By Anna Malos
BondOctober 2002
Unsurprisingly the answer depends on your perspective. The UN, UK and EU were all quick to proclaim it a success. NGOs, North and South, were far more critical - pointing out how much it didn't achieve.
Criticism from NGOs falls into two broad areas: how NGOs were permitted involvement, and the Summit documents themselves. So what was the problem with involvement in the Summit? Involvement was possible by formal accreditation for the UN process or participation in parallel and side events.
The formal route gave accredited NGOs the right to: observe at open sessions; help form major group and caucus statements; and provided access to government delegates for lobbying. Accrediation itself is a bureaucratic and lengthy process that mitigates against the involvement of less well resourced and smaller NGOs. Additionally for this Summit, logistics proved problematic as the numbers of major group delegates was such that there were additional access restrictions imposed. A more fundamental problem was that most negotiations took place in closed sessions open only to government delegates. This left NGOs hanging around in corridors and reliant on second hand information.
The final, most important, difficulty is how any non-government body can be involved - the UN works by consensus, but only the consensus of governments. There is no formal way in which civil society or intergovernmental bodies can block UN agreements. Of course many would say this is appropriate because NGOs, and the caucuses that form around international events, lack accountability. But surely there is a way of giving greater sway to non-governmental opinion - there were as many delegates at WSSD from major groups as from government.
Events associated with a Summit
These are often more obviously productive in their interchange of ideas, good practice and formation of new connections for future work. Attendance is far more open and the atmosphere more dynamic. The events usually succeed very well in their own right, but again it is the link with the formal process that can be lacking. For instance the Civil Society Global Forum was 35 km from where the formal negotiations were taking place. A nightmare for anyone who wanted to exchange information and ideas between the two and the perfect excuse to ignore it for those who weren't interested.
So what about the Johannesburg Declaration itself?
As disappointing as the two elements of this document were to many, the official line from those I talked to in the UK and EU is that there are enough 'pegs' to make progress on a variety of issues. Alongside the spin seems to be a genuine belief that the Summit will create worthwhile advances.
However, one of the key concerns is that agreements from more specific international meetings, eg. the biodiversity convention, had previously come up with more progressive language - although fewer countries participated. This suggests WSSD is going back on negotiated agreements and may show a lack of co-ordination within government on who signs up to what.
With the bad news there was some good - the agreement on Water and Sanitation. This mentioned specific actions and Sanitation was added as a key target for reducing poverty by 2015. Shame the rest of the document is not as good. For more specific critique of the declaration, contact BOND's Development and Environment Group (DEG).
The most demoralising aspect was the hegemony of trade and WTO agreements. In an ideal world trade should be recognised as only part of economic development, which itself is only part of sustainable development and on par with social and environmental issues.
Perhaps what is most important for this and similar declarations, is what has more international impact - challenging specific targets (that often seem to be ignored) or vaguer language that covers most actions. This is where governments tend to talk of the need to bring everyone along - the polite way of saying better the US agrees to something than is excluded. This is certainly not the view of all NGOs, eg FoE. There's an alternative view - if the US doesn't stand by agreements it has previously signed up to, what is the point of keeping them on board?
So, success or failure? Depends on whether you ascribe to the overiding need for Realpolitik or think that you should aim high and be continually pushing boundaries. Here is where NGOs rightly have a different perspective to governments, and this shows the need for different NGOs to have differing roles both as outsiders and insiders to achieve change.
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