Posted on 09/18/2002 9:17:23 AM PDT by jodorowsky
For my sins, which must have been considerable, I have just finished reading the final political declaration and the official implementation plan, all 54 single-spaced pages of it, of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Actually, they're not the final, final documents but the unedited final drafts, which are all that the United Nations has managed to get onto the official summit Web site in the two weeks now since the summiteers left Johannesburg.
The political document, which is only four pages, is bad enough. "We the representatives of the peoples of the world" -- the vast majority, governments and NGOs alike, self-appointed representatives -- "commit ourselves to build a humane, equitable and caring global society cognizant of the need for human dignity for all." Anyone out there know: Does "cognizant" modify "we" or "society"? And, if the latter, is "cognizant" really the best the delegates could do? Should "global society" merely be cognizant of the need for human dignity, or should global society be dedicated to human dignity? We right-wingers aren't much given to global declarations -- there's no such thing as global society, as Mrs. Thatcher might have said -- but you'd think the lefties who love them could do a better job of it.
The declaration then goes on to explain that "at the beginning of this Summit, the children of the world spoke to us in a simple yet clear voice that the future belongs to them." My kids actually were in school at the time so I don't know who these other kids were, speaking on their behalf. More self-appointed stakeholders, I suppose.
The political declaration, like most such documents, is little more than grand principles, albeit most of them debatable. The implementation document, by contrast, is supposed to be the summit's real achievement. It does set some precise -- and worthy -- targets: halve the number of people in poverty by 2015; halve the number who don't have access to clean water in the same period, and so on. But that's not quite what most people have in mind when they think of an implementation document. When you bring your new chairs home from IKEA you don't want an instruction manual that simply says: "Get half of them put together by 2015." You want something that says "Pick up front leg (A) and attach to seat base (C) using screws (D), (E), and funny IKEA tool (G)."
The implementation document does go into considerable detail on lots of things. My own personal favourite, in the section on oceans, is a direction for governments to "accelerate the development of measures to address invasive alien species in ballast water." If the UN -- which is, after all, the planet's organization -- should be in charge of anything, it's dealing with alien species. But, again, this is more in the nature of a goal rather than an implementation manual.
To be fair, in some cases the document does favour subsidizing this or that. Thus in the section on energy the developed countries are asked to help the developing countries achieve sustainable energy use. Actually, "energy" or "energy use" seldom appears in such an unvarnished way in the document. Rather, the politically correct usage is now "reliable, affordable, economically viable, socially acceptable and environmentally sound energy services" -- a cumbersome construction that seems certain to beget an acronym.
Easy access to energy, the UN argues, is a crucial part of a poverty reduction strategy, and who would disagree? The problem is that the socially acceptable and environmentally sound energy services that so many rich-country NGOs have made a fetish of are too expensive for the desperately poor of the world at whom the development side of the sustainable development initiative is aimed. Burning animal dung -- and what could be more renewable than animal dung? -- may harm the health of those who warm themselves and cook with it, but from their point of view the expenditure needed to replace it isn't, well, sustainable. If we rich folk want the poor to change their behaviour, we will have to pay them to do so.
Johannesburg probably didn't mark big business's co-opting of the development agenda, as so many on the left have charged. There is enough meddling interventionism in the implementation plan to belie that. But it may well have marked the formation of a new and heretofore unlikely alliance between the rich world's pro-capitalists and the poor world's most desperate.
The world's anti-capitalists doubtless will keep harking back to the official Action Plan in future years. But I suspect another document from the summit will last longer in people's minds: the placard carried by a homeless African, which said "We want sustainable development," but with "sustainable" crossed out. It was heartening, though hardly surprising, to see that the world's poor want exactly what capitalism has always been best at delivering: economic growth. And it is nice, for once, to be on the same side of the argument as the wretched of the earth, despite what their self-appointed representatives in the West may claim.
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