The Way Forward

Beyond Agenda 21

Felix Dodds, Felix Dodds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429588990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1997. 1997 marked the fifth anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development - the celebrated 'Earth Summit' in Rio de Janeiro which represented the high-water mark of intergovernmental action for sustainable development. Whilst some were tempted to dismiss the Conference as a gesture of concern by the participating governments, the list of resolutions which arose from the Summit is formidable, and the key text to emerge from the conference process, Agenda 21, had proven to be crucial to efforts to disseminate and implement the principles of globally sustainable development.

The Way Forward outlines the successes and failures of those first five years. Calling on a list of eminent experts, it provides an unparalleled analysis of the agreements that were reached, and the stakeholders who were charged with implementing them. It reviews the progress that was made at the intergovernmental, national and grassroots levels, and offers a cogent summary of the major issues that needed to be addressed for the future. Lucid, compact and authoritative, this is the essential guide to 'Rio plus five'.

Part I

AGREEMENTS FROM
THE RIO SUMMIT

1

Agenda 21

Chip Lindner

The real message of success will be what happens now, after Rio, when government leaders and citizens alike have returned to their countries, to their organizations, to their immediate preoccupations. It is up to all of us to build on the foundations laid by the Earth Summit to ensure that the decisions that have been taken at the global level be translated into national politics and practices at all levels. A new world order, as we move into the 21st century, must unite us all in a global partnership – which always recognizes and respects the transcending sovereignty of nature, of our only one Earth.

Maurice Strong, Secretary-General to the UN Conference on Environment and Development

On 22 December 1989, the General Assembly of the UN adopted a resolution¹ that called for the convening of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, later to be known as the Earth Summit.

The Earth Summit had been inspired by the publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987². The Brundtland Report tried to balance the responsibilities of the North and the South and the need to integrate environment and development. As such, Agenda 21 was negotiated by government representatives with a strong input from a wide range of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Four preparatory meetings took place between the summer of 1990 and April 1992. The first Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) was held August 1990 in Nairobi. Two working groups were set up to start to put together the Platform of Action (Agenda 21). Working Group 1 dealt with atmosphere, land resources, biodiversity and biotechnology and Working Group 2 with oceans, seas and coastal areas, fresh water, and hazardous and toxic waste.

The second PrepCom in March 1991 in Geneva established a third working group which dealt with legal and institutional issues. It also opened the possibility for a forest convention, which eventually became the forest principles, and the Earth Charter, which became the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.

Agenda 21 started to take shape at the third PrepCom in August 1991 in Geneva. As much as 90 per cent of it had been agreed by the final PrepCom in April 1992 in New York, leaving only the most controversial areas such as finance, technological transfer, climate, biodiversity, institutional issues, poverty, consumption, fisheries and biotechnology to be argued over at Rio. The draft Rio Declaration on Environment and Development was also agreed at the final PrepCom.

By the end, Agenda 21 consists of 40 chapters that cover almost everything about the planet and how humans interact with it. Many of the chapters overlap and a number of the issues are reinforced by repetition and are elaborated throughout the document. As such, it is a comprehensive strategy for global action on sustainable development, dealing with today’s problems and trying to set the framework within which the problems of tomorrow can also be addressed.

Agenda 21 does not constitute a legally binding commitment for anyone – in many ways this is one of its strengths. It is designed to stand as a blueprint for sustainable development, providing some ideas on the problems that confront us all and on the ways in which these could be tackled. It is also the most comprehensive document negotiated between governments on the interaction between economic, social and environmental trends at every level of human activity.

As many as 178 government delegations attended the Rio Summit and endorsed Agenda 21. Many of the representatives were at the highest level – over 120 heads of government attended the conference, including leaders from all the G7 group of industrial countries. Although US President Bush was one of the last to announce that he was attending, when he arrived he also became intoxicated with the Rio spirit.

Addressing the other heads of state, he said:

The Chinese have a proverb: if a man cheats the earth, the earth will cheat the man. We must leave the earth in better condition than we found it. Some find the challenges ahead overwhelming. I believe that their pessimism is unfounded. It has been said that we don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. When our children look back on this time and place, they will be grateful that we met in Rio, and they will certainly be pleased with the intentions stated and the commitments made. But they willjudge us by the actions we take from this day forward. Let us not disappoint them.³

Rio was the largest gathering of heads of government that the world had ever seen. If you add to this 50,000 non-governmental representatives, over 5,000 press and thousands of civil servants, the Rio Summit helped to provide the means for vast numbers of people in positions of influence to find ways of implementing sustainable development through Agenda 21.

Possibly the biggest failure at Rio was that no new money to implement the programme was pledged. The secretariat was asked at PrepCom II to work out how much it would cost to implement Agenda 21. They estimated that it would take around $625 billion a year, of which $125 billion would come from developed countries transferring funds to the South through increased aid.

At Rio the overall aid contribution to the South was around $60 billion, and $55 billion in 1996. The 4 billion ECU that the EU promised did not materialize. Financial support for the Global Environmental Facility, which was supposed to be in addition to existing funding is today being seriously questioned by NGOs as it seems that funds paid to other sources have decreased as a result. Many feel that sleight-of-hand has taken from one budget and put into another when the original idea was to create a new instrument to augment existing institutions and processes.

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES

To make sure that Agenda 21 was implemented at local, national, regional and international level, the agreement called for the creation of a new commission of the UN Economic and Social Council. The Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) was to meet annually.

The Commission is dealt with in greater depth in Chapter 2, but it is relevant to stress here that the CSD has become a political forum and its work in reviewing the implementation of Agenda 21 has benefited greatly from the presence and active participation of government ministers with a range of different portfolios, approximately 50 of whom have attended each annual session.

The involvement in the work of the CSD of politicians with knowledge and understanding of the national context, and also of many non-governmental organizations with a focus on activities at national and local level, has been significant. Agenda 21 places great stress on the principle of subsidiarity – that is, implementation of the programmes at the appropriate level. The direct involvement of such government ministers and actors of civil society in the work of the CSD brings the world’s concerns, problems and successes to UN efforts to realize sustainable development.

Setting up the Commission has also caused some blurring of the roles it shares with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which was set up out of the 1972 Stockholm UN Conference on Human Settlements. The UNEP and governments have endeavoured to be clearer about what the roles of the two bodies should be.

Agenda 21, however, is quite clear about this: the UNEP ‘will continue to play its role with regard to policy guidance and co-ordination in the field of the environment, taking into consideration the development perspective’.⁴

The CSD’s role is also identified quite clearly in Chapter 38 of Agenda 21: ‘To monitor progress in the implementation of Agenda 21’.⁵

The two bodies cover some similar areas of work, however, and it is this that has caused the problem. The UK and Indian governments called a meeting of 13 environment ministers from key governments, North and South, and UN agencies to Brocket Hall in the UK to review the way forward before the third session of the CSD.

A relevant paragraph in the chairman’s conclusions stated:

The high profile of the CSD, whilst welcome, has to some extent deflected political attention from UNEP. We agree that UNEP should be reaffirmed as the internationalfocus for the environment. Its role should be to monitor and assess the state of the world environment; to provide a forum for global environment concerns and to catalyse necessary regional and global action; to provide advice and guidance on environmental capacity-building; and to be the voice of the environment within the UN system.⁶

This blurring of the roles between UNEP and the CSD was revisited at the 1996 G7 environment ministers meeting in Cabourg when they said that: ‘The CSD should continue to be the high level forum for setting broad policy directions and long term goals.’⁷

The G7 heads of state meeting in Lyon in June 1996 carried on the discussion:

UNEP’s role should be confirmed as the environmental voice of the UN responsible for environmental policy development, scientific analysis and monitoring assessment. The current restructuring of UNEP and its governing bodies should be supported.⁸

One of the hopes of the Special Session is that it will clarify the roles of these two very important bodies once and for all.

Agenda 21 allocates some responsibility for implementing aspects of the programmes outlined to nearly all UN agencies and programmes. The UN Inter Agency Committee on Sustainable Development, chaired by Under Secretary-General Nitin Desai, has the responsibility for seeing that there is co-ordination between different UN bodies.

Carrying out their duties as UN task managers overseeing aspects of Agenda 21 {see Agenda 21, Chapter 38) has also led parts of the UN system into a closer relationship with each other in the implementation of Agenda 21. Many have developed their own implementation programmes, such as the UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) Capacity 21 initiative, which was designed to strengthen the institutional capacity of developing countries to implement Agenda 21 and other related activities at the national level.

The strength of giving nearly all UN agencies work in the implementation of Agenda 21 is that they have to meet and co-ordinate their activities and report to the CSD. This has brought with it some peer group review. The Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO) work on forest issues was criticized at the CSD session in 1995 to the extent that when the Inter-Governmental Panel on Forests was set up that year, a new body was created as secretariat rather than locating it in FAO.

Criticism of UNESCO over their work on the implementation of Chapter 36 was audible around the coffee bars and meeting-rooms of the UN at the 1996 CSD and may yet have a more tangible effect at the five-year review of Agenda 21.

REGIONAL CONTEXT

A variety of mechanisms look at the implementation of Agenda 21 at the regional level. These range from UN regional commissions, regional development banks, and regional economic and technical co-operation organizations, such as the European Union. In the EU’s draft Common Platform for 1997, the Fifth Action Programme Towards Sustainability is identified as an approach to realize many of Agenda 21’s priorities.

Towards Sustainability was prepared in parallel with Agenda 21 and is the EU’s ‘blueprint for achieving sustainable development in the EU by the year 2000’. The EU produced its Progress Report in 1995. It recognised that there had been a move to greater integration in the manufacturing sector, but less positive developments in the agriculture and tourism sectors. It went on to say:

Applying the analogy of a large ship which takes considerable time and space to manoeuvre, the 1992–95 phase should be viewed as a priming period, changing the sense of direction and commitment, and the 1996–2000phase as getting the operation under full steam.⁹

The Progress Report identified new elements for the work of the Community. It suggested that stronger measures and actions in addressing urban issues, climate change, agriculture and tourism were necessary.

NATIONAL ACTION

Agenda 21 states that ‘national level efforts should be undertaken by all countries in an integrated manner so that both environment and development concerns can be dealt with in a coherent manner’.

CONSULTATION WITHIN GOVERNMENT

To make sure that there is an effective review system, countries were asked to report to the CSD on their implementation of Agenda 21. Through the three full years of the Commission’s life, 74 countries have produced national reports on their activities to meet the objectives in Agenda 21.

There has been much criticism of the reporting process. In many countries it has not entailed much more than a consultant being employed to produce the report. In oth...