Unfinished business in Bali

Two weeks of talks ended in Bali with no agreement on an action plan for sustainable development. The fourth and last leg of the preparatory meetings before the Johannesburg Summit next August ended inconclusively as regards how to align economic development with social and environmental interests.

The Bali meeting was supposed to produce a 10-year action plan to be known as the Bali Commitment. This started out as an original 10-page Chairman's Text prepared by Prof. Emil Salim, and was then expanded into a 39-page document summarizing the outcomes of the three previous preparatory meetings in New York. In Bali, the document grew further into a 78-page draft plan, that was in the end watered down and weakened by political rhetoric.

It was supposed to contain definite time and action targets. Many substantial issues, however, were not agreed upon. The unfinished document, full of unclear commitments, will now be held over to the Johannesburg Summit.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong in Bali. The meeting was supposed to substantiate the principle that the whole planet cannot sustain economic development based on previous practices that disregard environmental and social constraints. The Rio Earth Summit 1992 concluded that economic, social and environmental concerns are inescapably interlinked in world development. Thus, sustainable development, integrating economic, social and environmental interests, should be established as the central organizing principle for societies around the world.

Years have gone by, but unsustainable approaches to economic progress remain pervasive. The global response to environmental degradation is sluggish, at the expense of future generations of human beings living on a planet whose ecosystems and resources can no longer provide for their needs. It seems that formulating global policies based on the principle of sustainable development, as envisioned by the Rio Summit, is not only difficult to achieve, but even more difficult to implement.

One obvious example is the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. There is broad scientific consensus that human-induced climate change is underway and accelerating, with some of the predicted consequences of global warming already taking place. But the international community cannot bring the Kyoto Protocol into force, because the United States, the largest contributor to human-induced climate change, has arrogantly decided to ignore the consensus, and refused to endorse the Protocol.

There is a general feeling that during the Bali meeting, the United States again led a systematic effort to water down the Bali Commitment, skillfully engineering delegates into a division between North and South over the issue of finance and trade.

The failure of the Bali meeting, however, cannot be blamed solely on the United States. Indonesia, as the host country, must also accept its share of the responsibility. The Indonesian delegation to the Fourth Preparatory Committee for the World Summit failed to put in a concerted effort and lacked the skills needed to rally the international community to focus its efforts on the action plan. The last decade has shown that Rio's political and conceptual commitments have not been decisive enough. There is a huge gap between the goals and promises set out in Rio and what is actually happening on the ground in both rich and poor countries. The Indonesian delegation obviously failed to bring about a focused and conclusive meeting.

In addition, the Indonesia People's Forum, which is supposed to represent various non-governmental organizations as stakeholders in sustainable development, failed even to consolidate its own disparate interests into one clear and common platform. Its demand for a boycott of the Fourth Preparatory Committee will not bring any nearer the putting into effect of the common principle of sustainable development.

We still have about 80 days left before the Johannesburg Summit takes place. There is still a chance to make that summit worth something more than the Rio Earth Summit. But the Johannesburg Summit will also possibly fail if the international community lets itself be divided between North and South. The international community has to act together to build the political will implement what was promised in Rio, with or without the United States.

On the other hand, local and international non-governmental organizations should consolidate their ranks and come up with clear and common goals. They must not fail again. Given that most agree that human beings are at the center of the concerns for sustainable development, it is clear that the stakes are just too high.