The WSSD Outcome: What it was and what it heralds Since the conclusion of the WSSD a month ago, TUAC and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) with their affiliates have carried out assessments of the outcome of the Summit and what happens next. One is first of all struck by the different perceptions of the Summit depending on whether they come from those who were present in Johannesburg or those who were not. That presence (or lack of it) largely explains the divergent opinions on the Summit and its outcomes. Those 400 or so trade unionists who took part by and large felt that the process was valuable and in any case necessary. But the vast majority of our members who were not there and thus followed events through the media see only the failures. Needless to say, Johannesburg succeeded in some ways and failed in others, so it is our task to clear up current misperceptions, to analyze and redress the failures, and to examine and encourage the successes. Almost inevitably the Summit disappointed the hopes of some in that it did not produce more ambitious targets for sustainable development in areas other than in water and sanitation. This was no surprise, given the fact that some leading governments threw doubt on the summit’s likely outcome even before it took place. Also, many doubts remain about government commitments to the Rio agreements; indeed, those doubts have increased. It is necessary however to analyse the reasons behind the failure to implement even existing commitments. The lack of political support is basically caused by the fact that the social dimension of sustainable development has been neglected or taken lightly in the years since Rio. Development that does not reduce poverty is hardly worthy of the name ‘development’ at all but that is what too many of the world’s population have had over the last ten years and hence the G77 remained suspicious about signing up to more ambitious environmental targets. More work therefore must be done to demonstrate the links between human rights, poverty alleviation, and sustainable development. Furthermore, the malaise of job insecurity and increasing income disparity in industrialized countries has not been properly addressed over the last ten years. Unless Sustainable Development can be shown to mean Sustainable Employment – many working people who are threatened by change will not support government action to achieve it. In Johannesburg there was also an important but confused debate on corporate social responsibility, accountability and public-private partnerships. Corporate social responsibility is a fine enough idea in itself, but at times it suffers a fatal flaw in that it tries to make the private sector do what the public sector should do, i.e. regulate and implement for the greater good. There has to be more clarity on the boundary conditions on these different notions. The protection and enforcement of civil, human, and labour rights is a domain in which governments remain the primary and most legitimate actor.
Friends of the Earth International Upon analyzing the final text of the Programme of Implementation of the Earth Summit, precisely two new and specific targets are identified:
…Paragraph
42 talks of “a significant reduction in the current rate
of loss of biological diversity”, a clear step backwards
from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. We could go on,
but the list of weasel words and lost promises is nearly endless.
Do not believe government spin doctors who claim success for this
Summit. It is by any objective test a failure.
International Forum on Globalization Where to Go After Johannesburg? Cancun or Bust! Victor Menotti Buried in the Johannesburg Declaration is a short sentence affirming that the fate of almost every enforceable environmental agreement that the United Nations has produced since the original Stockholm conference will now be unilaterally decided by the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose next ministerial is in September 2003, in Cancun, Mexico. Some people have wrongly understood that the autonomy of international environmental law was safely rescued from the jaws of the free trade fox by the recent removal of language in Paragraph 17 of the Trade Chapter calling for “WTO consistency”. This deletion was truly a victory for efforts in damage control and needs to be claimed. But the following paragraph (18), which contains the document’s only reference to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) finds the UN bowing “in support of the work programme agreed through WTO.” By agreeing to this text, Johannesburg has produced a cowardly reinforcement of the WTO’s dangerously unbalanced Doha mandate. (see pg. 11) Remember that, in Doha, governments mandated WTO to unilaterally clarify the relationship between trade rules and the trade measures that enforce MEAs. Negotiations are to take place under WTO auspices, with Trade, not Environment, Ministers leading negotiations, and where MEA Secretariats are given only “observer” status, apparently so they can watch while the treaties they administer are eviscerated. Doha also deemed that the outcomes “shall not add to or diminish the rights and obligations of Members under existing WTO agreements,” which would seem to imply that, since no trade rules can be changed, then it can only be the MEAs that will be modified. If not modified, WTO might forge agreement among Members to enforce MEAs only in a “least trade restrictive” manner, which would effectively subordinate everything from Rio, as well as conventions on trade in toxic waste and endangered species, among others. Governments should have used Johannesburg to introduce some balance into the WTO process by giving the UN an equal voice with WTO to reconcile the discrepancies between the international regimes governing trade and environment. The central concern here is “who decides?” And the answer to this question often determines the results.
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