World Sustainability Hearing Project
In
August, delegates from governments around the world will gather at the
United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in
Johannesburg, South Africa, to review the successes and failures of the
“sustainable development” agenda launched at the 1992 Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro, known as Agenda 21. Based on that assessment, the
“Rio+10” summit plans to initiate new steps toward a sustainable and
socially just world.
The Summit agenda began to come into focus during the second
summit preparatory meeting (Prepcom II) at the UN’s New York
Headquarters in January. According to Prepcom Chairman Emil Salim of
Indonesia, the four main issues on the agenda will be poverty
eradication, eliminating unsustainable patterns of consumption and
production, sustainable management of natural resources and the
underpinning need to make globalization work to promote sustainable
development.
But the underlying questions the Summit must address in
Johannesburg are more to the point: Does the UN really have the
political mandate to take effective action on critical global issues?
Will its environmental and social justice agenda continue to remain
subservient to the free-trade agenda of the World Trade Organization?
In his recently released forward to Worldwatch’s State of the World 2002 report, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that the great promises
governments made at Rio haven’t been kept and that business-as-usual
has ruled the past 10 years.
An assessment by Friends of the Earth International argues that
governments have shown “reckless disregard for safeguarding the planet
and its poorest inhabitants” since Rio, noting that 1.2 billion people
still lack access to clean drinking water, 35 percent of the world’s
fisheries suffer from declining yields, and that (as of 1998) none of
the European Union nations had approached their waste and materials
reduction targets.
A key commitment in Rio’s Agenda 21 included increasing aid from
developed countries to developing countries. However, annual aid has
dropped from $69 billion in 1992 to $53 billion in 2000. Moreover, the
Kyoto accord on CO2 reductions hasn’t been implemented. Meanwhile, the scientific consensus
has confirmed that climate change is accelerating. The list goes on.
At the recent Prepcom conference, a delegation from two Earth
Island projects, the World Sustainability Hearings Project (WoSH) and
Grassroots Globalization Network (GGN), met with individual civil
society participants and members of nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs). A consensus emerged that, with the rise of corporate-led
economic globalization, progress toward a truly sustainable world has,
in many instances, either halted or reversed.
Rather than making crucial progress over the past decade, we
instead find ourselves frozen in inaction, at the epicenter of a crisis
in world governance. As Martin Khor of the Third World Network
observed: “In the 1990s, the WTO overwrote the Rio accords. Its
free-trade-agenda policy, which has also been supported by the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund, often ran counter to…
sustainable development. And while the WTO and related institutions
have had the funds and the detailed, enforceable rules to move their
agenda forward, the UN plan was loosely drawn, underfunded and did not
include agreement on monitoring or compliance. The result: lots of
words from Rio, but no progress towards a sustainable world.”
In reaction to this sobering reality, NGOs and their civil society
allies at the Prepcom called for an agreement on corporate
accountability that could monitor and enforce adherence to world
guidelines that would ensure progress toward sustainable development.
Meanwhile, a crisis in world governance is leaving most of the world’s
peoples without effective representation in critical decision-making
processes.
What’s also been lost is the question how development -
“sustainable” or otherwise - has affected the lives of everyday people.
Noticeably absent from the international conference circuit are the
very people who live where development projects and the forces of
global commerce are felt most directly. These include the fisherfolk in
North America whose livelihoods are threatened by unfettered global
markets, forest communities in Southeast Asia whose future is
threatened by their governments’ conversion of timber into hard
currency, and farmers whose land has become the testing-ground for
agricultural biotechnology.
Also excluded from the official debate are many communities that
have found innovative, local solutions to ensure their economic,
social, cultural and ecological survival in the face of globalization.
These contributions deserve a place in the global debate about the
social and ecological future of the planet.
Giving a Voice to Everyday People
To increase effective participation of ordinary people at the
Johannesburg summit, WoSH, GGN and more than 40 other civil society
organizations have teamed up to provide a stage for their testimony -
the World Sustainability Hearing. The Hearing will be held near the
official Summit and will feature day-long explorations of critical
issues, including a Day of Energy and Climate Justice, a Day of Forests
and Logging and a Day of Corporate Accountability and Global
Governance. The Hearing has four major goals:
Even
when indigenous groups, environmentalists or other “grassroots” civil
society representatives manage to wrestle their way into these global
conferences, their effectiveness is often impeded by a lack of
finances, logistical support, interpreters and other assistance. Their
voice is muted by the scramble for resources and by their need to “ride
on the coattails” of northern NGOs, who are principally concerned with
their own agendas.
By bringing the vital reality of people’s everyday lives to the
Summit, the World Sustainability Hearings will help decisionmakers
fashion a binding plan that moves all nations toward a just,
sustainable planet. We already have the words from Rio. We’re still
waiting for the action.
Kelly Jones and Astrid Scholz are co-directors of the World Sustainability Hearings Project (www.wosh.org) and Aaron G. Lehmer is director of Grassroots Globalization Network (www.earthisland.org/ggn). To learn more about the events in Johannesburg, visit www.wosh.org, email info@wosh.org or call 415-927-6636 x101.
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