Unfinished business in Bali

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.