Bones, flesh and spirit

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil—An estimated 20,000 visitors are expected in this beautiful city for the 20th year anniversary of the original Rio Earth Summit, officially known in 1992 as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. This time, the meeting is formally called the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, but informally and more widely known as Rio+20. The official high-level meeting of presidents, prime ministers and other top officials begins tomorrow, but thousands of government, civil society and business representatives from all over the world have already gathered here since last week for official preparatory meetings and for over 500 side events.

Dozens of Filipinos are here, with various reasons for coming. Some are government delegates involved in last-minute negotiations on the final wording of the conference’s official outcome document titled “The Future We Want.” Others (such as Magsaysay awardee lawyer Tony Oposa, Earth Council Asia-Pacific chief Ella Antonio, IBON International program director Paul Quintos, Ateneo School of Government dean Tony La Viña and many more—myself included) are invited speakers in various side events on a wide range of specific topics under the broad conference themes. Still others came to renew and expand their advocacy networks. And some may be here more for tourism than serious work, with the Rio+20 conference providing a good reason to visit a city that is in most “must see” lists.

The Philippines is of particular interest in many of the Rio+20 discussions because 20 years ago, our nation acted promptly to put in motion key elements of Agenda 21, the outcome document then. I specifically refer to the institutional approach to achieving integration of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of development, which in Agenda 21 is the essence of sustainable development (SD). The 1992 Rio Summit saw that this integration would best happen if society’s stakeholders—grouped broadly into government, private business and civil society—are active participants in the decision-making and operational processes toward SD. Agenda 21 thus called on nations to establish mechanisms to permit such multi-stakeholder participation, via national councils for sustainable development (NCSDs).

Our country was quick to take heed. The Philippine contingent to the 1992 Rio Summit, led on the civil society side by the late Maximo “Junie” T. Kalaw Jr., lost no time in urging then newly elected President Fidel V. Ramos to establish such a multi-stakeholder body. Barely three months into his presidency, Ramos issued Executive Order 15 creating the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD), thereby making us the first country in the world to establish an NCSD after the Rio Summit.

The task fell on me, as new head of the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) then, to chair the PCSD, with Junie Kalaw as my civil society co-chair. The choice of Neda as PCSD chair and secretariat was deliberate. While Environment Secretary Angel Alcala seemed the logical choice, the Filipino Rio delegates argued that sustainable development is much more than environmental protection and must be mainstreamed into overall national development planning.

Thus was put in place the bones, or the skeletal framework, for the Philippines’ SD effort. But the effort needed flesh. Agenda 21 had also called on countries to formulate a national sustainable development strategy (NSDS), to translate the global Agenda 21 into a national plan. The PCSD thus went to work, and in the course of more than two years of wide consultations and participatory plan formulation, hammered out Philippine Agenda 21, described then as the most widely consulted planning document in the nation’s history.

Within the 20 years that ensued, various nations followed suit with their own institutional mechanisms for SD. A number followed our example of having direct membership of nongovernment (business and civil society) representatives, sitting co-equally with government representatives. Others made their NCSD a purely governmental inter-ministry coordinative body. Still other countries had NCSDs with purely nongovernmental memberships (hence they lacked decision-making authority). Many countries also formulated their respective NSDS. While many of them now have the bones and the flesh for their SD work, people felt the need for a guiding spirit, an ethical framework that spells out universally held values to guide responsible human behavior toward one another, and toward the environment. Thus, groups have campaigned over the years for the adoption of such an ethical framework in the form of an Earth Charter, or another version called the Charter of Universal Responsibilities. While it has been easier to promote these charters among nongovernment groups, proponents have all but given up on obtaining endorsement within the official UN mechanism where only governments participate.

Rio+20 has for one of its goals the definition of an agreed institutional framework for sustainable development (IFSD) at the global and regional levels. Progress has been made at the national level with the growing number of multi-stakeholder NCSDs. Many maintain that multi-stakeholder composition is the key to having an effective international body to govern and manage sustainable development globally. After all, the UN Charter, as its Preamble states, is a declaration by “We, the peoples of the United Nations….” But all too often, governments alone cannot assume to speak for the people they represent.

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