In June, world leaders will congregate in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations (UN) conference on sustainable development, better known as the Rio+20 conference. The event will mark the completion of two decades of the Earth Summit, the first major conference that explicitly focused on the synergies between environmental and developmental strategies. The Earth Summit was no ordinary event. One of its key contributions was in getting the term “sustainable development” embedded in the lexicon of the development community, even though later events have shown that development strategies in most countries are yet to grasp the term in its entirety.
UN Photo
But the Earth Summit will be most remembered for the forward-looking perspective that it provided to address the environment and development concerns. This was done through the adoption of the 27 principles agreed at the end of the conference, and more importantly, through the unveiling of “Agenda 21”, the comprehensive action plan to be implemented globally and nationally by organizations of the UN system, sovereign states, and other major stakeholders, including local communities, which can have positive outcomes in the areas of environment and development. At the same time, the Earth Summit provided the impetus for the multilateral action on a number of critical areas of environmental governance, including those relating to climate change, biodiversity and forestry, among others. In most of these areas, the global community has provided governance structures through the multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and efforts are now under way to ensure that these MEAs address the environment-related problems without in any way undermining the development imperatives. However, the recent history of multilateral action on environment-related issues, underlined by the contentious negotiations on climate change, has left no doubt in anyone’s mind that the global community may well take a while to implement some of the more significant MEAs in keeping with their core objectives.
As has happened to most of these global processes, the Rio+20 conference has to bear the burden of the past besides addressing new and emerging challenges. The most onerous of its objectives is “to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assess the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development…” This implies that besides Agenda 21, Rio+20 would also have to review the implementation of the outcome of the World Summit on Sustainable Development held a decade back in Johannesburg. In the Johannesburg declaration on sustainable development, participating countries moved the concept of sustainable development into operational domain. They proposed that this concept must be viewed in terms of three pillars: economic development, social development and environmental protection. Although this conceptual basis of sustainable development has been repeated ever so frequently, including the documents prepared in the run-up to the Rio+20 conference, the interplay between its three pillars has not been adequately spelt out. There are therefore considerable ambiguities in implementing the strategy of “sustainable development”.
The UN general assembly resolution to convene the Rio+20 conference (GA 64/236 of 24 December 2009) also underlined the two themes of the conference: a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication and the institutional framework for sustainable development. The UN secretary general provided guidance to the member states by grouping the first theme into seven “tracks”: green stimulus packages, eco-efficiency, greening markets and public procurement, investments in sustainable infrastructure, restoration and upgrading of natural capital, getting prices right, and ecological tax reform. But given their complexities, it seems unlikely that a consensus would emerge between the participating states on the details of implementing each of the “tracks”. In such a scenario it is imperative that emerging countries seize the opportunity to develop strategies for implementing the themes of Rio+20, in particular, the seven “tracks” defined by the UN secretary general.
From the submissions made by the member states in the Rio+20 process, it can be surmised that countries such as India, Brazil, China and South Africa, which have been coordinating their positions in several international processes, could play a critical role in the discussions that would take place in the run-up to Rio+20. The beginnings of such a process can be made in the ensuing BRICS summit where these countries are members. In order that BRICS take up the mantel for formalizing a plan of action at Rio, India has an enormous role, for it would assume the chairmanship of BRICS in the summit to be held in March.
What bodes well for India is that in the run-up to Rio+20 it has provided a well-argued framework for implementing the themes of the conference. The criticality of India’s position stems also from the fact that it has proposed an institutional framework for sustainable development, the second theme of Rio+20 and on which the implementation of the outcomes of the conference would hinge, which is based on the principles of equity, inclusion and transparency. India has argued that institutional framework for sustainable development should remain firmly anchored in the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities embodied in the Rio declaration. Furthermore, it has underlined the need to recognize the “right to development” and the overriding priority of poverty eradication and economic growth in developing countries.
Biswajit Dhar is director general at Research and Information System for Developing Countries,New Delhi
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