World Summit on Sustainable Development: Third Preparatory Committee Meeting, New York City, March 25 th - April 5 th, 2002

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1 World Summit on Sustainable Development: Third Preparatory Committee Meeting, New York City, March 25 th - April 5 th, 2002 An Update for Donors and Civil Society Organizations April 27, 2002 Prepared by: Arthur Getz Escudero, International Partners for Sustainable Agriculture (IPSA) Antonio G. M. La Vina, World Resources Institute This is an update on the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), focusing in particular on the outcomes of the Third Preparatory Committee meeting recently held in New York City. The authors have prepared this for donors and civil society organizations with the objective of providing a critical perspective on the ongoing processes related to the WSSD. With support from The Ford Foundation, we will provide periodic updates on these processes with the specific intention of enhancing and maximizing the impact of civil society organizations, particularly those representing poor and excluded constituencies worldwide, in the WSSD. A broader and more detailed account and analysis of PrepCom III can be found in Volume 22, No. 29 of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, at: Highlights of PrepCom III PrepCom III did not succeed in its main objective - producing a negotiated text for the Ministerial Meeting in Bali, a document that would contain the review and assessment of the ten years of experience since Rio as well as conclusions and recommendations for future actions. The Chairman and the Bureau have been mandated to produce a new text that incorporates the concerns articulated during the PrepCom, yet in a short, concise manner. That new text would be discussed during the next preparatory meeting in Bali, Indonesia, which will be preceded by three extra days of informal deliberations. Debate was robust, intense, and comprehensive during the third PrepCom. Some of these debates were constructive and broke new ground (trade and sustainable development, the role of globalization, corporate accountability). However, the continuing debate on the meaning of common but differentiated responsibilities and new and additional financial resources continued to cast shadow on collaboration between North and South. The discussions around Type II outcomes (their appropriateness, criteria) reflected this continuing debate. Civil society organizations actively participated in PrepCom III. However, efforts to coordinate positions and interventions more effectively are essential. Dealing with the format of the negotiations posed certain challenges to civil society participation. The immediate consequence of this round not producing a text in synthesized form is that the next moment of hammering out a final statement of 1

2 political will and renewed commitments between governments will happen without civil society access customary to PrepComs of the WSSD three days have been added to the front end of the Bali meeting and have been determined to follow?informal-informal setting structure, which restricts non-government organization access to the official process. The Big Picture: Is Success Still Possible for the WSSD? This spring, a different mood prevailed at the basement meetings in the UN headquarters in New York. While the late January meetings (PrepCom II) were relatively relaxed and open-ended, providing opportunity for civil society and government participants alike to informally discuss and critique where sustainable development had come since the tenyear old Rio commitments, the more recent March-April round in New York was more strained and focused on delivering specific language to the next round coming at the end of May in Bali. A difficult series of choices needed to be made by PrepCom III participants as to where they might focus their energies because several processes competed for people s attention over the nine-day session. As expected, the debate in PrepCom III was robust, intense and comprehensive. The thrust of the Summit is a focus on implementation, with the aim on more recently established UN Millennium Declaration goals. Yet the Secretariat of the Summit has seen it necessary to update the issues agreed upon from Rio with many dimensions that have emerged or evolved since Governments debated the role of globalization in sustainable development, changing unsustainable patterns on consumption and production, the impact of declining levels of official development assistance, the role of corporations and the private sector, the interface between health and sustainable development, international and domestic environmental governance including issues related to access to information, transparency and environmental justice, and means of implementation. Governments also discussed substantive topics ranging from access to energy to forestry and biodiversity. Some of the debates in PrepCom III were constructive and broke new ground. The relationship between trade and sustainable development, for example, is long overdue. Likewise, debating the role of globalization, including corporate accountability, is a theme that was not central during the Earth Summit but is now appropriately being debated. The past could not however be avoided in the form of the continuing debate on the meaning of common but differentiated responsibilities and new and additional financial resources. The unmet commitments that tie official development assistance to a level 0.7% of GNP and the expectation that new commitments would bring with them new resources and technology transfer continue to be a source of friction between the North and South. Overall though, PrepCom III was a disappointment to many who hoped that the outlines of a Summit Agenda would have emerged by now. By failing to produce even a broadly agreed text summarizing the review and assessment of the 10 years since Rio and 2

3 identifying renewed commitments and future actions, there is a real concern that the WSSD process would not result in meaningful outcomes. In the absence to date of a more focused negotiating text, both governments and relevant stakeholders (including civil society organizations) would not be able to prepare as extensively as they should for Bali. The Bureau has been mandated to prepare a new synthesis text to replace the compilation text. It has also been asked to refine a text on sustainable development governance and give further guidance and clarification on?type 2 outcomes, or partnerships. Partnerships in Focus: Who, How, What, Where? Type 2 partnerships are conceived as a step beyond the commitments established in Rio with the Agenda 21 and now being re-affirmed with its ten-year anniversary, which taken together are the inter-governmental agreements and resources being seen as?type 1 outcomes. The WSSD secretariat distinguishes the latter, which involve governments and are expressions of political will, from the former, which can be partnerships to implement sustainable development on the ground with and between civil society organizations, and the private sector, in addition to governments. There was heightened suspicion during the PrepCom among members of the NGOs present that the emphasis on partnerships would possibly permit several unwanted results: that to engage civil society in the elevated role of partners in implementation would detract from governments responsibilities (possibly letting them off the hook on taking direct responsibility for implementing sustainable development) or that it would ease further entry and cover for corporate involvement in UN activities and thereby contributing to a weakening of the international governmental system. Expressions of doubt about the meaning of partnerships between unequal parties came from Major Groups reps of Women and Indigenous Peoples. Others have welcomed the focus on implementation and on commitments that could be monitored over time, and much recent activity (perhaps because of the impasse on Type 1) is now centered on generating partnership ideas and linking groups and donors to them. The WSSD Secretariat is tracking the applications and posting proposed partnerships online at the following URL: Civil Society Participation in the Process PrepCom III was beset with various difficulties in the work schedule, including compression of the first week into four days followed by a three day Easter holiday. Recently imposed austerity measures closed the buildings early on several days, curtailing or shifting meetings for delegations to consult, or for negotiations to continue late, and sometimes forcing cancellation of side events. Intense competition and confusion resulted from bumped assignments of meeting rooms, frustrating many NGOs who had planned to keep abreast of the developing negotiations through regular meeting times and predictable locations. This also helped underscore the importance of near /off site meeting and workspaces for NGOs, together with very basic but still elusive 3

4 logistical supports: access to computers/printers/cheap communications &copying facilities/quiet work areas/regular locations for schedule updates/simple presentation tools & supplies. While resources are scarce, many hope that Bali and Johannesburg will provide better support for NGOs to get their work done. The economizing measure that turned to posting text changes to the web during the PrepCom may have been a mixed blessing. At the very least, it is clear that position statements that are more easily accessed and analyzed from the web can be applied as a sharper tool for finding common positions between stakeholders engaged in the official process, and could prepare participants in combined lobbying strategies for the period leading to the next High Level segment in Bali. The URLs for these working group and other NGO and IGO submissions can be found at: PrepCom II provided the opportunity for structured interaction between Major Group representatives and governments within the meeting plenary on several occasions, while the third round was not designed for these multi-stakeholder dialogues (MSD). The next opportunity arises again in the Bali PrepCom IV round, and many hope to see better application of this important opening for civil society voices in the official policy arena. Some discussions in New York were devoted to assessment of the shortcomings of January s MSD, criteria and guidelines for selection of NGO candidates to make presentations, and on preparations of position papers for the next occasion. In Bali, there will be three sessions with the first themes on?governance in the context of globalization, and in two concurrent sessions on?partnerships: standards, roles, limitations and criteria, as well as?financing and institutional arrangements, and a third on?capacity building and means of implementation. A final session will be a plenary with a large statement from the Chair and opportunities for Major Groups to each make final statements on a?political priorities theme. The deadlines for review and submissions to the NGO position paper, are fast approaching, and are being managed by the collaboration between the Third World Network (TWN), the Danish Rio 92 Group, and the Environmental Liaison Centre (ELCI). Further information and links are available at the official WSSD homepage: Amplifying the Voices of the Poor and Excluded Amplifying the voices of poor and excluded constituencies in the WSSD processes remain a task that needs to be accomplished more effectively. While some structure provided that voices were at least heard in PrepCom II (through the Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue Segment), this more recent round was focused on formulating agreed text, and so measuring success in being heard necessarily turned to how well issues were included in the drafts. Two active constituencies in PrepCom III were women and indigenous peoples. Through various organizations, such as WEDO, women groups have been working hard to ensure that gender perspectives on all issues to sustainable development 4

5 were considered, and numerous instances of their language reaching across sections of the draft confirmed this. A different strategy was pursued by a caucus of Indigenous Peoples groups, who circulated a proposal for the inclusion of a distinct section in the Chair s paper reflecting their unique status among the major groups and their relative?invisibility as they have so far been perceived. Their three-fold proposal has at its heart the recommendations : indigenous peoples legal systems for economic, social, cultural and political development be adopted; that recognition of their lands and territories and plans for territorial demarcation be encouraged as a poverty eradication strategy; and that existing proposed and emerging conventions on indigenous peoples be adopted, ratified and implemented. Environmental justice groups, mostly from the United States and joined by a few colleagues from other regions of the world, were present during PrepCom III. Representatives from some developing country civil society organizations also attended the meeting. Overall though, attendance by grassroots organizations in the PrepCom was limited. More importantly, the concerns of many of these constituencies have not been reflected in the official texts that have been produced so far. Vague references to community-based approaches in managing natural resources such as forests and coastal marine resources have appeared in the various drafts, but with no connection to specifics or commitments to deliverable results. Likewise, the theme of environmental justice has not been incorporated into the text and will require a clear strategy if it is to gain prominence in the next round of negotiations. Governments have included language on access and tenure to land as normative references but have not yet tied them to timetables or particular programs for clear implementation outcomes. It is not too late, however, to amplify these voices and to connect the rhetorical placeholders that do exist in the text to real interests and places on the ground. The Multi-Stakeholder Segment in Bali remains an important opportunity to fill this gap. If the Type 2 criteria are made more clear and acceptable to their critics, they also may become important recognition and commitment building openings for groups that have long been excluded. Better coordination and implementation of a more effective political strategy at Bali and subsequently in Johannesburg are also essential elements if local and excluded communities are to be heard in this global process. Preparations for Bali PrepCom IV, to be convened at the Ministerial Level, is scheduled for 24 May 7 June 2002 in Bali, Indonesia. Regional meetings are scheduled for 24 May while informal consultations will be held from May These consultations are aimed at producing a draft text that will be negotiated in the two weeks scheduled for the official meeting. In addition to the negotiated action programme, the Bali meeting is also supposed to draft a political declaration that will be endorsed by the Heads of States and Governments who attend the Summit in Johannesburg. 5

6 Looking ahead to other civil society entry points, there were brief presentations in PrepCom III by representatives from the Indonesian Peoples Forum (IPF) on logistics and preparations for side event planning for Bali. The late shift of venue from Jakarta to Bali has caused the IPF considerable difficulty, and while still flexible on additional themes, the existing list of side events for the Peoples Forum event includes the following range of issues and focus groups: Corruption, Foreign Debt, Ecological Debt, Globalization, Poverty and Equity, Women in sustainable development, Indigenous People, Youth and Children, Peasants, Laborers, Global Governance, Forests, Energy and Climate Change, Biodiversity, Mining, and Coastal and Marine Resources. More details of the IPF and the strategies to link?inside and?outside processes are under development, and will be posted at: Preparations for Johannesburg In an effort to further resolve NGO representation questions and to facilitate international civil society governance processes on the path to Johannesburg, a team of staff from the South African civil society coordinating body convened a meeting of the International Steering Group during the end of the first week. The meeting devoted considerable time to the question of geographical spread of representatives and clarified the responsibilities of members to report back to their regional networks. A process was established for confirmation of regional positions through a loose voting process among people able to convene around the various geographic clusters at the PrepCom, and added space for Major Group representation and some international NGO representation, to be followed up through communications to the South Africa host committee. For more information about civil society (in South Africa) preparations for the WSSD, see 6