of the idea of sustainable development, are necessary to understand how the outcome of the next weeks will shape our world over the coming decades.

Environmental and developmental concerns are likely as old as the human conceptions of “environment” and “progress”. But in the 60’s after WWII mass production patterns had been applied to peacetime consumption and the population exploded worldwide – including in countries that were nowhere near equipped to handle millions of new souls – people in nations around the world began to realize this time this was different: humanity was pressing down upon the world with a heaviness never before seen, and not just in one place but everywhere. Several important papers, including The Limits of Growth, were published on the topic. And in 1972, The United Nations Conference on the Environment was convened in Stockholm.

That meeting was the first time nations from every corner of the world came together to talk about how best to develop socially and economically in order to benefit their people and what that meant in the context of the environment. And it was there that developed countries and developing countries first hashed out one of the central themes of the sustainable development debate that holds to this day: developed countries’ concern is with overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity (including through the impact of overpopulation and shoddy industry in developing countries) and developing countries’ concerns are with neo-colonialism (including worries about developed countries overexploiting and over-polluting and stunting the developing world’s growth in the name of sustainable development).

Fifteen years later the United Nations tasked a special commission with reviewing the state of development and environment. The final result of the commission, known as the Brundlandt Report after the its chairman, provides the most commonly cited definition of sustainable development: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. It also added a social element to its conception. A nation needs not just to protect its environment and provide materially for its people to be sustainable but it also must enable them to have a say in their society and control their own destiny. A dictatorship does not beget sustainability. Thus the Brundtland Report laid out the three pillars on which sustainable development rests: economic, environmental and social, each of which sometimes threatens to overcome the others but all of which must be respected and taken into account. The Report, published in 1987, also paved the way for the Earth Summit to take place in 1992– the biggest summit yet on sustainable development and a one of a kind conference in history.

Rio de Janeiro was chosen as the host city for the summit. At that point the city was much less prosperous and secure than it is today. A Brazilian man I met here said they had tanks patrolling the streets as a precautionary measure and that all the organized crime headed south out of the city for the conference. It was supposed to be big deal – all the world’s nations coming together to produce a joint statement about the relationship of civilization to the environment – but none of the delegations could really have predicted the direction it would take. One delegate suggested at the outset that the result should be a document every child should be able to understand and hang over their bed. The debate quickly became more complex than that, thanks largely to a strong and unified negotiating block of developing countries – the G-77 – which refused to let their concerns be pushed aside. The negotiating document grew from a symbolic declaration about the importance of the environment to human society to include complex and important issues of equity and responsibility between and within states. As a developing country representative said at one point, “our kids won’t have a bed over which to hang a poetic Earth charter if we don’t eradicate poverty also.” The debates went long into the nights and the questions raised were at least as important as the outcomes. Are environmental concerns just a disguise for a new trade barriers? Is there a “right to development,” and if so, what are the constraints on it? Does sustainable development require a fundamental restructuring of global North-South relations?

The results of the Summit included the creation of three new UN commissions, each of which has brought together the worlds’ governments to discuss rights and responsibilities every year since 1992. These are the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (which created the Kyoto Protocol and has held most of the intergovernmental debates about climate change and man’s role in it). In addition it produced two documents: The Rio Declaration and Agenda 21. The former consists of 27 principles, all of which seem matter of fact and universally agreeable at first glance but in fact were the result of furious negotiation. An example is Principle 8, “To achieve sustainable development and achieve a higher quality of life for all people, States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and promote appropriate demographic policies.” Developed countries wanted to include something about the need to put a check on uncontrolled population growth, which they worried was getting out of hand in Africa and Asia. Developing countries, though, were adamant that the blame for depletion of the world’s resources should fall not on the masses of poor people in their own countries but on the overproduction and overconsumption – the cars, the malls, the clothes – of the developed world, which did and still does use up a far greater share of water, trees, and oil than is sustainable. Some developed countries vehemently resisted the idea that they might have to change their living patterns. As the first President Bush said at the time, “The American way of life is not up for debate.” In the end both sides agreed to both make one principle that would include both proposals. The final result reflected this series of compromises. According to one ambassador, Tommy Koh,“form a very delicate balance as a package deal, and any attempt to amend any part of the declaration could unravel the whole package.”

The first time I stumbled across the Agenda 21 – before I’d even heard of sustainable development – it was in a book about a New World Order that was being secretly schemed and would soon bring about a world government similar to the Illuminati or the Freemasons dominating national authorities and usurping sovereignty at all levels. It kept referring to an insidious plan, apparently dreamed in a back-room, called Agenda 21, and it was chock full of details about how the take-over would take place. To be fair to the conspiracy theorists, Agenda 21 is 700 pages long and sounds like it could be a Soviet directive. The delegates could have picked a better name. But its focus was on strengthening international cooperation for the purposes of combating deforestation and desertification, conserving biological diversity, and protecting and managing the oceans. And again its implementation is voluntary and depends on each country enforcing it within its own borders.

The Earth Summit, also known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), brought together more heads of state and government, diplomats, and UN representatives than any other conference before it. It also brought together a diverse and vibrant set of civil society and NGO groups to talk about sustainable development issues – and all this in age before internet and cell phones. I talked to a woman, Thais Corral, who coordinated the Women’s tent of activities and speakers during the conference and she said, “You contacted people and made a schedule, but in the end you just hoped they showed up at the right time – which they did – because there was no way to reach them otherwise.” Inside and outside the negotiations, the agenda and the means of taking action on sustainable development for the next twenty years took shape: shift to sustainable patterns of consumption and production, share the technology that will help states develop efficiently and effectively, eliminate poverty, and create international norms that will prevent pollution and environmental degradation. And since that time the general consensus seems to be that we’ve made a lot of progress, but the human world is still overburdening the nonhuman one. If things don’t shift, the Earth may be a sorry place to live a century from now. And so twenty years after the Earth Summit, in 2012, amidst economic turmoil in North America and Europe, emerging countries in the developing world beginning to exert their force on the world stage, and the effects of climate change beginning to be felt around the planet, Rio+20 convenes. The world awaits the results.

Posted:
March 22, 2012
Author:
COA Students

Bottoms up

by Ana Puhac

After witnessing the process of negotiations on the Zero Order draft compilation document for only three days, disappointment in the spaces of the UN Headquarters is laughably apparent. Disappointment is not an unforeseen ingredient when dealing with the global political scene and UN. However, when it is implied in mordant remarks of Staffan Tillander, Ambassador for Rio+20 while putting amendments into the Zero order compilation text, it is an omen that calls for rethinking the accountability of the high-level negotiating juggernaut in spearheading the change toward sustainable development.

What struck me the most was that there is a prevailing acceptance coming from both inside & outside of UN, that there is a prescribed place for the change to happen, and it is ultimately in the hands of a minority of high-level decision-makers. I am particularly concerned with the evident inferiority complex that civil society, as well as the Major Groups, are still battling with. Opening up intergovernmental flora to civil society in 1972, the Stockholm Conference offered an opportunity to show that civil society organizations can reach their highest political potential during environmental blockbusters. Still however, in the twenty years of the sustainable development jamboree, civil society and Major groups have a role but of civil slaves to the governments and corporations.

Marian Harkin, Member of European Parliament from Ireland, and a passionate speaker at the side event, Volunteering for Sustainable Future, definitely changed my expectations on how expertise influences the share of responsibilities in implementing the change with her remark that volunteerism is still seen as “an appendage” to  the real (?) actions on sustainable development. Maybe I’m wrong, but it appears to me that at the UN there are powerful experts in many areas who are not doing much of anything, and outside of the headquarters there are many powerless people who are not  necessarily experts in anything, but contribute to everything.

Predictably, my point is that the floundering inaction at the highest levels has been elevated to a format where it’s clear that we can’t lose any more time putting tremendous efforts into reigniting the commitment of the world leaders. Indeed, it is not entirely true that the bottom-up approaches will ultimately bring the solution either. Change is not vertical or horizontal. Change is organic, and it does not occur in harmony with the human expectations. One would think that, some natural impulse for survival would  kick in by now, and people would realize they need to push to create a web, or a network if you will, rather than a streamline that operates bottom-up or top-down solely.

However,  the power of grassroot niches and international local governments, the field of my great interest, are going to become places of creating the web of change in this century. Local communities must raise their self-awareness and keep cultivating its role in the web-creating transition to change until it reaches the top. In that regard, the side event of Just and Sustainable Cities brought to the table different growing initiatives between local communities and businesses that happen in local urban communities around the world. Surprisingly, at the negotiations on the Zero order text yesterday, the paragraph on cities received some quite interesting and innovative ambitions. Most of them were, quite successfully, smothered by [US, Canada, EU and New Zealand].  Japan brought up an important point of establishing a platform to promote sustainable cities for the future with active involvement of the relevant UN entities such as United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) and United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD). This is a proposal that recognizes the real benefit of initiatives that come from the local and international levels simultaneously. Cities and metropolitan regions are growing so big that they are gaining a real potential to become future autonomous enclaves. For that reason, the cities and growing towns are the prominent acupuncture points for the civil society to “press” on, where the relief  on our biosphere can be the greatest.

This is not an outcry to dismantle the UN system or other global governing powers. Even though it might be marvelously cathartic to do it, for that we’d have to compete with the United States and the other developed giants. Let’s not forget however, that in the contrast to the UN meetings, there are the G8 countries, WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and such other meetings to which civil society is explicitly unwelcome. Those are the events that need proliferating passionate protests, too. With the Rio conference approaching, my hope is that the civil society  will recognize that it needs to distribute the energy among itself, not to end up pressing the UN’s belly to burp “the solution” while forgetting that the solution comes from the gut of civil society as well.

I say we need to realize that the effort put in the negotiations is mostly effort to decide how much green make up should be thrown at the Earth’s face. We must find ways to act against that plastic surgery of our planet. The events such as the Rio conference more than ever need a passionate crowd that believes that the sky will fall in order to remove the centuries of hubris that have been blocking politicians ears like wax plugs. However – finally, but vitally, this century movements will be closely shackled with advocacy of the rocketing power of local communities (Cairo, Madrid, NYC, Damascus, Athens…) that are more mobile to organize, but still great enough in number to influence national, federal  and sub-national legislations. From this point on,  the rational political acumen and the muscle of the local system will hopefully get this perpetuum mobile of the world to reach an unprecedented life of dignity and efficiency [we] here are dreaming about.

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