Global Policy Forum

By Amartya Sen *

A Task For Johannesburg

The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago, which did a lot to advance environmental consciousness in public discussion, also helped to generate the understanding that environment and development are inextricably linked.

The need to think about the environment cannot really be dissociated from the nature of the lives that people, especially deprived people, live today. If people have a miserable living standard, then the promise of sustaining that pitiable standard in the future can hardly be very thrilling. The goal has to include rapid reduction of today's deprivations, while making sure that what is achieved today can be sustained in the future.

Global cooperation is needed both to alleviate today's deprivations and to safeguard our future. And that is exactly what the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which begins Aug. 26 in Johannesburg, is trying to achieve.

But do the prospects of effective global cooperation look promising? One issue that has received much attention is the need for development aid, and the extent to which richer countries are willing to help poorer ones. On this front, things do not look particularly promising.

The International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Mexico last March, produced a document quite upbeat on powerful rhetoric but rather bashful on the likely magnitudes of financial assistance. The chasm between expectation and delivery is beginning to look big. In general, from the financial perspective, the outlook for the Johannesburg summit meeting cannot be seen as rosy.

But fruitful global cooperation can take many different forms - not just general financial assistance.

On the environmental side, we need to make up ground that has been lost by the slowing down of international agreements and the reneging on past understandings (for example, by the United States on the Kyoto Protocol). On the economic side, the importance of reducing entry barriers in the richer countries for products from the poorer ones deserves much greater practical acknowledgment. Johannesburg offers an excellent opportunity for both.

There are also many institutional reforms urgently needed for the global economy. To illustrate, there is a strong case for making patent laws more efficient as well as less contrary to equity. The existing laws do not facilitate the actual use of desperately needed medicines in less affluent countries.

There are also many positive things that the poorer countries can do for themselves, without any financial help from the rich, who need not be seen as the moving agents of change.

We can even question the general strategy of defining sustainable development only in terms of fulfillment of needs, rather than using the broader perspective of enhancing human freedoms on a sustainable basis. The essential freedoms must, of course, include the ability to meet crucially important economic needs, but there are also many others to be considered, such as expanding political participation and broadening social opportunities.

Indeed, it is not at all obvious why the enhancing of democratic freedoms should not figure among the central demands of sustainable development. Not only are these freedoms important in themselves, but they can contribute to other types of freedoms. Open public discussion, often stifled under authoritarian regimes, may be pivotally important for leading a fuller human life and also for a better understanding of the importance of environmental preservation.

There are many rewards of seeing people as "agents" who can exercise their freedoms rather than merely as "patients" whose needs have to be fulfilled. Being less anxious about getting big financial assurances from richer countries is among those rewards. Important as financial assistance may be, there are also other ways forward, which can be helped by more focus on agency.

Johannesburg offers a major opportunity for that approach as well. Our relations with the world depend crucially on our view of ourselves.

The writer, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize for economics. This comment was distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate International.

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