WSSD: Credibility of Future UN Summits under Threat – Activists

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 26 2002 (IPS) - The credibility of future UN summits will be undermined if countries like the United States, Canada and Australia succeed in pushing through their ‘’unilateral” and ‘’bilateral” agendas, warn activists gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).

The United States, Canada and Australia, dubbed the ‘’Filthy Three” by environmental lobbies such as Greenpeace International, are among the leaders urging other industrialised nations to place greater emphasis on voluntary initiatives to solve the planet’s environment and development problems, consequently eroding the previously agreed multilateral measures.

‘’If the Filthy Three prevail, it will be a victory for unilateralism over multilateralism,” Remi Parmentier, political director at Greenpeace International, told IPS. ‘’They want voluntary measures and no regulatory framework. That is a dangerous road to go down.”

This is an attempt, Parmentier adds, to move away from responsible governance. ‘’Governments are elected to look after our future, not to abdicate this role and do what the private sector imposes.”

Goh Chien Yen of the Malaysian-based think tank, Third World Network, points to the absurdity of this push away from the multilateral measure to achieve sustainable development on the planet. Yen says the problems are universal in nature, such as climate change due to global warming and lack of access to clean water for over one billion people.

‘’The multilateral system has to prevail because the issues we are faced with are global and we need to solve through broader measures,” he says.

‘’Multilateralism is central to secure the sustainable development goals, ” he adds. ‘’The ‘Type 2’outcomes are okay to complement the multilateral commitments, but not as the mainstay.”

Even senior UN officials reflect this view, given that a multilateral approach to resolving global problems is a central pillar of the world body. ‘’Partnerships between all key players are important, but if there is only interest in bilateral activity, it will be a deadly blow to multilateralism, ” Jan Pronk, special envoy of the UN secretary general for the WSSD, told a news conference Sunday.

Concern over this emerging trend, led by the United States, Canada and Australia, to raise the profile of bilateral and unilateral solutions is in light of how high such an initiative will feature at the WSSD, which runs from Aug 26 to Sep 4.

‘’The Summit will serve as a platform for the launch of new partnership initiatives known as ‘Type 2’outcomes,” states a UN press statement.

Under this measure, deals can be struck between governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and businesses ‘’to tackle specific problems and achieve measurable results” for sustainable development.

According to the United Nations, discussions on these new partnerships have focused on ‘’the need to allow flexibility without diluting or substituting the responsibility of governments to commit to strong ‘Type 1′ outcomes.”

‘Type 1’outcomes are the government-negotiated documents that have emerged from UN conferences, which underscore the multilateral approach to solving global problems. This, in fact, was reflected in the final document that came out of the 1992 Earth Summit, held in the Brazilian port city of Rio de Janeiro.

That document, Agenda 21, deemed by some as the ‘’bible for future policy making” for sustainable development, was unequivocal about the financial resources the industrialised countries would provide to the developing world to ensure that economic progress in the South will not harm the environment.

But 10 years later, ‘’frustration is running high in many quarters over a failure of industrialised countries to uphold their end of the bargain,” states ‘’Vital Signs 2002,” a study published by the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

The deficit between what the industrialised world pledged as part of its commitment to save the earth from being destroyed due to rapid development and what prevails is reflected in the numbers.

‘’According to Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development figures, official development assistance (ODA) amounted to 54 billion U.S. dollars in 2000, down from 73 billion U.S. dollars in 1992,” states the Worlwatch study.

At the Rio summit, industrialised nations pledged to spend 0.7 percent of their gross national product (GNP) annually for development assistance. But thus far, reveals Worldwatch, only Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway have honoured that pledge.

Australia, Canada and the United States, on the other hand, are currently at the bottom of the pack of those who have failed to keep their ODA pledge. Australia’s ODA in 2000 was 0.27 percent of its GNP, Canada’s was 0.25 percent and the United States offered 0.10 percent, the Worldwatch report notes.

And this, the activists say, is a primary reason behind the push by the United states, Canada and Australia to insist on funding for sustainable development be achieved through ‘Type 2’outcomes.

‘’But there are no minimum criteria for sustainable development under ‘Type 2’outcomes,” Erica Schutze, of the Sustainable Partnership for Energy and Climate Change, a South African NGO, told journalists over the weekend.

Her concern is mirrored in UN documents on ‘Type 2′ initiatives that state they are ‘’voluntary” and that ‘’there is no formal process.” These partnerships, furthermore, ‘’will be self-governing bodies with their own accountability mechanisms.”

For one environmental activist, it gave license for the United States, for instance, to assert its case that ‘’multinational companies should be the agents of change for sustainable development.”