The Johannesburg Global Summit: were hopes being raised too high?

The Johannesburg Global Summit: were hopes being raised too high?

At a meeting on 7 October 2002, Catherine Day, Director General Director General for DG Environment, Niall FitzGerald KBE, Unilever Chairman and CEO, Tony Long, Director WWF for Nature, Mona Westergaard, Special Advisor to Hans Chr. Schmidt, Danish Environment Minister exchanged views on the theme “Johannesburg Global Summit: were hopes being raised too high?”

Robin Pomeroy, a Brussels-based Reuters correspondent who covered the UN Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, offered reflections on the event’s many paradoxes. First, there’s the jargon. “Sustainable” is a buzzword for those in the development community, but it doesn’t actually mean much to editors in Western capitals. That makes it tougher than people might think to report on. The lavish nature of such events itself also raises questions. The summit involved moving 40,000 people from 200 different countries. Was that effort worth the cost in terms of time, expenditure of carbon dioxide, and the consequent environmental damage?

Catherine Day, the EU’s Director General for Environment, said hopes weren’t raised too high at the Johannesburg summit. That’s because the issues under discussion are crucial to the world’s future. Ambitions need to be lofty to achieve some sort of a result. The biggest problem in Johannesburg was a “political climate” not conducive to delivering on many of those ambitions. The EU therefore characterizes Johannesburg as “only a qualified success” and believes that the real outcome can only be judged over time.

Niall FitzGerald KBE, Chief Executive Officer of Unilever, said the main achievement of Johannesburg was keeping sustainable development on the world’s agenda by creating a more tangible set of priorities than those set in Rio 10 years ago. Johannesburg saw the formation over 300 partnerships, with 200 involving government and NGOs. One partnership involves Unilever, which is helping the Indian government in the area of hand washing, a key to global hygiene and disease reduction.

Tony Long, the Director of WWF for Nature, said hopes were high at Johannesburg because of the very nature of the development agenda. Eliminating poverty, tackling environmental degradation and resource depletion, improving social equity, and righting the north-south imbalance were “legitimate expectations for the summit.” Those hopes were largely dashed and the summit was all too “often a race to the bottom.” Hitherto established frames of reference, such as the precautionary principle and the Rio principles, were actually in jeopardy a lot of the time.

This led WWF to call Johannesburg the WSSD – or World Summit of Shameful Deals. Campaigners are right to ask whether such events can make any meaningful contribution. In Johannesburg, it was easy to lose sight of the visions outlined and to embrace the lowest common denominator because of the overloaded agenda. “Huge trade-offs” were the result.

Mona Westergaard, Special Adviser to the Danish Environment minister, said the EU went to Johannesburg aware that “many countries didn’t share our views.” The EU also faced criticism from NGOs who complained that Europeans weren’t being ambitious enough. In those circumstances, with conflicting forces at work, maybe hopes were raised too high.

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