The World Summit on Sustainable Development: A Story of Many Summits

From August 26 to September 4, 2002, eighty-two Heads of State and Government, more than one hundred cabinet ministers, and thousands more official representatives came together with observers from civil society, academia, the scientific community, local communities, and the private sector at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).¹ In addition to the more than 20,000 participants in the official summit, thousands of others from all over the world participated in parallel events—summits in their own right—organized to coincide with the WSSD (see Box 1).²

Together, the many summits of Johannesburg tell a complex story: of a world community confronted with immense poverty and serious environmental problems; of governments divided by competing visions of development and globalization; and of civil society, asserting the public’s right to participate meaningfully in decision-making and increasingly holding governments accountable for the consequences of decisions on development and environment. The WSSD achieved some notable successes:

The most concrete of the WSSD’s successes was the adoption of a new basic sanitation target, which aims to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and/or basic sanitation by 2015.

• The Plan of Implementation (see Box 2) adopted by the Summit encourages and promotes regional and national initiatives aimed at delinking economic growth and environmental damage. While the relevant language was much weaker than many had hoped, the Summit’s very acceptance of the idea that economic growth must be delinked from environmental degradation is an important step forward.

• The Plan of Implementation also commits governments to ensuring access at the national level to environmental information and judicial and administrative proceedings in environmental matters, as well as public participation in decision-making. Although it failed to pledge new resources or expand implementation of these “access principles” adopted at the 1992 Rio Summit, the WSSD reaffirmed the importance of ensuring individuals’ access to information, participation in decision-making, and justice.

• One of the WSSD’s most significant outcomes was a new recognition of voluntary partnerships between civil society, government, and corporate interests (“Type II” partnerships), a development that highlights a transition from traditional multilateral diplomacy to a voluntary approach to implementation. The Summit witnessed the launching of several key initiatives and partnerships on sustainable development, including the Partnership for Principle 10, a global coalition of civil society organizations, governments, and international organizations working to strengthen public access to information, participation, and justice.

• The WSSD provided unequivocal recognition of community-based natural resources management, including reaffirmation of the vital role of indigenous peoples in sustainable development.

• The Summit acknowledged the need to consider ethics in the implementation of a sustainable development agenda, marking the first time that an explicit reference to ethics has been made in any official United Nations environment or development document.

• The political declaration adopted at Johannesburg, as well as the Summit’s Plan of Implementation, contain references to corporate responsibility and accountability, including “the full development and effective implementation of intergovernmental agreements and measures.” Although the final negotiated text fell short of NGO demands for binding corporate accountability measures, the decision to promote corporate responsibility and accountability is an important sign of progress.

Nevertheless, the Summit’s official outcomes were disappointing to many. In Johannesburg, governments looked at the state of the world, recognized its immense development and environment problems, acknowledged that they need to do more to respond to these challenges, and then concluded weakly by ratifying existing efforts and approaches that have been found wanting. New commitments and innovative thinking were largely absent, particularly on global environmental issues and how they threaten development in all countries.

The governmental meeting that took place in Sandton was only one of the many “summits” (see Box 1) that took place in South Africa before and during the official sessions. These summits and conferences addressed issues as wide-ranging as responsible tourism, children’s rights, environmental justice, business interests, local governments, and legislators. Each of these “summits” illustrates how far the world has come toward meeting the challenges of sustainable development, and how many stakeholder groups are clearly far ahead of governments in building a local sustainable development movement.

The story emerging from Johannesburg and its many summits is both inspiring and disturbing. Despite low expectations, the official meeting achieved concrete gains, many of which could be directly linked to the efforts of stakeholder groups. The diversity of voice and faces reflected in the other “summits” was important and valuable.³ However, governments’ failure to agree on effective means of implementation (including financing) makes it likely that the successes of WSSD could be rendered meaningless. Division within and between civil society and governments will remain an obstacle to addressing development and environment concerns for years or even decades to come. Bridging these divisions and charting a course that takes advantage of the strengths that come from diversity is the challenge now before those working toward sustainable development.