Adil Najam is Associate Professor of International Negotiation and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also Research Director of the ICTSD/IISD/RING Project: A Southern Agenda on Trade and Environment.

Bernice Wing Yee Lee is Strategic Knowledge Manager at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD).

Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz is Executive Director at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and Chair of the Group on Environment, Trade and Investment of IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy.

‘…because words are not what scholars make of them in academia but what people make of them in the streets.’

The many facets of globalisation bring about developmental opportunities whilst posing tremendous challenges to the governance of global affairs, whether in the economic, social or the environmental realms. Sustainable development, as both a compelling conceptual construction and an organizing principle for global public policy, provides a visionary and viable framework for the management of the interconnectedness and dynamism, which characterise globalisation. Its integrative conception, for instance, offers concrete responses to the challenge of mitigating potential negative impacts of globalisation, such as the exacerbation of social inequalities and the fast depletion of natural resources. It does so by enabling the provision of global public goods at the national and the local levels. As pointed out by Kaul et al, ‘whether – and how – global public goods are provided is what turns globalisation either into an opportunity or a threat.’[ii]

Sustainable development requires a pro-active mindset that puts its precepts above any other. Due to its nature, it promises in return to deliver at all times for the common good. In terms of environment, such a conception rejects the view that development has to be ‘balanced’ against environment because the two are fundamentally in opposition. Instead, the concept of sustainable development recognises environment as integral to the development process and, hence, to development – or, better still, sustainable development – policy.

It is not easy to judge the global progress made on sustainable development over the last two decades.[iii] On the one hand, when the former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and her colleagues on the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED)[iv] made in 1987 the then still novel and untried notion of sustainable development the centrepiece of their steering report, they could not have imagined that the concept would gain such wide currency in the arenas of international and national policy as it now has. On the other hand, it is equally evident that when negotiators preparing for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio debated the applicability of the idea through countless late-night sessions they expected it to become a more powerful policy construct in terms of implementation than it has in the ensuing ten years.[v]

Sustainable development has been, and will remain, a moving target because the more we understand it at a conceptual level, the more we realise the importance of operationalising it, but also the difficulties involved in doing so because of its cross-cutting and expansive nature. The distance that the concept has travelled since its hopeful beginnings is not unimpressive, but it pales in comparison to the distance it still has to travel.[vi] The milestones that have been covered are worth celebrating, but the most important parts of the journey still lie ahead.

Global governance challenges will feature in a not insignificant manner in that journey. The current state of affairs, as we write, can be characterized by severe deficits in international cooperation and in the solution of global problems. Both fronts go hand-in-hand and have been tackled intensively and explicitly in the past ten years or so. The quest for answers requires a search for clarity of vision and purpose, and a confirmation of shared values. Sustainable Development as a notion has been evolving to provide a response, not only from the ink bottles of academia but from the collective mission that have engaged thousands of individuals in a decade of intergovernmental summits, community cooperation schemes, partnerships and policy networks. It is in this sense that the process of conceptual maturation of the notion of Sustainable Development is a living expedition, not an academic pursuit.

The purpose of this essay is to review the advances we have made and the challenges that we face in realising the promise of the concept, particularly as it has impinged on governance. The aim is neither to present an exhaustive review of the state of knowledge on the subject nor to attempt a comprehensive assessment of initiatives in this arena. The purpose, instead, is to reflect on a few key trends and to identify a handful of priorities that cry out for greater attention from practitioners and scholars of the subject. We begin this exercise by looking at the ‘state of play’ from three broad but critical vantage points, by asking where we stand today in terms of sustainable development knowledge, sustainable development action, and sustainable development politics.

Ø Knowledge. Where do we stand today in terms of our conceptual understanding of sustainable development?

Ø Action. How have we fared in translating sustainable development into meaningful policy and practice?

Ø Politics. How are the key actors and institutions responding to the new and varied challenges posed by the proclaimed quest for sustainable development?

We will now pick up a few representative strands in each of these areas to weave the argument already presented: that there has been some progress in each arena but never enough. We also consciously choose to highlight the signs of hope at each of these levels not only because these have been generally ignored but also because they are most likely to point us towards the type of steps that need to be taken in the future.

Knowledge: Conceptual Understanding

The intellectual frenzy for trying to precisely define sustainable development that gripped the literature in the early 1990s has, thankfully, subsided. The realisation that the concept of sustainable development is a ‘constructive ambiguity’ which derives its utility and appeal from its ability to combine the loosely defined interests and concerns of a wide variety of varied stakeholders has taken root in policy as well as scholarly communities and very few, if any, now seek precision in their description of the concept.

This, however, is not an abdication of conceptual clarity but, rather, an acceptance of sustainable development as originally conceived as a dynamic, comprehensive, and cross-disciplinary notion – its very potential and power lies in its conceptual flexibility. The thrust of the most inspired enquiries today is to understand the elements that need to be measured and recorded to suggest that we are on the road to sustainable development, rather than to catalogue a precise depiction of what utopia might look like.

This is a not insignificant advance. It implies that the notion of sustainable development has evolved beyond being merely a normative construct and is finally inching beyond the epistemological fault-line between a classical view of development that simply equates growth and a radically complex agreement that understands sustainable development as lying at the intersections of humanity’s social, economic and ecological aspirations.

A now popular and useful way of understanding the real world relevance of the concept is to view it not as a ‘particular’ type of development but as a framework for analysing development through a variety of lenses and to balance the impacts of development across multiple arenas. The dynamic and multi-dimensional aspect of sustainable development is best captured in the much discussed and now familiar ‘triangular puzzle’ of sustainable development which views the concept as the space that lies within a heuristic triangle that meets the social, economic and environmental needs of society.

This simple construct is powerful in its implications because it views sustainable development not as a trade-off between the needs of society in these three dimensions but as a balanced co-existence of the three. It does not presuppose that any one of these needs is more important than the other; which, by obvious extension, implies that none is less important than any other. Environment, then, becomes a part of sustainable development. No more important than the economic needs of society, but not any less important either. The three dimensions of this triangle (sometimes also referred to as the three pillars) are particularly elegant because they can be ‘unpackaged’ depending on the particular area to which they are applied.[vii] In general terms, the essential ingredients within each of the three can be identified as follows:

Ø The social dimension of sustainable development refers to the issues related to justice, equity, transparency, and access.

Ø The environmental dimension of sustainable development refers to issues related to the essential integrity of ecological processes and systems.

Ø The economic dimension of sustainable development refers to issues related to income, wealth, livelihoods and depravation (poverty).

The three dimensions interact in varied ways in all real issues and it is in that interaction between the three that one finds the true manifestations of the potentials and challenges for sustainable development.

Although we have now come to accept such a conceptualisation of sustainable development and some might even view it as ‘uninteresting’, the fact of the matter is that it is a more nuanced and advanced understanding than was originally proposed by the Brundtland Commission or its predecessors. More than that, such a conceptualisation is worth celebrating because it necessitates cross-disciplinary policy and practice and it has been instrumental, as we will note later, in pushing for greater interaction between the earlier compartmentalised motors of policy and practice. As mentioned in the Introduction of this think piece, such a conception rejects the view that development has to be ‘balanced’ against environment because the two are fundamentally in opposition.

Action: Policy and Practice

The growing realisation of interconnectedness as emphasised by sustainable development has also led to a realisation of our lack of skills, ability and structures to manage the interconnectedness. These shortcomings and the institutional hesitancy (and sometimes resistance) to deal with the complexity of interconnectedness has routinely manifested itself in slippages into the ‘governance gaps’ that Reinicke and Deng[viii] have identified as increasingly cropping up as challenges to the traditional approach to problem-solving through global governance. These gaps result, to a large extent, from governments favouring a conventional linear sequencing that neglects the dynamic connection between implementation and problem-definition. In such a context, the cycle of policy and practice, stressed by sustainable development, is unsatisfactorily addressed when policy and institutional formation simply follows a sequence of problem-definition, intergovernmental cooperation and the establishment of legal frameworks. The mismatch between the conceptual necessity of interconnectedness and our inabilities to deal with it is directly related to the neglect of the role and the need for involvement of actors other than governments in public policy management. A fundamental precept of sustainable development established through negotiation in Principle 10 of Agenda 21 as the need for the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level, in decision-making processes.[ix]

Of the many governance gaps that manifest themselves today, four will be highlighted. These include: (a) the participation gap, (b) the legitimacy gap, (c) the capacity gap, and (d) the implementation gap.

How do these gaps arise, from a perspective of sustainable development? Here are some scenarios. If public policy at the global level were to meet the various societal goals and objectives through the three pillars of sustainable development, it would be crucial to ensure that the views and aspirations of all the stakeholders were adequately taken into consideration. However, the flow of the aspirations of individuals and communities up the ladder towards their local and national governance systems is often compromised by the absence of participatory mechanisms in decision-making as well as prevailing inequity that govern the relations between, for example, local communities and national governments. As a result, this participatory gap fundamentally handicaps the management of interconnectedness and the achievement of sustainable development goals and objectives.

National governments, in a context of political and resource interdependence, struggle to craft norms and to establish institutions, and they often operate from an insufficient platform inherited from deficient participatory systems described above. Against this backdrop, any resulting design is questioned and born with weak authoritativeness. An ethical and normative gap – an increasing one, currently hinders any attempt to management by traditional governmental or intergovernmental approaches.

Faulty norms make for difficult implementation. Tensions and contradictions are abundant and rising. An operational gap is inevitable. This is not least because there are often disconnection between the decision-making fora at the global level and those who are responsible for translating these decisions into policies to be implemented.

The operational difficulties in translating decisions made in the international fora into concrete public policy, for example, may mean that the public are not adequately informed about the kind of policies needed to bring about sustainable development. As a result, the public may also feel alienated from these many international processes and became suspicious of the effectiveness of this process. This in turn inhibits their participation in the policy-making process and limits their inputs, completing the vicious circle that further exacerbates the participation gap.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002 is a very apt indicator of how sustainable development has fared in the world of policy and practice.

At the one hand, one cannot but celebrate the fact that this was a world summit on the very subject of sustainable development. This fact signifies an acceptance of the concept – at least at the declaratory level – at the very highest levels of policy making. This is a significant development from a decade ago where the original emphasis at Rio was placed on the environment/development nexus, rather than the more integrated concept of sustainable development. On the other hand, the very theme of the summit was the failure of our attempts to put the concept into practice at a grand enough scale. The theme that wove through the entire summit – from the meetings of the government delegates to the protestors on the street – was the strong sense that the promise of sustainable development in practice that had been at the heart of Agenda 21 and the Rio Earth Summit of a decade ago had not materialised, or at least not enough.

In reality, both assessments are true. The concept and vision of sustainable development have, indeed, gained political currency and found their way into the language of international policy. Even in the unlikely domains of trade negotiations, international finance and climate change – the World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference at Doha, the international finance community at Monterey, and the climate regime at Kyoto – all committed themselves to making sustainable development the centre-piece of their policy endeavours. This is a fairly significant departure, and generally positive one, from where we were a decade ago. At the same time there has not been much to report in terms of meaningful progress towards sustainable development at the global level. However, if one were to change the focus of analysis from the global to the local level, one would find that there had indeed been progress towards sustainable development, even startling progress.

For example, a key realisation of the last decade is that even as policymakers at the global level have been painfully slow and reluctant in translating sustainable development into practice, an entire generation of ‘civic entrepreneurs’ have begun operationalising it at the local level. Civic entrepreneurs represent civil society, business and government. They champion sustainable development and succeed, often despite significant odds, in making it happen on the ground – often at small scales, but in undeniably real, robust and promising terms. In this regards, sustainable development involves newness, a new way of pulling things together, new ways of mobilising resources, building legitimacy, engendering collective action, stimulating economic activity or adapting technology. In short, it involves entrepreneurship, or to be more exact civic entrepreneurship. In contrast with other forms of entrepreneurship, civic entrepreneurship is driven explicitly by the public interest, and seeks to create new ways of building social capital, of harnessing existing ideas, methods, inventions, technologies, resources or management systems in the service of collective goals.

Perhaps the most challenging lesson of the decade since the Rio Earth Summit has been that sustainable development has no blueprint: it cannot be deconstructed and replicated at will, a reality that makes its implementation something of a challenge. However, the evidence provided by many of these civic entrepreneurs around the world suggests that while sustainable development has no template, it does involve some shared characteristics.[x] Effective implementation of sustainable development requires participation in decision-making process by stakeholders at different levels, drawing upon, for example, what has been termed ‘civic entrepreneurship’.[xi] Common to many successful experience at the local level is a ‘rootedness in and responsiveness to the unique priorities of the community’[xii]. Sustainable development has no blueprint. Delivering solutions will require thinking afresh.

The implementation challenge, then, can be viewed as a challenge of subsidiarity.[xiii] Maybe we have not seen successful implementation of sustainable development at the global level because it cannot begin at the global level. By its very nature it must begin at the roots and grow upwards. This is to suggest that sustainable development has to be sought and nurtured at the local level and at the sectoral level. It does not flow from the global to the local, from the broad to the specific, but the other way round. This does not mean that we should not be discussing sustainable development on the global scale. Far from it, the global discussion and global policy is integral to the creation of the space and policy frameworks at the domestic and sectoral levels in which sustainable development can flourish. It does suggest, however, that the challenge at the global level is most particularly the challenge of creating the framework conditions in which local and sectoral sustainability can be nurtured.

It is here that one must caution against the creeping problem of ‘gentrification’. What was, at least until the Rio Earth Summit, a cutting-edge concept that threatened to change the status quo in deep and lasting ways has today become ubitquous and widely accepted by all sides of the debate at least in part because it has been ‘tamed’.[xiv] The threat implied in this gentrification is that what was once a signal of a serious promise to deliver significant change from the status quo and was, therefore, deemed threatening is in danger of becoming yet another buzzword that provides political brownie points rather than intent to deliver. The opportunity is that perhaps the degree to which the political and corporate establishment feel the need to nod in the direction of sustainable development illustrates the ample tactical room for change.

The challenge to sustainable development policy and practice, therefore, is to ensure that we avoid gentrification into meaninglessness, that we capitalise on the wider support that the concept has gained, and we harness the power of subsidiarity by using global forums to create the policy environments which can nurture robust implementation at the local and sectoral levels.

Politics: Actors and Institutions

The politics of sustainable development has remained, to large extent and despite its early promise, the politics of the North-South divide. The hopes that it would provide a bridge across this divide have remained largely unrealised. To a great extent this is a reflection of the fact that the advances made in conceptualising sustainable development as a multidimensional space which brings the economic, social and ecological dimensions of a society’s aspirations onto the same plane has not, yet, fully seeped into the actions of the key actors and institutions responsible for making decisions about sustainable development.

In the world of politics – of actors and institutions – the debate is still stuck in the more stifling discourse of environment versus development. This dichotomous binary debate not only belittles the more nuanced understanding that has been achieved at the conceptual level (see above) but is a major reason behind the lack of meaningful implementation of global policies (also see above). The binary distinction – environment versus development – is also a major reflection of and contributor to the perpetuation of a North-South template for understanding sustainable development.

The policy community is replete with assumptions that developing countries are necessarily less interested in preserving the environment and more interested in traditional economic gains, at least in the short to medium term.[xv] Such simplistic characterisation is both insubstantive and misleading, spiralling not least vicious circles of self-fulfilling prophecy. The correlation between the depletion of natural resources and persisting poverty in many regions, for example, should be brought to the fore to remind policy makers of the interconnectedness of many of these issues. Water and sanitation is another issue area that requires taking into account all three points of the triangle in order to achieve sustainable development. Going beyond political posturing and focussing on delivering common action seems to present the only constructive way forward.

While the promise of new and powerful North-South partnerships evolving around the concept of sustainable development might not have been realised yet, there are other, positive, partnerships that the concept of sustainable development has begun fostering. Important amongst these positive developments is the emergence of global public policy networks (GPPNs), the rise of networks of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and flickers of a new generation of cross-sectoral partnerships between government, business and NGOs that were, un-inspiringly, named ‘Type II partnerships’ at Johannesburg.

While there is much already written about the rise of GPPNs and NGOs,[xvi] let us briefly look at the world of Type II partnerships, which are only just beginning to take root. One of the key advertised achievements of the Johannesburg Summit was the development of such partnerships – the launching of voluntary partnerships to implement specific aspects of sustainable development. Partnerships among different actors – governments, businesses, NGOs, academia – that seek to deliver specific public policy objectives are nothing new. Some of these are also known as global public policy networks.[xvii] However, nominating these partnerships as key mechanisms to implement intergovernmental commitments to sustainable development is novel, amounting to an implicit acknowledgement by governments that they are not able to deliver on their own. In this context, Johannesburg is a significant watershed. While international cooperation and negotiations among governments may have enabled the international community to embark on a search for common values and an endeavour to define and agree on a common vision, these same processes are yet to deliver significant improvement in the livelihoods of many, nor reversed the trend toward environmental degradation. The challenge today is for the international community to manage these partnerships in an effective and legitimate fashion so that they are not only filling the governance gaps but are fostering lasting capacities for implementing sustainable development.

The one other trend in the arena of actors and institutions that we would like to highlight here is a particularly disturbing one. If sustainable development is truly a multi-sectoral, multi-temporal and multi-dimensional concept as we and others have argued then it truly, even desperately, requires more concrete support from multilateral institutions at the global level – not least because enabling global settings will help create and nourish the local conditions in which sustainable development can take deep roots. Yet, it is more and more evident that the new millennium has placed multilateralism under severe strain, and some significant threat.

As the world continues to be confounded by the implementation challenge, a (not so) new factor is also threatening to derail the multilateral agreements seeking to underpin progress towards sustainable development. As pointed by Celso Lafer, former Minister of Foreign Relations of Brazil, if Rio represented a ‘Kantian’ breakthrough, the realities that face the world today is more ‘Hobbesian’, with a ‘worrisome trend towards replacing a multilateral approach to the solution of global problems by unilateral action’.[xviii]

This is more evident today in the context of the approach driven by trade liberalisation for the management of interconnectedness in economic globalisation. It was not so long ago when the multilateral trade system was viewed as the mainstay of instruments to bring peace among nations, and to insulate the weak and the small from the powerful. Fifty years on, the outlook on multilateralism or international order today is uncertain, to say the least. There is, on the one side, a formidable and unprecedented power[xix] with the means to determine the course of history and, on the other side, a wide ranging set of instruments, a rich body of international law, and imperfect but participatory institutions for international cooperation, all struggling to keep their role in multilateral relations and decisions. Some, justifiably, worried about multilateralism under threat. A more optimistic interpretation may suggest that the international community is currently going through a phase of adjustment in which the relevance of global and regional institutions will be increasingly tested and measured by their performance and effective response to challenge.

The Crafting of the International Trade System: Attempting a Sustainable Development Governance Scheme for Integrating the Global Economy?

The emergence of the construct of Sustainable Development in 1987 coincided with a re-thinking, through negotiations, of the international architecture governing economic relations among states and custom territories. The Uruguay Round, the most ambitious effort to universalise the fifty-year-old rules-based multilateral trade framework, was underway since its conception in the early eighties. It aimed at institutionalizing – as it did succeed in doing – a forcible and contractual instrument for managing the integration of national economies into a global market, under principles of non-discrimination and international cooperation, and following a trade liberalization rationale. As former centrally-planned economies and import-substitution models crumbled and gave way to export-led models of growth, countries from very diverse development bases joined the effort to craft the new system. And they did so in a quest for policy guidance towards a better future. Indeed, many of them autonomously made the choice of locking sweeping policy reforms through the contractually agreed rules of the emerging institution.

In the early 1990s, at the same time that the collective inquiry into the type of development advanced in the context of negotiations for Agenda 21 along the precepts of Sustainable Development, the multilateral trade system found itself doubling its membership, joined by what would later be termed ‘emerging’ economies. Countries participating in the negotiations looked for the newest system to serve as a bitacora in the long quest for development models. Prevailing market and institutional failures, and imperfect international market structures rigged the landscaped –as they still do today. And previously tried approaches, favouring intervention over market forces, had failed or appeared exhausted.

Difficult tension characterized this quest for direction. Tension between, on the one hand, the enthusiasm and commitment of nations to the objectives of sustainable development, and on the other, the freeing up of forces stemming from the factors that underscored and fuelled gloablisation as we know it today; primarily with respect to the transboundary movement of capital, goods and services. Tension between the approaches to norm-making, for instance, between regulation and de-regulation. Regulation needed in order to protect the degrading environment as a result of intensification in the use of natural resources, and deregulation advocated and agreed to free and enhance the functioning of markets. Tensions between the novel notion of subsidiarity and the promotion of universal, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to rule-making in trade. And, last but not least, tensions between the options of resisting sovereignty, against political short-termism and long-term concerns, or giving in to supranationality, as a pre-requisite to entrance into the global economy.

It was against this backdrop – and the rapidly growing concern in the environmental and developmental communities about the intrinsic worth and virtues of the emerging model – that the promised-objective of sustainable development found its way into the preamble to the Marrakech Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization. However, it did so as an add-on; and a severely undervalued add-on at the time. It was the Rio process that forced sustainable development, and with it environment, to be admitted into mainstream global governance, the plane on which economic interdependence among nations is played.

That was 1994, almost ten years ago. Today the international trade regime continues to struggle to find consensus around its veritable objectives. The functioning of economies, now integrated into global markets – albeit, imperfect as they still are – has created vast amounts of wealth. But it has also derived in enormous negative consequences with respect to its distribution and exacerbated inequity among nations. From an optimistic perspective, these are the costs that reflect the pains of transition into better schemes, ruled by values and organizing principles with a capacity to respond to the complexity of interconnectedness stressed by sustainable development. The notion of sustainable development inserted in the Preamble to the multilateral trade system as a vision back in 1994, has since been confirmed in extraordinary exhortatory ways through jurisprudence[xx] and mandates for negotiations. Governments at the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha in November 2001, for example, reaffirmed their commitment to the goals and objectives of sustainable development. This newest round of negotiations launched in Doha was also termed the Doha ‘Development’ Round. And its terms of reference are sprinkled with sustainable development turns. Furthermore, at mid-term in such a Round, evolution of the trade system seems to be discussed precisely on Sustainable Development language: the failures to move forward in the negotiation agenda so far, and the visible acrimony characterizing the debate as we write, have all to do with equity and finding the balances between the social, economic and environmental objectives and effects of trade and of economic engagement. The discussion on its future and the relevance of multilateralism, is also reaching out to the sheared values, the common principles identified since Rio, and enriched through the decade of summitry, to provide direction for the adaptation of institutions. [xxi]

The claim here is that even if the notion of Sustainable Development continues to orbit, unrealized, around the system, it also seems to be the only source of oxygen to it. In the alternative camp to multilateralism, the regional, bilateral and plurilateral instances of negotiation that now not only complement but also compete with the multilateral trade system have also reach out to sustainable development as a guiding objective, and are also struggling with the pains of adjusting to it. From the ambitious and obsessively narrow Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)[xxii], to the autonomously defined New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the Cotonou Agreement which specifies sustainable development as one of three specific purposes of its undertaking.

Daunting and critical challenges confront the evolution of governance for international trade today. Two of the greatest include delivering on the promise that there will be welfare gains for all and each participant in the system and moving away from the prevalence of mercantilism in the approach to developing trade-rules and to development itself. The first is chronically threatened by the WTO basic design along the lines of the so called Single Undertaking[xxiii], which institutionalizes the one-size-fits-all approach and neglects the peculiarities of development needs among structurally different partners. Sustainable Development precepts might be useful in responding to this challenge, for instance, through a more actual approach that allows for modulation in the application of equal or similar rules among unequals. The second problem, the stubborn mercantilist mindset, has also chronically handicapped the evolution of the international trade system from its beginnings and distorted the function of trade policy with respect to development. Responding to the requests of people and the increasingly large policy communities that act in the formulation of trade policy requires moving away from such a culture and into one of clear public policy purpose and broader aims. Sustainable development, if embraced with the necessary political will and heads-on, offers a conceptual and visionary pathway.

The opening section of this essay argued that while much, possibly too much, sill remains to be done we should also acknowledge the important (if incomplete) advanced that have been made towards sustainable development in all the arenas that matter; i.e., in the worlds of knowledge, action and politics. The next steps must focus on building on the successes, learning from the failures and filling the gaps that exist. Three challenges are of particular importance:

· Solidarity. In the context of any community of nations, we need action that takes effective and pro-active care of the structural differences between partners. We need an operational solidarity approach that harness power to common goals.

· Choice. In today’s world of integration of formerly national and local economies into one global economy[xxiv], the satisfaction of sustainable development aspirations requires allowing and enabling for choice. We need to safeguard the policy space needed by individual countries and communities to determine their own developmental paths. Put simply, we also need to make sure that policies leave room for countries to have the choice to make up their own mind about their development path.

· Ownership. This is the concept at the heart of the nineties’ shift in North-South cooperation. No one from outside, not donors or trading partners, can come and develop any country. There is now a global consensus that countries, or their own societies and individual communities, need to take charge and be responsible for their own development. We need to give ownership to those whose lives are directly affected by many of the decisions negotiated at the international or the regional level. At its core, ownership is about effective participatory decision-making processes, access to information and functional institutions that uphold the public goal in the design of the policy in question.

Bearing these central guiding principles in mind, we will look at a number of key elements and framework conditions to ensure effective implementation of sustainable development. At a most basic level, there are two great tasks that confront the global decision-maker: that of creating a more meaningful, inclusive and integrated policy agenda for sustainable development, and of fostering the framework conditions in which such an agenda can be implemented. The implementation itself will come from the local and sectoral levels, but the task of the global decision-maker is to get this agenda and the framework conditions for its implementation right.

In this regards, a few specific tasks can be identified and elaborated. We identify six specific steps that need to be taken; the first three to foster a meaningful global agenda for sustainable development and the later three for creating conducive framework conditions for its implementation. It should be noted that these task will require all nations (North and South) and all actors (governments, NGOs and business) to make deep changes to how they do business; sustainable development cannot be a product of business as usual.

Like ‘governance’ in the 1990s, today the term ‘coherence’ risks becoming one of the most overused political buzzword in sustainable development. Coherence should not be promoted for the sake of it – clarification on exactly for what should coherence be promoted is paramount. Only with clarity of purpose could policy-makers design clear mechanisms and process to ensure coherence for sustainable development. For example, many rich countries have conceived their ‘development policies’ in terms of official development assistance (ODA). Policies in other arena – such as trade, agriculture policies, investment, intellectual property, immigration, security, environment – are usually crafted without due concerns for their impacts on developing countries.[xxv] Policies pursued by one end of a government can seriously undermine efforts taken by others in promoting sustainable development.

Developed countries therefore faces enormous challenges in ensuring that their policies are not standing in developing countries’ way in achieving social, environmental or economic breakthroughs. They need to ensure that their policies in arenas outside of the ODA will be crafted not solely in consideration of national interest but also with their impacts on the livelihoods of those in the South in mind. New ‘coordination’ or ‘coherence’ mechanisms would need to be put in place to ensure that different parts the policy machinery is singing the same tune. In Europe, for example, there is no current coordination among development agencies at the Minister level across Europe. Without such kind of mechanism to counterbalance say the trade ministries, it is hard to envisage a future where Europe’s policies on trade are deliberated with development concerns in mind.

While there are many good initiatives that should be taken in the name of sustainable development, it is also true that many good initiatives and tools that are already available to policy makers are under-utilised. The push for better policy instruments must continue, but the existing policy instruments must also be put to better use. In this context, despite the many criticisms, the Millennium Development Goals and Targets, together with Agenda 21 and the WSSD Plan of Implementation, remain the fairly comprehensive set of guiding policy objectives for international cooperation. More importantly, none has yet lived to its potential and all need to be, and can be, put to better use than they have till now in the global quest for sustainable development.

Let us take the example of the Millennium Development Goals. All 189 member states of the UN came together in the year 2000 to reaffirm the need for global cooperation to meet the key challenges facing the world and establish concrete measures for judging performance through a set of eight inter-related commitments, goals, and targets on development, governance, peace, security and human rights. These are known as the Millennium Development Goals and Targets (MDGs). If the first six of the eight MDGs mostly define development targets for developing countries, the seventh (to Ensure Environmental Sustainability) calls for the integration of the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes. It also specifically summons global political will to reverse the loss of environmental resources, to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, and to achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020. Goal Eight (to Develop a Global Partnership for Development) goes a step further and addresses developed countries by explicitly delineating their special responsibilities with regard to the achievement of the other seven MDGs. It holds the rich countries of the world accountable – to their own citizens and to the rest of the world – for the steps they must take in the global MDG effort.^[xxvi]In the eighth MDG, all UN Member States pledge, by the year 2015, among other things, to develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory. This includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction – nationally and internationally.

Despite the limited progress, new targets, timetables and commitments were adopted in Johannesburg – to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015; to use and produce chemicals by 2020 in ways that do not lead to significant adverse effects on human health and the environment; to maintain or restore depleted fish stocks to levels that can produce the maximum sustainable yield on an urgent basis and where possible by 2015; and to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity.

Even though many of these internationally agreed goals and targets are neither perfect nor comprehensive, they provide important starting point for delivering sustainable development – and global public goods. Translating these goals and targets will be difficult – we need to put in place mechanisms, instruments, and clarify the roles and responsibilities of different actors to bring them about. This will also include serious political will to redress imbalances where they prevail.

There is a need for serious political will to move some of the more difficult environmental issues forward and if necessary re-direct the sustainable development agenda to fit the needs and priorities of developing countries. Both North and South need to invest in imaginative and inclusive thinking on sustainable development which not only internalises the many dimensions of the concept but also the many interests of the different players.

For example, developing countries could use the opportunity provided by the Doha negotiations to lever the Monterrey Financing for Development and Johannesburg World Summit for Sustainable Development outcomes towards building their own environment agenda as well as an international environment and sustainable development regime that takes into account pressing concerns such as access to water and other poverty and livelihood-related issues. In order to attain these goals, developing countries need to move away from a reactive agenda (against, for example, subsidies and other 'Northern' issues), to a proactive approach focused on advancing their own environmental and developmental priorities in international trade policy.

This is a particularly poignant moment to do so for the developing countries. In two of the major issue areas – international trade and global climate change – the international regimes are in a period of flux. Both regimes are at the brink of major structural changes. Trade through the ‘Doha Development Round’ and climate through the realisation that a post-Kyoto structure has to be devised for the climate regime and such a structure will require a greater (though yet undefined) role for developing countries, at a minimum at the level of climate adaptation. In both cases the exact nature of the changes to be made are uncertain, but in each the possibility – even necessity – exists for the developing countries of the South to move from their familiar and comfortable positions of resistance and reactive politics to a more proactive and imaginative stance built around the deep rooted development – and sustainable development – interests of these countries. However, for such imaginative agendas to emerge the developing countries will have to invest (and invest heavily) in serious domestic thinking through their own priorities and the industrialised countries will require international decision-making to become more inclusive of Southern concerns than it has been in the past. A key constraint for the developing countries is going to be capacity, and we shall move to this issue forthwith.

The disparity today between the North and the South is clear and present. These discouraging numbers are not new. On the one hand, for example, rich countries grew by a total of more than $10 trillion (measured by annual output) during the 1990s. On the other hand, about 1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar a day.[xxvii] If investment in the knowledge economy accurately reflects a country’s growth potential and capacity, there are more alarming numbers. In a recent study on the strengths and weaknesses of knowledge economy regions, for example, it is found that the US has 43 out of the top 50 regions among leading centres of knowledge economy.[xxviii]

Capacity building or capacity development has been described by UNDP as ‘the process by which individuals, organisations, institutions and societies develop abilities (individually and collectively) to perform functions, solve problems and set and achieve objectives.’[xxix] If the aim is to enable developing countries to ‘perform functions, solve problems and set and achieve objectives’, it is safe to suggest that much of the resources that had been poured into the ‘capacity building’ pot had largely been wasted.

Many reasons account for this failure. Effective capacity building requires equal commitment by both recipients and donors. These exercises are frequently driven by donors’ interests or agenda – rather than genuine need in the south. In addition, the skill involved in capacity building is often underestimated - those who 'do' often cannot 'teach'.[xxx] But most important of all, many of these capacity building exercises failed to emphasise the need to enable developing countries to think for themselves, from their own perspectives.

Therefore, there is a need to radically change or reconfigure the current model for capacity building. It is not about the North telling the South what to do, nor about replicating the Northern experience. It should be about instilling the kind of knowledge, know-how, and framework of analysis in recipients so that they can make up their own mind about the kind of policy objectives, strategies, and actions to pursue.

Traditionally, the accountability of an institution or government or company is evaluated in terms of whether the institution has behaved responsibly vis-à-vis its owners or members – such as the Governing Board of an NGO or a company, or the constituency of a member of parliament. Many indicators have been put forward to measure accountability, which include access to information, transparency or the degree of members’ control. However, it is clear that if the goal is to achieve sustainable development, these measures are necessary but insufficient guarantors of accountability for many of these organisations. This is not least because, as many commentators have suggested, we have evolved from a ‘Trust Me’ through a ‘Tell Me’ and a ‘Show Me’ to an ‘Involve Me’ world, where blind faith in the integrity of institutions is unlikely to prevail.

Today, our understanding of accountability has extended from an inward looking criteria (that involves assessing an institution’s responsibility to its members) to include external dimensions such as its impacts on the outside world, in particular the social, environmental and economic implications of its policies on developing countries. [xxxi] The implications of this trend are twofold. First, institutions need to establish inclusive and participatory processes to ensure that relevant stakeholders can effectively participate in decision-making process. Second, the impacts of both their policies and operations will need to be rigorously assessed and, where relevant, the negative impacts abated. In this context, legitimacy is a close and inseparable cousin of accountability. Needless to add, all these changes in our understanding of accountability have enormous policy and practical implications for the operations of the 300 IGOs, 60,000 transnational corporations, and the 30,000 international NGOs, as well as over 190 national governments that we have today.

The challenges that face all these institutions vary. The kind of criteria that is needed to assess accountability clearly depends on the type of organisation; its specific mission; the sector in which it operates; and the number of stakeholders involved.

Finally, the realisation of the multifacetedness of sustainable development must be reflected in the institutions that are constructed to foster it. The challenge of sustainable development is not just a global challenge; it is a shared global challenge. It not only requires that all actors and institutions play a role in its achievement, but it also requires that various institutions play this role ‘as a team’. Sustainable development requires partnerships; between North and South; between governments, NGOs and business; and between economic, social and ecological aspirations.

At every turn in global public policy, multilateralism seems to be under threat today. This is evident not only in trade arena after Cancun, but also environment after Kyoto, and security after Iraq. Worse still, this is not only the result of unilateralist action by the world’s one remaining superpower. Former bastions of multilateralism (such as Europe and Canada) have also sunk deep into regional process or regionalism, raising questions about their commitment to multilateralism. Sustainable development not only requires that this trend be reversed but also that multilateralism be expanded. The multilateralism required for sustainable development is not just a multilateralism of nation-states; it is the multilateralism of states and non-states. It requires not only that states, North and South, recognise that sustainable development is a common challenge that requires working with each other, but also that they realise that is a broad challenge that will require them to seek cooperative responses and to work in partnership with other actors. This is where the emerging trend towards global public policy networks and of Type II partnerships can become particularly important.

Task#7: Move to the Next Stage: Effective Sustainable Development Norms

As argued above, sustainable development is a visionary proposition. Embracing it through global governance will only be effective if principles, norms and practices can stand the test of delivering balanced, equity-centric implementation outcomes. For this to be the case, global regimes and institutions, as well as domestic policies, must be designed with such aims as primary objective, beyond short-term or special interests of politics or economics. This refers to every single provision in a trade agreement, multilateral or otherwise, any global or local compact towards social or human development ends, any environmental norm, any act of governance.

[i] Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Prologue to the Diccionario Clave de Uso del Español Actual, Ediciones SM, Madrid, January 2003, (unauthorized translation by the authors).

[ii] Inge Kaul, Pedro Conceicao, Katell Le Goulven, and Ronald U. Mendoza, ‘Why do Global Public Goods Matter Today?’ Inge Kaul, Pedro Conceicao, Katell Le Goulven, and Ronald U. Mendoza, Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalisation, (Oxford University Presss for the United Nations Development Programme, 2003), p. 1-2.

[iii] As avowed by Ashok Khosla, one of the ‘major intellectual breakthroughs’ of the twentieth century, came about in the late 1970s when The World Conservation Union- IUCN, working with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) formulated the World Conservation Strategy, Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development (1980). For the first time, time and continuity were provided as a conceptual feature to resolve the environment-development contention. See Thaddeus C. Trzyna, ed., (1995) A Sustainable World, IUCN.

[iv] Our Common Future, the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Oxford University Press (1987), made the concept popular and offered with it an equity-centric definition of development such that it is sustainable when it ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to met their own needs.’ Integral to it, the Report also elaborated, was that ‘[it] includes two key components: The concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor; and the idea of limitations that are imposed by technology and society on the environment to meet those needs’ and further, that ‘Sustainable Development is best understood as a process of change’. For a synthetic analysis of the strength of the Report’s conceptual potential see for instance, Maryke Dessing, The Social Clause and Sustainable Development, ICTSD (2001). See also Adil Najam, Janice M. Poling, Naoyuki Yamagishi, Daniel G. Straub, Jillian Sarno, Sara M. DeRitter and Eonjeong M. Kim, ‘From Rio to Johannesburg: Progress and Prospects,’ Environment vol. 4 no. 7 (September 2002): 26-38; Martin Khor K. Peng, The Future of North-South Relations: Conflict or Cooperation? (Penang: Third World Network, 1992); Stanley P. Johnson, The Earth Summit: The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) (London: Graham & Trotman/Martinus Nijhoff, 1993)

[v] The hope that sustainable development would become a policy ‘implementation’ concept rather than just a conceptual construct is most evidently embodied in the text of Agenda 21, the key agreement coming out of the Rio process as a negotiated blueprint for the attainment of Sustainable Development. Agenda 21 imparts guidance on broad number of economic, environmental and social policy areas, as well as on governance.

[vi] Adil Najam suggested that ‘The notion of sustainable development was a conceptual device used to lure the developing countries, which had been quite apprehensive about the emerging environmental agenda at the 1972 Stockholm Conference, to the idea that environment would not be used as a reason to stall development in the South.’ See Najam, A. and C.J. Cleveland, (forthcoming). Energy and Sustainable Development at Global Environmental Summits: An Evolving Agenda, International Journal of Environment and Sustainability, 5(2), 2003. See also Edward Kufour, ‘G77: We Won’t Negotiate Away Our Sovereignty,’ Third World Resurgence, vol. 14-15 (1991): 17; South Centre, Environment and Development: Towards a Common Strategy of the South in UNCED Negotiations and Beyond (Geneva: South Centre, 1991); Tariq Banuri, Noah’s Ark or Jesus’s Cross? Working Paper WP/UNCED/1992/1, Islamabad, Pakistan: Sustainable Development Policy Institute (1992); Adil Najam, ‘An Environmental Negotiation Strategy for the South,’ International Environmental Affairs vol. 7 no. 3 (1995): 249-87.

[vii] Adil Najam, A. and C.J. Cleveland, (forthcoming). Energy and Sustainable Development at Global Environmental Summits: An Evolving Agenda, International Journal of Environment and Sustainability, 5(2), 2003

[viii] Wolfgang H. Reinecke, Francis M. Deng et al, Critical Choices: The United Nations, Networks and the Future of Global Governance, (Ottawa: IDRC, 2000). See also, Steve Wadell, Global Public Policy Networks: Emerging our Futures Together, Global Public Policy Network Research Group, Case Conference presentation, Boston, 2002.

[ix] See United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Agenda 21 (United Nations, 1992)

[x] Tariq Banuri and Adil Najam (eds), Civic Entrepreneurship: A Civil Society Perspective on Sustainable Development, (Islamabad: Gandhara Academy Press, 2002).

[xi] Banuri et al, ibid

[xii] Tariq Banuri, Adil Najam and Erika Spanger Siegfried, ‘Civic Entrepreneurship: In Search of Sustainable Development’, Sustainable Development Opinion (London: IIED/RING, 2003)

[xiii] The subsidiarity principle is intended to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made as to whether action at regional or the global level is justified in the light of the possibilities available at national or local level. In the European Union, for example, it is the principle whereby the EU does not take action (except in the areas which fall within its exclusive competence) unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level.

[xiv] See Adil Najam, ‘The Unraveling of the Rio Bargain.’ Politics and the Life Sciences, 22(1), 2003 (in press)

[xv] This perception, although erroneous, might be supported by the classical economics argument that explains a correlation between environment and wealth in sequential terms, the so-called Kuznets curve. Accordingly, developing countries will need to fast generate income, and focus on income growth, before granting relevance to concerns for the environment. For a discussion on this dichotomy and how it affects the setting of policy priorities see, for instance, (1994) Edouard Dommen, Développement durable: mots-déclic. Discussion Papers, No. 80. UNCTAD, Geneva. See also Dasgupta, Susmita, Benoit Laplante, Hua Wong, and David Wheeler. Winter 2002. "Confronting the Environmental Kuznets Curve." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(1): 147-168; Bruce Yandle, Maya Vijayaraghavan, and Madhusudan Bhattarai, The Environmental Kuznets Curve, PERC Research Studies, 2002 and Nordstrom, Hakan and Scott Vaughan, Special Studies: Trade and Environment. Geneva: World Trade Organization, 1999.

[xvi] See, for example, John Clark (ed.), Globalizing Civic Engagement: Civil Society and Transnational Action, (London: Earthscan, 2003); Jan Aart Scholte, Civil Society and Democracy in Global Governance, CSGR Working Paper No. 65/01, University of Warwick, January 2001; ‘The Non-Governmental Order: Will NGOs Democratise, or Merely Disrupt, Global Governance?’ The Economist, 9 December 1999; ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’, The Economist, 27 January 2000; Jan Martin Witte, Wolfgang H. Reinicke and Thorsten Benner, ‘Beyond Multilateralism: Global Public Policy Networks’, International Politics and Society, 2/2000

[xvii] See, for example, Wolfgang H. Reinecke, Francis M. Deng et al, Critical Choices: The United Nations, Networks and the Future of Global Governance, (Ottawa: IDRC, 2000) and Witte et el, ibid.

[xviii] Celso Lafer, Johannesburg and Beyond, speech delivered at Yale University, 18 September 2002.

[xix] Fareed Zakaria clearly puts this into perspective, ‘The U.S. economy is as large as the next three –Japan, Germany and Britain- put together. With 5 % of the world’s population …it accounts for 43% of the world’s economic production, 40% of its high technology production and 50% of its research and development.’ Newsweek, March 24, 2003.

[xx] See, for example, Gregory Shaffer, WTO Shrimp-Turtle Case, Washington: International Trade Reporter, Vol. 15, No. 7. p 294 – 30, 18 February 1998.

[xxi] For the broad debate on multilateralism affecting governance see for instance, Jens Martens, The Future of Multilateralism after Monterrey and Johannesburg, Friederic Ebert Stiftung, Berlin, October 2003.

[xxii] A great deal has been written on the nature of the FTAA and on how Sustainable Development has been embraced in various forms in it, through its proposed Preamble and through the parallel summit on Sustainable Development in Santa Cruz in 1996, primarily. There is still, however, an immense distance between the political integrative rethoric and the negotiations which remain highly limited in its incorporation of the broader issues. The next stop here is in Miami in November next, when the future of the FTAA project will be determined.

[xxiii] For a discussion on the origins, effects and validity of the notion see for instance, Chandrakant Patel, Single Undertaking: A Straightjacket or Variable Geometry? South Centre, Geneva, May 2003. For a discussion on special and differential treatment and the challenges of incorporating sustainable development into it, see Ricardo Melendez-Ortiz and Ali Dehlavi, Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy Objectives: A Case for Updating Special and Differential Treatment in the WTO (ICTSD, September 1998) and Werner Corrales Leal, David Primack and Mahesh Sugathan,

Dialogue on Governance, Globalisation and Development

Knowledge: Conceptual Understanding

Action: Policy and Practice

Politics: Actors and Institutions

The Crafting of the International Trade System: Attempting a Sustainable Development Governance Scheme for Integrating the Global Economy?

Task#7: Move to the Next Stage: Effective Sustainable Development Norms