Who are we to judge failure or success and from what perspective?

By Daniel Christian Wahl (www.danielchristianwahl.com)

The consensus in the international press, the NGO sector, and with most scientists seems to be that Rio+20 was a failure.  I beg to differ. I think it is too early to tell.  What difference did a more committal language in the outcome document of Rio’92 actually make?  Did it mean that promises made were kept? Maybe the outcome documents are not the point, or at least not the main drivers of real change after these conferences? Maybe in the absence of pompous commitments we will actually leverage a much more profound change in the next 20 years? So much is certain, if we don’t the curtain will fall early on Homo sapiens.  One thing Rio+20 left clear to me is that we cannot expect our politicians to make commitments and kept them.  Gandhi’s advice was never more timely than now: We have to be the change we want to see in the World.

It is a little over two weeks now that the doors closed at Rio Centro on the largest UN conference with civil society participation in the history of the United Nations.  Has this event changed the world? The answer has to be: Yes, and it will continue to do so.  And, yes, I was there and I too was disappointed by the lack of political courage. The conference certainly didn’t go the way many had hoped for. Nevertheless, the subtle and not so subtle effects that will continue to ripple out from this gathering are changing the world and will do so for many years.

On a small planet with finite resources, where everything is connected to everything else it is simply impossible that there will not be many lasting and transformative effects resulting from the meeting of delegations from 193 countries and between 30 and 50 thousand people (Source). Politician, business leaders, farmers, indigenous elders, scientists, activists, trade union representatives, eco-social entrepreneurs, educators, women leading the way, spiritual teachers, and maybe most importantly young people, from all over the world came together in Rio de Janeiro during the week from June 16^th to June 23^rd. I believe that the countless personal face-to-face meetings and conversations, the networking and envisioning of future collaborations are actually the truly transformative moments of such events.

It has taken me a couple of weeks of distance from Rio and reflection on what I experienced there before I felt ready to express a view, partial as it will have to be. As you can imagine, I only managed to attend a minute fraction of the more than 6000 events that took place at ‘Rio Centro’ (the UN Conference on Sustainable Development) and the ‘Cupola de los Pueblos’ (the People’s Summit).  I had the good fortune of access to both venues as part of the delegation of Gaia Education, an international consortium of sustainability educators linked with the Global Ecovillage Network, a consultative NGO to the United Nations Economic and Social Council.  The two locations were an hour and a half by shuttle bus apart, even longer in the rush hour or when roads got blocked for dignitaries.  As Albert Bates commented: “The people and the UN delegates seem to drift further and further apart. In Copenhagen the distance between the two venues was maybe 15km, in Cancun 25km and now almost 40km.”

But don’t let me get too cynical or negative here.  I intend not to pipe into the same horn as all the voices that have called Rio+20 the ‘conference of bla-bla-bla’, a ‘Historical Failure’, or simply a waste of time and resources.  It has to be said though resources were wasted and the event could have done a lot more to reduce its own energy, carbon, waste, and water footprint.  Nevertheless, I don’t think the conference was a failure.  I don’t think anyone could accurately judge this right now. It is simply too early to say.  At one level you could make up the following equation:

Rio’92 + Rio+20 = Rio-20 ? Stockholm’72

Which is to say compared to 1992 the 2012 conference resulted in less specific commitments and more vague aspiration statements, so that we seem to have regressed twenty years rather than advanced, which would basically take us back to the 1972 Stockholm conference on the environment and thus pretty much back to ground zero for the sustainability agenda within the United Nations.  Again that would be an overstatement and a partial truth, made in an understandable reaction to an event that admittedly fell desperately short of what a hurting planet and a humanity in peril would have needed: the coming together of all nations and all sectors of society to collaborate in a fundamental re-design of the human presence of Earth.

But the choices we are faced with are not to either see the glass as half full or half empty, the higher ground of including both of these perspectives and transcending them in a new synthesis is to understand that the glass in question is always full! It just happens to be half full of water and half full of air.  Rio+20 seems to follow that analogy. In particular the majority of the speeches by the heads of state were remarkable lacking in substance and the political courage called for by this occasion. As many of the negotiators and NGO delegates remarked: “Why do we actually need the heads of state here. Most of the work is done before they arrive and most of the meaningful work that is done after the conference happens at the level of cities, communities, and collaborations between NGOs and the people on the ground.”  I believe that eco-social entrepreneurship and some corporations that are truly changing their ways will also play a key role in leveraging positive change

The plenary speeches by Head of State at Rio Centro

One image that I would like to draw if I was a good cartoon artist would be a long row of ostriches with their heads in the sand representing the heads of states giving their plenary addresses from Wednesday (June, 20^th) to Friday (June, 22^nd).  Almost without exception each dignitary exceeded the agreed upon 5 minutes by double or triple that amount, yet very few succeeded in adding substantially to the meaning or content of the event. The drawn out process of plenary addresses that should have finished by early Thursday was thus prolonged to make sure that there was no room for debate at the end, only a quick show of hands to ratify a document that had already been fixed in its final version the day before their arrival.

Nevertheless, this farcical process of mock-democracy gave some UN officials enough reason to celebrate Rio+20 as a shining example of effective multilateralism.  One does wonder whether the watering down of any kind of firm commitment to weakly formulated and contractually non-binding aspiration statements is truly a success of multilateralism or simply evidence that Rio+20 has turned the high hopes of an increasingly aware humanity into the lowest common denominator that powerful corporate lobbying groups have allowed their governments to sign up to?  Yet, it is also true that there is something remarkable about the fact that we have managed to get at least some common ground and agreements negotiated that will serve as a platform from which we can build real sustainable development initiatives in our communities and businesses, with reference to a broad endorsement of the world community. Anybody who has ever tried to get 136 people (let alone nations) signed up to a common vision statement and action plan will know that to expect too much from the outcome is simply unrealistic.  We live in paradoxical times and should at one and the same time condemn “The Future We Want” document for its insufficiencies and at the same time be able to celebrate that we have been able to generate a document at all/

Among the national leaders to be commended for daring to strike a different note isEvo Morales of Bolivia, who apart from his usual political positioning clearly addressed the issue that commoditizing the commons, like access to drinking water, natural resources, and clean air are not the way to build a sustainable economic system.  He warned other states to be careful with the privatization of national resources and suggested that the ‘green economy’ agenda as it is being put into practice in the developing world is a new kind of colonialism. Another left wing political leader with the courage to raise an important issue that too many remain silent upon was Raul Castro who asked why military spending had sky-rocketed since the end of the cold war and suggested that there would be better ways to spend this money.

One of the two most outspoken and enlightened heads of state was Prime Minister Lyonchhen Jigmi Y Thinley of Buthan.  He reminded us that sustainable development is not a choice but a necessity, and suggested that happiness and wellbeing are globally unifying human goals that offer a better measure for development than GDP or economic growth focussed indicators. He called Rio+20 the last opportunity of humanity to prevent its own extinction and the last opportunity for civilization to truly flourish, since “in another twenty years from now humanity will have crossed the point of no return.”

As with political leaders like Morales and Castro, it has to be said that political rhetoric does not prevent wide spread suffering and hardship for parts of their population.  In the case of Buthan in particular the Nepali minority in the country finds itself without any political rights and severe discrimination against it. Nevertheless Buthan has to be commended for its visionary leadership in pioneering alternative measures of progress to the woefully inadequate measure of Gross Domestic Product.

The most impressive, if not the only true example of courageous political leadership came from president Jose Pepe Mujica of Uruguay. He questioned whether the current market driven models of consumption could ever sustainably be extended to 7 or 8 billion people; whether in our societies of the market we are actually governing the process of globalization or are in fact governed by it?  Murjica insisted that the current crisis required an unprecedented magnitude of political character  and that we were in fact facing a crisis of political will and leadership.  He identified the use and throw-away culture that drives our economic growth driven markets as being at the core of the current unsustainability.

… END OF PART ONE