ENVIRONMENT: Civil Movement Needed to Push U.N. Platforms

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 13 1997 (IPS) - A broad movement of social groups must be formed to ensure that the promises made by governments on a range of issues since the 1992 Earth Summit here will be kept, according to veterans of several U.N. conferences.

“Frankly, I’d like to see a lot of these commitments that governments have made — from Rio to (last year’s Food Summit in) Rome — implemented,” Bella Abzug, president of the New York- based Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO) said at the forum being held here to review progress on environment and development commitments made at the Earth Summit here five years ago.

Target dates on achieving goals in environmental improvement, social development, and women’s empowerment should be set, and the United Nations should develop some form of sanctions for nations that fail to meet the targets, Abzug said here at the Mar. 13-19 ‘Rio Plus Five’ forum. “Until it happens, it may very well be that we will go on talking forever.”

She was echoed by other key participants of U.N. summits who discussed the uphill struggle in pushing the results of conferences held over the past five years.

“We need to set dates and targets to the commitments we have undertaken,” said Juan Somavia, Chile’s U.N. ambassador and chairman of the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen. But more importantly, he added, groups interested in the various programmes dealt with in those summits need to build a united movement to push for results.

“We continue to organise around sectoral lines,” but only a movement that can wed environmental, social, and development goals can ensure that it will get results, he added.

U.N. conferences held since the Earth Summit include the Rome and Copenhagen meetings, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, the 1994 Small Islands Development Summit in Barbados, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and last year’s U.N. Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul. But as the period of U.N. conferences winds down, some groups are already keeping track of how governments follow through.

A range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), supported by the Dutch development agency NOVIB, this month released a report, ‘Social Watch 1997’, that details the mostly slow progress of governments to abide by commitments made at the Social Development summit. WEDO also recently released a report, ‘Promises Kept, Promises Broken?’, which describes the sluggish pace of implementation of the Beijing meeting’s results.

‘Rio Plus Five’ intends to hold governments to their environmental promises by developing a draft ‘Earth Charter’ for governments’ consideration at a special session of the U.N. General Assembly, to be held at the Earth Summit’s fifth anniversary this June .

In so doing, the forum can provide a vehicle for consolidating the gains, not only of the Earth Summit, but of all the U.N. summits on social and development issues, contends Wally N’Dow, the secretary-general of the Habitat summit.

Joke Waller-Hunter of the U.N. Department of Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development told IPS that meetings such as the current gathering must involve the participation of a diversity of environmental groups if the June Assembly is to accomplish anything.

Some groups doubt this is being done here. Greenpeace and some Brazilian groups, including ‘SOS Mata Atlantica’ and ‘The Socio- Environmental Institute’, opted not to participate in the forum, arguing that it failed to represent a diversity of non- governmental actors.

“You can’t get every meeting to be perfect,” Abzug told IPS. But she added that the current meeting, along with several others scheduled before June, would help to unite environmentalists with other activists to forge a common agenda for the Assembly session.

“The process that prepared this meeting was a very broad-based process at the national consultative level,” N’Dow added. “This is a very representative and diverse group.”

Maurice Strong, who was secretary-general of the Earth Summit and is now chairman of the Earth Council which sponsored the current meeting, defended the forum as “not another Earth Summit, but rather a People’s Summit.”

“We’ve done the best we could to consult with their national networks”, he said, noting that some 500 NGO, business, and other representatives had been invited to Rio.

And in the interest of realising the promises made at the international meetings, the veterans of the U.N. summits also underscored the need to question the growth-oriented, free-market perspectives embraced increasingly by governments. N’Dow noted that governments must set aside the ethic of “we win and you lose” to make any real social gains.

“The pendulum of extreme neo-liberalism is beginning to come back,” Somavia contended. But a broad civil movement needs to help push the pendulum along. “We know how governments are: they are slow to act” and vulnerable to other sectors of society who resist change, he added.

“When it comes to action, very little seems to be feasible,” Waller-Hunter said of governments’ attitudes. “There are too many practical obstacles.”