The future of the planet is being decided behind closed doors in Sandton. Media and the uninvited are not welcome at the tough negotiating sessions making the key decisions at the Jo’burg World Summit on Sustainable Development.
They are allowed to attend the United Nations plenary sessions and “partnership” talk-shops around topics like water and energy, but these forums are not where the nitty-gritty is being hammered out.
The closed-door negotiating sessions, dubbed Vienna-style proceedings, are where the draft plan of implementation and the draft political declaration — the two key documents of the summit — are being worked out.
These are the documents that more than 100 heads of state are expected to sign at the end of the mega-event in a week’s time. The Vienna proceedings began in Sandton last weekend, when negotiators from around the world started meeting in closed sessions.
By the time the official programme started on Monday morning, the negotiators had not made sufficient progress and they asked to go back into closed sessions yesterday afternoon.
Officials say the negotiators have been given until this evening (Tuesday) to complete their business. If they have not resolved their differences, these will be taken on to negotiations at ministerial level — and some issues may even be left unresolved by the time the heads of state arrive at the summit on September 2.
“If they remain unresolved, they may be used as trade-off issues that can be bartered across the sectors. If a sanitation issue is unresolved, for instance, maybe it can be solved by exchanging it for an unsolved trade issue,” says one of the negotiators.
About 400 issues are reportedly still under dispute among the negotiators. These include 14 areas of serious disagreement on central issues like how to bring fresh water, sanitation and energy to the poor, debt relief, overseas aid, the impacts of globalisation and trade.
In the negotiations there are divisions between delegates from the European Union, which wants clear targets and timetables for improving the lot of the world’s poor, and the United States, Japan, Australia and Canada, which are nervous of new commitments.
Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa, who has been part of the Vienna negotiations, says the level and number of negotiators is “open-ended. Yesterday there were 300, but it changes all the time”.
Smaller, informal “contact groups” are sometimes sent off by the negotiators to tackle particularly tricky topics. Apparently this is a similar modus operandi to the way small splinter groups tackle problems at the World Trade Organisation. One contact group is busy trying to iron out sticking points around trade, financing and globalisation, to create further consensus between the G8 developed countries and the G77 bloc of developing countries.
A second contact group has been set up to deal with issues of good governance. Frustrated media attending the daily UN progress reports know little more than that the all-important Vienna negotiations are “constructive”.
Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Zuma, who has been appointed an ex officio vice-president of the summit, said on Sunday the negotiations were making “good progress, but we don’t expect them to come up with all the solutions”.
It appears unlikely that all the sticking points in the 77-page draft plan of implementation will be resolved by the end of the summit.
Says Nitin Desai, Secretary General of the World Summit: “We don’t expect that on September 5 [the day after the summit ends] all the problems will be solved. We don’t expect the issues of trade and finance, for instance, will be out of the way.”