What will be the likely outcome of Joburg Summit?

What will be the likely outcome of Joburg Summit?

Agus P. Sari, Executive Director of Pelangi, an Environmental Research Institute, Based in Jakarta

The Bali preparatory committee meeting was meant to prepare material for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg to address a range of issues from helping millions out of poverty to protecting the environment.

These issues were, among other things, poverty alleviation, changing unsustainable production and consumption, transfers of resources and technology from rich countries to poor countries and preserving natural resources and the environment that development needs of future generations will be dependent upon.

In conclusion, the meeting was to agree on the implementation of sustainable development.

The past week and a half at the Bali meeting, however, has been dominated by economic globalization, trade liberalization and corporatization. Champions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been insisting that a globalized world, free trade and the increased role of corporations would contribute to sustainable development. Critics, however, argued that the results would be increased poverty, gaps in income and further destruction of the environment.

Against the backdrop of these polarized arguments, Johannesburg will have to come up with an outcome that is acceptable to the stakeholders that the Summit represents, yet worth the papers it produces, the words it forms and the costs it incurs. What will this be?

Remember Seattle? In 1999, the WTO held its annual meeting in Seattle, and the U.S. anti-globalization movement, joined by a number of anarchists, took over the streets and inadvertently incited destructive riots.

This event caught the attention of world leaders. Clinton's speech said that the WTO must take the voice "from the outside" into account. Then there was the meeting in Genoa where one protester was killed, putting heavy pressure on other protesters. Afterwards, there was Doha, where the world leaders finally agreed on the basic terms for free trade.

The expansion of the role of corporations is all too noticeable. And the impression that the WTO is just an extension of corporate interests is all too apparent. In the years between 1987 and 1997, foreign direct investment grew drastically from US$88 billion to $400 billion. Overseas Development Assistance, on the other hand, grew from $42 billion to $63 billion over the same period.

Social and environmental impacts made by these corporations have been felt mainly by local communities while overseas executives and shareholders have enjoyed large profits. The piecemeal programs by these multinationals, in the name of community development, have failed to address the longer term problems of corporate responsibility and good governance. A viable longer term solution to this is urgently needed.

There is an unspoken agreement that, given the global and corporate world that we live in now, there is a need to balance the power of the WTO -- to complement it, and more importantly to undertake tasks that the WTO cannot undertake. While the WTO is good at promoting free trade and investment, it is not well- situated to address poverty, equity and environmental protection. These tasks should be undertaken elsewhere, not through the WTO framework.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) for a while tried to champion international environmental governance, with a likely outcome of forming an organization, such as the world environment organization. This idea, though it gained momentum in its time, failed to materialize because it failed to address the most pressing developmental issues, such as poverty alleviation and equity. Nevertheless it has started a discourse on global sustainable development governance.

Along these lines, proposals to establish the likes of a world environment and development organization and a world sustainable development organization have been put forth. Johannesburg may be a process striving to achieve just that: to establish an institution with a set of rules, mechanisms and agreements. The institution may not necessarily be an organization, which at first competes with and is the anti-thesis to the WTO, but in the end it would work alongside the WTO, complementing its undertakings in areas where the WTO cannot go.

At the same time, in response to global world problems, civil society has become increasingly globalized as well. Alongside the worldwide non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Greenpeace, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Friends of the Earth, numerous smaller NGOs have established international networks among themselves according to common interests.

Institutionalized rules and mechanisms to govern sustainable development will have to comprise a range of multi-stakeholders and governments. The old model of intergovernmental mechanisms can no longer work. In conclusion, even though the WTO is currently the only game in the global town, it should not be.

Mechanisms to make the corporate world accountable and responsible for its conduct everywhere in the world will have to prevail and the constituency for it among governments as well as civil society is growing. The shape of this new model of multi- stakeholder mechanisms will be determined at Johannesburg. Bali started the move, and Johannesburg must finish it.