Desai aims for Bali Commitment

Desai aims for Bali Commitment

The Jakarta Post, Nusa Dua, Bali

With negotiations at the fourth preparatory meeting in Bali ongoing, the United Nations Secretary General for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Nitin Desai expects delegates to produce a strong action plan for implementing sustainable development principles. He calls it the Bali Commitment.

The Jakarta Post's Berni K. Moestafa interviewed him on Wednesday to get his views on the Bali Commitment. The Following are excerpts:

Q:How do you describe the progress thus far?

A: I will use the phrase many here are using, slowly but steady. It means the pace in terms of the numbers of paragraphs etc., which have been agreed upon is slow. But what has been done is very definite: Things are being finalized and decided.

What are the main issues being negotiated?

The whole issue is the form in which the commitment will be stated. How firm will the targets be? How firm is the language on the programs? These are very important things which are being negotiated. But once they come to an agreement, then a lot of things fall in place. Like the language of finance, once you fix it in one place, a lot of other things get cleared up.

I would say at this stage some basic issues are being hammered out, then we will be at a stage to ensure consistency.

People are negotiating in different (working) groups and contacts (groups). Then when everybody comes together, you'll have to decide on what is the formulation that should be used throughout. That's the sort of thing we start doing on Friday.

What are the chances for a strong document?

I don't know about that. A lot of countries support the idea of time definite goals, the NGOs are clearly in favor.

The negotiations should conclude by Friday. What do you expect the delegations do?

What I expect from them is to clear up as many things as possible, so that when we start on Friday we have some well defined areas of the differences which we shall resolve.

So certainly the text which will come out on Friday will have fewer alternatives than the text which is being looked at now.

We are working on the assumption that we complete our work. But there is a lot to do, on the political declaration, on the preparation for Johannesburg and what is it that we need to do, to put some credible program of implementation between Bali and Johannesburg.

My hope is that we really do complete our work by the weekend on the program of action. The Bali commitment as I call it.

Is the NGO's participation going the way that you expect?

Yes, this is a very long tradition in the UN. As you can see, a lot of them are here, they are very vocal, they speak up and they are very critical quite often but that's the whole point. They are expressing an important point of view governments should listen to.

Is the forum provided for the NGOs sufficient to get their message across to the governments?

There is much more interaction than normal since the multi- stakeholders dialog that we were having over the past three days. That's much more intensive, in fact they are right there in front and the documents are freely available, they can meet with delegates. So there are a lot of opportunities for them.

Will there be any change from here to Johannesburg?

The program of action will be decided here. What will be done now is on the political declaration. Bali will give the outlines, the elements, but the actual drafting and discussion on that will take place in Johannesburg.

But the main product of the Summit is what we think will be, is what I call the Bali Commitment.

If it is strong enough, we'll call it the Bali Commitment.

And if the program is not strong enough?

We'll still call it Bali something, perhaps the Bali Program.

Many people say the implementation (of the 1992 Rio Declaration) was too weak and they fear this could happen again.

Yes, so I think a lot of focus here is on what we need to do to keep up the pressure. This sort of thing falls under the name of accountability and responsibility. Much of the discussion on the institutional issue here is on that. And I expect this will remain an important dimension between now and Johannesburg. People will correctly ask: Okay, how do we ensure that this gets implemented? What do we need to do beyond Johannesburg? So this is very correct and we will see a lot of discussion here also on the follow up mechanism which focuses on this. This will be a major item. We call it the accountability and responsibility monitoring discussion.

And after Johannesburg?

I think the main thing is we really have to make sure that we implement what will be decided in Johannesburg. The real beyond Johannesburg, is to make sure that we actually meet the promise. Because the whole point of Johannesburg is implementation. This means we have to really make sure that we get to the sources, we get the program in place, that we assist the countries in need of assistance, that we help the countries in formulating their own plans. All of these things you will have to take up. So there is a lot of work beyond Johannesburg to do. The work is with the countries, the UN is not a negotiator. It is there to facilitate.