|
.
Johannesburg Jamboree
By Chandrika Mago
When the leaders of the world, civil society and business converged on Johannesburg recently for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, there was hope against hope that people would unite in the fight for survival, understand their situations and their own interdependence, and do something to improve the lot of millions without access to basics such as safe drinking water, energy and health care.
A hope that they would address the issues of food security and halt the alarming loss of biodiversity on which so many communities still depend directly for their identity and livelihoods.
When world leaders left Johannesburg, that hope seemed all too distant. The anger, and frustration in civil society was evident. Concrete commitments on shared goals of survival, and the money and technology to realise these, were missing.
A failure? Very clearly so, in some ways. But, overall, an outcome that was expected. This was one summit which had to contend with initial disagreements on almost every basic commitment; the preparatory committee meetings leading up to it had ended in deadlock. All the homework was left for the last minute when governments were left with no option but to come out with some plan, be it of action or inaction. As India's external affairs minister put it, this was a summit doomed to succeed.
The summit began life with a debilitating image handicap. The first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 10 years ago, had fired the imagination; it had led to an idealistic vision of what the world should be like for everybody. The developing world had a say and the developed world promised to pay for some of what it had done to the planet and for what it wanted others not to do.
In contrast, this Rio plus 10 review did not excite. The world was more cynical, the ideals and principles decided upon in Rio were contested, civil society had gained a voice but had lost some credibility, business was firmly in the saddle - and US president Bush was infuriating environmentalists and keeping away, symbolically, from Johannesburg.
So, those in search of a new global deal in Johannesburg stumbled on landmarks that were old - for trade, the stopping point was largely a 2001 meeting of the World Trade Organisation; for finance, it was a March conference in Monterrey; and for goals, it was the millennium development goals decided in 2000. Effectively, a 'megasummit' billed as one of action and implementation came up with only one new real target for achievement - to halve the number of those without access to sanitation by 2015.
The question is inescapable: Was it worth it? Did we really need more than 16,000 delegates to sit day and night fighting over lofty phrases, translating these into as minimal a commitment as possible? Did we really need to spend the millions of dollars which could have been better used elsewhere? If the answer is tabulated in concrete government commitments and uplifting vision, it would definitely be in the negative.
One could even argue that the summit's title itself compounded the problem. As a phrase, sustainable development creates a distance. It means everything, and nothing; it is an umbrella for every issue on the planet but nobody is particularly comfortable defining it.
This continued to bedevil the summit. The vast canvas the UN came up with was its strength but also its weakness. Within a broad, identified framework of water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity, the so-called WEHAB agenda, were an immense number of sub-themes: The fights on genetically-modified crops, privatisation of water services, 'polluting' fossil fuels and renewable energy, even what constitutes renewable energy. In the energy sub-theme were half a dozen other controversies - for and against hydro, nuclear, biomass. Global warming? There was no end to it.
The richness of issues was almost too much. The interests, too many. The results, inevitably, did not match up. The UN ended the summit with a long list of 'targets' and 'achievements' couched largely in non-committal language running the gamut from minimising the effects of chemicals on health and the environment and checking biodiversity loss to replenishing fish stocks and setting up marine protected areas or establishing a 10-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production. But with no real commitments on resources from the developed world.
Yet, there were some slivers of light to relieve the monotony of dark hues. For one, the summit did force debate - good or bad - on the path to development. Would governments continue to control it or would it be done more effectively through 'partnerships' between local, state or national governments, NGOs and business? Should aid to developing countries be linked to governance within those nations? Who will decide what is good governance? And, if it is so important domestically, shouldn't nations also look at global governance and the rules of multilateralism?
The questions remain. But in the long run, perhaps, we may look on Johannesburg more kindly. As a summit, it was one more step in a long, painfully slow process, an attempt to highlight at a top political level an agenda pushed completely to one side by 9/11. There is, they say, no harm in hoping.
Courtesy http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=23289504
|
