bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1993) — Winter 1993 // Hiver 1993, pp. 24–26
by Michael Small
The Earth Summit that concluded the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) proved to be the largest — and in many ways the strangest — assembly of world leaders ever gathered. For two days last June, over one hundred heads of state and government met in a converted trade fair grounds on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to deliver their views on the future of the planet. Some of their speeches were highly combative (George Bush); others were folksy and funny (Yoweri Musoveni of Uganda); and others were tough but inspiring (Gro Harlem Brundtland). In the end, their presence was more important than the content of their statements, because it signalled that the agreements officials had laboured for over two years to produce — conventions on climate change and biodiversity, global principles on forests, and a comprehensive Action Plan called Agenda 21 — merited political commitment at the highest levels.
UNCED had its origins in one of the most influential initiatives ever undertaken by the UN — the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), better known as the “Brundtland Commission”. The Commission’s report, tabled before the General Assembly in 1987, recommended holding a global conference on sustainable development (the central concept popularized by the Commission) to mark the twenty year anniversary of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. In the fall of 1988, Canada and Sweden sought co-sponsors for our resolution to convene such a conference in 1992. It was passed by consensus and Brazil offered to host the Conference in a diplomatic master-stroke, designed to counter the devastating public criticism it had received over deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. In the fall of 1989, the General Assembly negotiated the critical resolution that gave UNCED its mandate. Canada successfully advocated the appointment of Maurice Strong as Secretary- General of the Conference; and the General Assembly approved by consensus the nomination of veteran Singaporean diplomat, Tommy Koh, as the Chairman of the Preparatory Committee. By mid-summer 1990, Strong’s Secretariat had been established in Geneva, and the negotiating process was ready to roll, through a series of four monthlong meetings of the Preparatory Committee, leading up to the final conference in Rio in June 1992.
Such is the official UN genealogy of UNCED. But looking back, it is clear that UNCED should be viewed as the product of a wider explosion of international concern over the global environment in the period 1988-89. This concern was driven by the convergence of a number of phenomena, including the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, new and alarming data on global warming, the long hot North American summer of 1988, and the accelerating loss of the world’s rainforests. Four years later, environmental negotiations are still propelled by the political momentum unleashed in this short period. One measure of how rapidly the environment moved from the fringes to the centre stage of world leaders’ preoccupations in this period are the communiqués from the G-7 Summits. In 1988, Canada as host had to push hard to include one line on the environment in the communiqué from the Toronto Summit, reflecting the findings of the Brundtland Report. In 1989 at the Paris Summit, no less than a third of the entire communiqué was devoted to a sweeping discussion of global environmental issues. The same issues were also discussed at length by leaders at the Francophone Summit, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, and the special Hague Environmental Summit — all in 1989.
At least six international negotiating processes were either launched or given a major political push by this “big bang” phase of environmental diplomacy. This list included: the OECD’s work to integrate environmental factors better into economic policy making; negotiations to create a multi-lateral fund under the Montreal Protocol to assist developing countries to phase out production of ozone depleting substances; the negotiations, launched by France and Germany, to create a pilot Global Environmental Facility tied closely to the World Bank, to meet newly recognized global environmental needs; the negotiations under UNEP towards a global convention on biological diversity; and the negotiations, under the General Assembly, towards a convention on climate change.
The sixth and most ambitious negotiating track, encompassing all the issues dealt with by the previous five and much, much more, was UNCED.
UNCED was not intended to duplicate any of these more specific negotiating tracks. In theory, its purpose was to generate the over-arching political commitment to move towards sustainable development, at the national and international levels. In practice, this translated into a number of more specific objectives, which were never clearly articulated, and which were met with varying degrees of success.
At its simplest, UNCED set a deadline of June 1992 for completion of negotiations on the two conventions and UNCED’s own work plan, known as Agenda 21. June 1992 also served as a major milestone for the progressive restructuring of the Global Environmental Facility. Without the political imperative to have a package of agreements for leaders to sign in Rio, negotiations would undoubtedly have dragged on for years on both conventions. Both conventions were reduced to a “lowest common denominator” than most delegations would have liked in order to meet this deadline; but at least a basic legal text has been achieved, which can be amended and made more concrete through new protocols in the future.
UNCED was also widely expected to generate the impetus for a series of new negotiations on other global environmental issues — such as forests, marine pollution, and possibly freshwater. By mid-1991, it was clear that virtually all delegations, both developed and developing, were already taxed to the maximum to manage the ongoing load of environmental negotiations and there was little willpower to launch new conventions. For the most part, the best we were able to achieve were commitments to hold conferences in the future dedicated to these subjects. Canada sought right up until Rio to build support for a future global forest convention and had widespread support for this goal. However, we were blocked by the determined resistance of several influential LDCs, principally Malaysia and India, that saw no national advantage in such a convention, and a considerable risk that it would be used to restrict their freedom to develop their forest resources. The best we could achieve in the end was a highly general, “non-legally binding authoritative statement of principles on the conservation management and sustainable use of all types of forests”, whose text was as crisply drafted as its title. It remains to be seen whether countries will build upon the forest principles by making tangible commitments for of course never officially subscribed to this vision of the Conference — but with the recent experience of the Montreal Protocol as a yardstick, most developed country delegates began this enterprise expecting that increased commitments of cash would inevitably be required to bring the developing world on board. Only the United States, from the outset, publicly refused to countenance any commitments of “new and additional resources” as a necessary outcome of UNCED.
If the world economy had not entered a recession just as the UNCED negotiations began in earnest in mid-1990, and if either Japan or the EC had decided to make a strategic commitment of major new financial resources to the developing world and Global Environmental Facility (GEF), as the only large pot of “new and additional” money around, assumed increasing importance and most industrialized countries hardened their negotiating positions around the view that the GEF would serve as the fund for both the climate change and biodiversity conventions.
This left the negotiators on the generic issue of financial resources in UNCED to explore the scope for expanding the definition of “global issues” eligible for GEF funding into new areas, beyond the conventions; and to probe the willingness of donors to increase ODA flows, either through a real increase in the IDA — the World Bank’s soft lending window — and/or a renewed increased forest protection – or instead, the principles turn out to be a diplomatic dead letter.
On a grander scale, UNCED was widely expected to forge a global political consensus around a gigantic, new “North-South bargain”, in which the North would provide dramatically increased flows of “new. and additional resources”, ’, in return for significant new commitments by developing countries to protect their environment. Many developing countries hoped or believed that the environment would give them the leverage with the North to extract the aid and trade concessions that they lacked the last time this kind of global bargain was pursued in the era of the “North-South dialogue” of the late 1970s. Industrialized countries challenged other donors to meet them, a bargain along these lines might conceivably have come to pass. Instead, as Maurice Strong unfailingly told developing country audiences “never have the rich felt so poor” The prospect of new money was steadily pushed further into the future awaiting the “political commitments” that would come in Rio; meanwhile negotiators began work on the specifics of Agenda 21. It became increasingly obvious that what new money was available would only be made available for “global issues” — which basically meant the two conventions under negotiation. The rest of Agenda 21 would be categorized as “local issues” to be met by developing countries’ own expenditures, supplemented by existing ODA flows. At the same time, the commitment to reach the 0.7% GNP/ODA target by a specific date. The agreement reached after a seventeen hour negotiating session on the final day in Rio left the scope of the GEF unchanged, in return for a commitment to make its governance more democratic (ie. more open to influence from developing countries); while donors agreed to consider a real increase in IDA, without making a firm commitment to it, and agreed to reach the 0.7% target “as soon as possible”. This result was far less than the grand global bargain many originally envisaged.
What happened to the developing countries’ purported leverage in this exercise? In the end, it proved to be over-stated although certain LDC delegations attempted to link agreement on specific chapters of Agenda 21 of interest to the donors — notably forests — to progress on financial resources. My own interpretation of the LDCs behaviour was based on another negotiating exercise described in the pages of this magazine — namely PAFSO’s latest round of contract negotiations with Treasury Board. Like PAFSO, the developing countries invoked the moral superiority of their position until absolutely the last minute before the clock ran out — and then settled for whatever money was on the table. But beyond the real-politik of the situation, another phenomenon became apparent during the fourth and final Preparatory Committee meeting in New York. Developing countries themselves realized they had real interests at stake in many of the environmental issues under negotiation through Agenda 21 — and that it would not serve their needs to hold Agenda 21 hostage for a large cash settlement from the donors that seemed unlikely to materialize.
As a formal negotiating exercise, UNCED was structured along classic UN lines as a re-play of the twenty-year-old “confrontation” between the industrialized countries and the Group of 77, that has rendered the UN, on the economic side of its agenda, a comparatively irrelevant organization. The issues dealt with by UNCED represent the most active areas of the UN’s economic agenda, essentially because they are the only economic issues for which the industrialized world needs to secure the willing co-operation of the developing world. Unfortunately, the prospect of “leverage” this provides has perpetuated the survival of the Group of 77 within the UN, instead of hastening its demise. It was striking that the most creative negotiations towards Agenda 21 occurred precisely when countries broke out of the mould of North versus South (e.g. in the chapter on oceans, in which Canada, Chile and New Zealand built a coalition of coastal water states to press our interests in marine conservation on the high seas). In an era when the UN is undergoing significant renewal on its political side, one wonders when new alignments and coalitions among member states will emerge that might revitalize its economic agenda as well.
The principal outcome of UNCED was Agenda 21 — a vast, global blueprint, covering 39 separate issues from the disposal of hazardous waste to the role of indigenous people in sustainable development. UNCED’s strength, and its weakness, lie in the inclusiveness of Agenda 21. For the first time, there is an agreed inter-governmental action plan embracing all facets of sustainable development. At the same time, there are no priorities set, nor starting points identified. Doubtless, the implementation of Agenda 21 will be very uneven, between countries and between issues. It will be up to individual governments to determine how to implement Agenda 21, up to the newly created UN Sustainable Development Commission to maintain the international peer pressure on governments to do so, and up to NGOs and the media to hold everyone accountable for the results.
In my opinion, the true importance of Agenda 21 lies in the learning process countries went through to negotiate it. The requirements of negotiating this vast document served brilliantly to shift governments’ thinking from an “environmental agenda” (considered the narrow concern of one department in most governments) to a multidisciplinary “sustainable development agenda”, in which national leaders’ credibility was at stake. This required breaking down both bureaucratic and conceptual barriers, within government and between government and public interest groups. Through the UNCED preparatory process, foreign ministries were obliged to work closely with environment departments, development NGOs had to collaborate with environment NGOs, and both groups learned to find some common cause with business associations.
UNCED gave non-governmental organizations an unparalleled degree of access to a major inter-governmental negotiation and the opportunity to participate in many official delegations, from both developed and developing countries. In this way, UNCED capitalized on the latent idealism that the UN, at its best, can command from a global public; and Maurice Strong, as UNCED’s chief impresario, was brilliant in brokering media interest, public involvement and private sector sponsorship for the conference. Minister Jean Charest, who led the Canadian delegation until the Prime Minister arrived in Rio, identified the early and effective involvement of NGOs (including business representatives) in our official delegation as the most important strategic decision we made in preparing for UNCED. I believe that this new form of public diplomacy, which the Canadian delegation had to invent as we went along, will be one of the enduring legacies of this conference.
Six months later, it is clear that the political momentum generated by UNCED has not dissipated. The UN had a vigorous debate this past autumn to hammer out the terms of reference for the Sustainable Development Commission. Canada had now fulfilled the Prime Minister’s commitment in Rio to ratify both treaties by the end of 1992 — making us the first industrialized country to do so. The UN Secretary-General has made two new key appointments to guide the UN’s work in the post-UNCED era: Nitin Desai of India (the former Deputy Secretary-General of UNCED) will head the secretariat of the Sustainable Development Commission and Canada’s Elizabeth Dowdswell (former co-chair of the climate change negotiations) will become the new Executive-Director of UNEP. At the same time, the USA has changed its political leadership. Al Gore, the only other elected American to address the Plenary in Rio, is widely expected to shift the USA’s stance from scepticism to advocacy for the outcomes of UNCED.
UNCED and its associated conventions, did not “solve” the long-term problems of the planet — but it changed the way governments think about them and the international frameworks they use to address them. Canada’s basic message in Rio was that UNCED was not an end in itself, but the beginning of new forms of co-operation to achieve sustainable development. Judged by that standard, UNCED honestly met the high expectations placed upon it.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1993) — Winter 1993 // Hiver 1993, pp. 24–26. Read the rest of this issue →
