About 10 000 people gathered in Bali from May 24 to June 7 for the fourth and final Preparatory Committee meeting (PrepCom) for the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
There is one requirement for the achievement of sustainable development around which there is consensus: redirection of financial flows.
We need investment in technology and infrastructure, we are told. Africa needs to move beyond the beggar-philanthropist relationship with the developed world to enable the input of financial resources, and there is much promotion of the role of the private sector.
With the widening gap between rich and poor — not only in monetary terms but also in terms of access to essential/basic resources — and the decline in real terms of the wages of the majority of workers, even the champions and apologists of globalism acknowledge that something must be done. Food must reach the starving more effectively than it currently does in, for example, Malawi; poverty must be addressed (cut in half, according to the Millennium Summit of 2000); water resources must be sustainably managed and energy poverty replaced by access to energy services.
Africa does not have a great track record in sustainable development. Exporting natural resources, particularly minerals and fossil fuels, we can do; retaining value for local people from such resources, we are not so good at. This is not to deny the high standard of living that a substantial number of us enjoy, or the existence of pockets of over-consumption on the continent, but the plight of the vast majority is poverty and marginalisation.
Malawi capitalised its food (maize) reserves fairly recently, reportedly at the direction of the International Monetary Fund, but there is refusal to consider debt write-offs.
One document that all countries are being encouraged to rally behind is the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad).
Whatever one thinks of the Nepad document in itself, it must be judged not only by what it says, and fails to say, but also by how it is used.
It is a contested terrain. An example of this was illustrated at the PrepCom in Bali on May 29. On the one hand the South called for a more democratic global governance system and honouring past promises of official development assistance, lobbying for an international sustainable energy fund to support universal access and the denouncement of the World Trade Organisation’s terms.
On the other hand the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and other corporate lobbyists offered partnerships to achieve the redirection of investment.
The example of invoking Nepad that Eskom, apparently the leading African member of the WBCSD, showcased at a side-event in Bali, prompts serious questioning.
Consistent with its self-appointed mandate to electrify Africa, at the lowest possible costs to the generator (last year Eskom Enterprises CEO Jan de Beer insisted on a cost to the generator of no more than $0,02 a kWh), and extend the grid into Europe, Eskom tabled a “concept proposal” for an “African Sustainability Fund (Energy)”, which it claims is “aligned with the priorities laid out in Nepad”.
In order to attract finance for “projects with a long value chain”, Eskom volunteers its services as “African equity partner”, proposing input from international “institutional sustainability investors” and use of aid: “Official development assistance core funding to cover risk and guarantee returns”. Thus “alignment to Nepad” becomes a shielding sound bite for corporate ambition presenting itself as public interest.
The proposal completely ignores the Nepad text: “Africa should strive to develop its solar energy resource[s] which is abundantly available”, and makes no reference to the objective of increasing access to energy. It also seeks to bypass the Nepad mandate to “establish a task force to recommend priorities and implementation strategies for regional [energy] projects”.
Such a body could be established and include multi-sectoral representation to ensure that priorities and strategies serve all Africans, and are not simply dictated by the company with the largest financial interest.
The Eskom proposal elaborates: “A ‘free’ equity base sourced from consolidated development funding from donor nations …” will be used “… to cover the returns expected by investors in the fund in the event that projects fail or do not deliver the returns anticipated.”
Is this the kind of intervention that the authors of Nepad intend? It is suggested that the fund be emulated in other sectors and regions. Is the bulk of development assistance now to be used to guarantee returns for the private sector? In what way does this support sustainability and poverty alleviation?
Organisations such as the WBCSD love to talk of the “triple bottom line”, in which social and environmental costs and benefits would be calculated and reported alongside economic returns. Perhaps this should become a standard and mandatory feature of all proposals that claim alignment with Nepad.
Monitoring implementation of commitments made at international summits could involve quantification and evaluation of social, democratic and ecological returns. Financial returns, or the levels of tax on such returns, could be made contingent to the achievement of other benefits.
Perhaps the members of the WBCSD will stop denying access to information (for example, blocking access to entire documents on the basis that a few figures are proprietary information) and actually implement triple bottom line accounting, with independent verification, in a bid to win donor money to underwrite investments in Africa.
Whether it is welcomed or criticised in Bali, Eskom’s proposal will likely give added relevance and urgency to civil society insistence that the world summit develop and enforce mechanisms to ensure corporate accountability.
Richard Worthington is the project coordinator for the Sustainable Energy and Climate Change partnership