Gearing up for Rio+20

SEOUL, KOREA—Meetings are taking place here this week on the preparations being undertaken in the Asia-Pacific region for the 20th anniversary of the historic Earth Summit held in July 1992. It was in that conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, officially known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, where UN member-countries first agreed to take measures to integrate environmental concerns with their social and economic development efforts.  What distinguished this particular summit then was that it was driven as much by people outside of government and international public institutions (i.e., “civil society”), as it was by heads of government and high officials from all the UN member-countries who came. The Earth Summit ushered in a new era of multi-stakeholder partnerships in pursuit of sustainable development.

The outcome of the Rio Summit was a global “Agenda 21” that defined broad directions to be taken by countries to ensure proper integration of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of development. Such integrated view of development has since provided the operational framework for “sustainable development,” defined as providing for the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Apart from identifying sectoral and technical imperatives that would translate the pursuit of sustainable development into action, Agenda 21 recognized that sustainable development is not a task for governments alone. It requires active partnership that brings together the efforts of the three major stakeholder groups in society, namely government, the private (business) sector, and civil society—the last referring to ordinary citizens working through organized groups and institutions such as non-government organizations (NGOs), people’s organizations, academe, Church and religious groups, sectoral associations and communities. To put this partnership into action, the global Agenda 21 urged all states to establish institutional mechanisms where the three stakeholder groups can come together to jointly tackle their sustainable development challenges.

Through the prompt action of President Fidel V. Ramos barely six weeks after the 1992 Earth Summit, the Philippines became the first country in the world to establish a national council for sustainable development (NCSD) with such multi-stakeholder composition. The Philippine Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) was established by President Ramos’ Executive Order 15, one of his earliest, and indeed one of his most significant actions with far-reaching implications. We were also among the first to have a national Agenda 21, through Philippine Agenda 21 promulgated by PCSD in 1996. Over a hundred countries have since followed our example, and they recognize us as having blazed the trail of institutionalizing government-civil society partnerships for sustainable development. Such multi-stakeholder participation has since become a regular feature of our governance structures and processes at all levels, including the committees that prepare our Medium Term Development Plans, the National Anti-Poverty Commission, and our Regional Development Councils, to name a few. Few would now dispute the value of participatory governance that involves the major stakeholders for the pursuit of sustainable development.

As countries prepare to participate in the “Rio+20” Summit in Brazil next year, two themes are on the agreed agenda for this 20th anniversary review of progress since the original Rio Summit. The first is the pursuit of a Green Economy, defined by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities. In its simplest expression, a green economy can be thought of as one that is low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive. UNEP’s Green Economy Report points out that there is now growing recognition that achieving sustainability rests almost entirely on “getting the economy right.” Decades of creating new wealth through a “brown economy” model have not substantially addressed social marginalization and resource depletion. Sustainability remains a vital long-term goal, but we must work on greening the economy to get us there.

The second Rio+20 theme concerns the institutional framework for sustainable development. The clamor is for a more effective institutional approach to the pursuit of sustainable development at all levels spanning the community to the global levels, and the widely recognized formula is multi-stakeholder participation and partnership. While NCSDs are already in place, replicated at the local levels through similar local councils in many countries, the regional and global decision-making bodies remain purely inter-governmental. Non-government sectors remain relegated to separate side meetings whose recommendations are simply reported to the official inter-governmental meetings, which may or may not adopt those recommendations. The call now is for the UN to be true to its own charter that describes itself as a union of peoples, and not just of governments. Thus, the call is for its institutions on sustainable development to have private sector and civil society representatives as active members, not merely as observers.

The strong Filipino NGO contingent here in Seoul reminds our regional counterparts that the Philippines’ path-breaking PCSD has been our tangible demonstration to the world that such participation and partnership is the way to go—and indeed, the world followed suit.

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E-mail: cielito.habito@gmail.com