The official launch of World Summit 2002 took place in Johannesburg this week. Victor Munnik explains what it’s all about
Nations are works of the imagination. People become part of a nation when they think of themselves as citizens. Nations come into being in words and symbols.
The words that make up history, constitutions, political manifestos, novels, poetry, soap operas, daily newspapers, sport events and Miss and Mister South Africa extravaganzas these form the nation in the imagination of the citizens. And they become part of the words we use when we are not even aware that we are talking to ourselves about who we are.
That is a big enough project for 40-million South Africans but at the World Summit to be hosted in Gauteng from September 2 to 11 2002 we will be busy with an even bigger one.
Since the Earth was first photographed from space in 1968, the nation of the planet has been under construction in the minds of many. Environmental concerns provided a perfect vehicle for this, since effects like pollution and global warming are global.
But not only were the concerns about ecosystem decay very real after 200 years of often reckless industrial activity, the world economy was entering a phase of integration in which it could be thought of as a single system. Communications technology and knowledge management made it feasible to imagine one world.
So now we are invited to imagine ourselves as one but one what? There are really two possibilities: we are all people, and we all live on the same planet. People’s relationship with the planet was the easiest place to start.
As a species, and armed with powerful new technology, we were behaving in an arrogant fashion, wiping out other species and threatening ecosystems on which our very survival depends, like climate, water and biodiversity. So the green issues entered world public imagination.
It took a decade or two for the green agenda to come up against the people-centred or brown agenda, which was expressed in the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
Two thoughts carry this agenda: the rich consume too much, which is how they place pressure on the environment, and the poor fall back on natural resources to meet their needs, which is how they degrade the environment.
The solutions for the rich were changes in production (recycling and clean technology) and in lifestyle (spiritual values replacing consumerism). The solution for the poor was population control (not popular or successful) and dealing with poverty.
Both sets of solutions were called ”sustainable development”, defined in 1987 as ”meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”. In 1992 this idea was elaborated into Agenda 21 (a blueprint for action) with its 40 chapters, a number of conventions on specific issues and subsequent summits.
The definition poses an immediate problem namely that the needs of the present are not being met. This is called poverty.
Although it is true that environmental concerns have not been solved over the past 10 years as expected, some progress has been made on the green agenda.
However, over the past 10 years poverty has become worse. In fact, the mechanisms that create poverty have been entrenched more deeply than before in international governance through the World Trade Organisation and in the economies of countries in the South through structural adjustment.
The neo-liberal agenda has achieved near hegemony since even liberation movements and officially socialist governments implement it. The neoliberal agenda opens public spaces and activities and turns them into profit-making activities. This makes it more difficult for those without money the poor to survive.
And how will the needs of future generations be met if we add destroyed ecosystems to growing poverty?
The World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 faces an interesting situation. Instructions from the United Nations are to undertake a review of the 10 years that have passed since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, focusing on the identification of accomplishments and areas where further efforts are needed to implement Agenda 21 and other outcomes of the Rio summit.
There is wide consensus that the primary focus of the 2002 summit should be on poverty, development and the environment. The summit should reinvigorate the process of implementing Agenda 21 because words have been many but actions few.
These days, the texts of sustainable development deal with green and brown issues. Where they are stuck is on the question of poverty, as if they find themselves in a traffic jam of words.
Why? Because poverty cannot be eradicated without fundamentally transforming the power structure that controls the world economy. And the global power structure cannot be transformed.
Or can it?
What would one see if one looked at the planet from a spaceship now? One would see the curious phenomenon of the most powerful people in the world hiding from crowds of their subjects marching, protesting, organising, creating free zones, linking up in a global coalition ”against neo-liberalism and for humanity”.
Some ask: will it happen in Johannesburg? Others want to know: what is the text of this coalition? We don’t rightly know. Maybe because its texts are so many, spoken in many different languages.
Or maybe it is because its texts are constantly being negotiated in the streets between many different factions who have in common only that they are all people living on the same planet and taking responsibility for it.
Victor Munnik is a policy analyst for the World Summit Civil Society Secretariat. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Land & Rural Digest