DISCUSSION
CHAIRPERSON: One thing that comes through all of the presentations is the importance of the process and the Summit. It seems though, that for things to change, people need to be mobilised and get involved. But I wonder, is it possible to get a global deal? What would drive that? It seems to me to be something very important.
Secondly, a cynic might say, that we've had a progressive government since 1994, we've had all these strategies. The RDP, the Integrated Rural Development Strategy, and so on, but despite all our best intentions and efforts, the global reality is that we are up against something that requires a rethink. Although one could say if we had not done all these things, where would we be now?
I also think that it is interesting listening to Sandile talking about some of the practical things that involve organisations on the ground as juxtaposed to what the technocrats are saying. Another issue that we seem to grapple with a lot at Nedlac is transforming multilateral institutions. But to what extent is the current institutional arrangement one that we will not be allowed to tamper with? And if that's the case, are we on the right track?
DISCUSSION
Will Bernard from SAFM. (personal capacity) The reason nobody did anything after Rio is that nobody understood Agenda 21. It is incredibly hard to understand. It is not in any known language and is so convoluted that it takes hours to get through a sentence. We are all talking about changing governments in the north and south. You cannot change other people. It has to come from within every individual. Until we all know that fundamental change can only start with an individual we might as well stop wasting our time and money. Why don't we cut out all these middlemen, take the poor and get them to build schools. It's not difficult.
Mosebjane Malatsi from Thari e ntsho: I am not sure that community based organisations on the ground have been involved in the world summit. The question here is, how far, if at all, are those people involved? Do they know about it? Do they understand it? What do they expect? Are they going to get anything out of it? Secondly, why are we in this country shying away from planning? The RDP was dropped like a hot potato as soon as it was commissioned. And then we went into a free market system, the GEAR system, to implement what was promised, none of which has come through. We are not planning with a very clear commitment to addressing the basic needs with involvement, in other words, the bottom-up approach. Community development is not heard, let alone understood. At least, that's my impression here in this country. Why have we waited this long?
Michael Sacks from the ANC. (personal capacity)
Desighen mentioned a tendency towards centralisation when dealing with issues of global governance. And Saliem spoke about a strategy to try and fragment discussions. Surely the progressive agenda in this era of globalisation should be striving towards some democratically constituted global government and the UN, for all its flaws and problems, is the place that should be strengthened. We should be moving towards subordinating organisations like the WTO and the IMF, to the United Nations, and maybe the FFD was beginning to move in that direction.
Second, I think the RDP is still the foundation of our vision. We have just introduced the Integrated Development Plan processes at local government level, you've got RDP at a regional level, you've got NEPAD, and now we're trying to craft an integrated Development plan for the globe through this global deal.
Doesn’t this contradict with the whole WSSD process, which says that you must have a National Council for Sustainable Development and a national strategy for sustainable development? Don’t we already have instruments in place that we are using and that are not tied to particular strategy?
Tuthula Balfour from National Department of Health (personal capacity)
We are all probably converts and we see the magnitude of the problem. I wanted to find out from Desighen if there is some measure of hope that this WSSD will actually make a difference?
I'm saying that because the climate now is far more hostile than in the early 1990s where you had a more social agenda. Now the world is very dog-eat-dog and free market and not pro poor at all. At a political level is there any indication that this conference can come up with something? And then is there something specific, or a few specific things, that the government is working towards to make sure that there is an output that has made a difference for South Africans in this year?
Jonathan Katzenellenbogen (Business Day)
We are pushing for the Summit to be about poverty eradication and one of the speakers referred to South Africa's anti-poverty strategy. I have been following the budget and I know that there is no real formal, comprehensive thing called an anti-poverty strategy. There are a number of programmes, mostly dogged by problems. One cause of those problems is that the programmes cut across government departments and therefore there are tremendous problems in spending those funds. So what is government's thinking on its anti-poverty strategy, particularly ahead of the Summit? South Africa is the host and 1994 unemployment has increased and we have no poverty strategy. I think that's a source of national embarrassment, myself.
Ralph Harman from the Universities of East Anglia and the Witwatersrand
South Africa’s global deal suggestion is pretty much in the middle between the right and left.
On the right side you mentioned the resistance of conservative governments to something like the global deal. What is the real leverage South Africa and the G77 have to convince northern governments to make concessions? Is it enlightened self-interest or is there some kind of pressure you can exert?
The other side is partly what Sandile was talking about. For the global deal the main unit of analysis is the nation state, which may not even be the real locus of power these days. The second unit of analysis would be the trans national corporations or the IMF and the World Bank and so on. But what about local communities who are in many ways worse for wear from things like GEAR, and some people would even say things like NEPAD. Is there something in the global deal that will give local communities access to resources and guaranteed rights, rather than just promises access to international markets?
Janine Gonzales, Trade and Industry Policy Secretariat (TIPS)
There has been a lot of talk in the World Economic Forum recently about poverty alleviation. And for the first time in the North-South debate the north is realising that poverty is not just a south problem, it's a north problem, too. That is a good platform for the summit to start from. But we must always be aware that this is a world summit, it's not a South African summit. As such, although it is a good platform for us to launch our important issues, the only way we will be able to change North-South relations is if we find common South-South issues.
John Clark, social work consultant
We were told that the summit could be called the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development or the World Summit but not the Earth Summit. This was to show that it is not just about the conservation and environmental concerns of the North. I can understand this but it still raises a conundrum. Unless people have food in their stomachs and have their poverty and survival needs addressed they won’t hear about issues like earth justice, and sustainability, and biodiversity, and climate change. But if they don’t hear about these issues there will be more and more people struggling to find less and less food to put in their stomachs. For me that is the deep learning question and I'm really hoping that there will be some enlightenment to help steer our way through that conundrum and address both sides and hold it in a sort of dialectical tension.
PANELLISTS' RESPONSES
Desighen Naidoo
I think there is a lot of validity in everything everybody has said. We need to enrich the debate to achieve a better product. One problem is where to address this debate. You actually have to go through the global arena, through those dungeon negotiations in the United Nations system using those convoluted terms because they serve a purpose. And then you have to find ways to make it meaningful to people on the ground.
Naming the summit was a United Nations decision together with many players including South Africa and was primarily around branding, because the Rio Earth Summit was extraordinarily well branded. We did not want this summit to be Chapter 2 of Environment and Development. We wanted it to be the world addressing sustainable development and sustainable development is not only environment and development, it's much broader than that.
We spent most of our time on the economic and social platforms because the environmental platform was taken care of. I think we can make a fairer assessment of whether the balance is right closer to the summit when we come out with a negotiated text.
What is different now, and why should people engage?
One thing is that September 11th has made the United States recognise that its internal security is very dependent on external security. So the biggest economic power bloc is now prepared to engage in multilateral discussions on global initiatives. They're actually engaging in the discussions around, if not global governance systems, at least monitoring and evaluation systems. That is a big change.
A second fundamental change is recognition of the impact of current unsustainable consumption and production patterns in the north, particularly in the EU. That is forcing them out of an inward-looking world into an external-looking world and they're now very happy to engage with the developing world around production and consumption. So there are some significant factors that are different in the north and that makes it a bit easier for us to engage in this conversation.
South Africa has already derived important benefits from being a key participant, but perhaps most of all being host. For the first time in this country, and possibly in the world, there is a cabinet committee around sustainable development where you have the Ministers of Environment, Water, Agriculture, Finance and Trade & Industry trying to work up a collective agenda mainly about the positions that we are taking forward to mobilise a global deal, but inevitably talking about how to restructure South Africa's policies so that we actually have a sustainable development governance regime in the country.
Saliem Fakir
It is not so much about whether we can change people but how we can resist people trying to change us. If you resist other people trying to change you, they do change, too.
On the question about the convoluted language used at summits and conferences:
I think that may be a problem for the way particular countries involve their own national constituencies and also ensuring that their concerns are addressed. Our Constitution is quite difficult but involved a massive process of distillation with over a million people participating and nobody can say that the Constitution is not an important document in our country.
We must take responsibility for making sure that they speak a language that we can understand. Journalists have a particular responsibility in making sure that whatever is being discussed is translated into accessible language. We must engage these processes and argue the importance of different constituencies participating in these discussions. Democracy survives through active engagement of all constituencies, and it is a constant battle.
If you don’t engage there is a great chance that decisions will be taken that are not in your interests, no matter what the language is. And I think this language issue needs to be fought. It is not just about the World Summit, it is even here, nationally. The issue of language and understanding is a fundamental debate about participating in these political processes. And the more you ignore it, the more you give avenue for the technicians and the political elite to manage processes on your behalf in a way that may not always work in your interest.
Sandile Ndawonde
How does the grassroots know about the WSSD?
Last year we discussed the summit at a conference for CBOs at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, which the MEC of Agriculture and Environment attended. We will be part of the NGO process and after the summit, in October, we will have a conference to report back to our constituency on the recommendations made by our government and other governments.
We have a serious concern with the Integrated Development Plans because they do not have an environmental component. They don’t deal with waste or with sustainable land use. Instead they continue to promote inappropriate development and land use driven by market value and government planning without community involvement.
At the moment we are predicting huge flood damage because of the way the low income housing has been built and we are trying to access funding to do the environmental impact in terms of flooding around the area and see where we are going with that tragedy in Pietermaritzburg.
I am seriously concerned about the concern raised that there is no anti-poverty budget. What is happening in this country if there's no budget for poverty alleviation?
What I would like to advocate is that CBOs convene their own conference and tackle these issues. Then inform the municipal or district councils and say: “This is our plan. If you don't do that we will block the streets.” We know that Sangoco has called for action, we don't know whether this is still going to happen but we are still going to push the same line as it has been agreed at grassroots.
CHAIRPERSON:
I was tempted to give you more time because you started to talk about what the lever was by blocking the streets. That might be the way to engage at national level. But I think the panel have not touched on two interesting things. The one was around what is the lever? The lever to get the global deal. It's fine to talk about all these nice things that you want to achieve, but you never get a deal unless you have the power to force somebody to do something.
On the enlightened self-interest thing – one of the interesting things about the US choosing to lead the world now is that it's choosing to do so militarily as well, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Michael Sachs also asked a question which I think was quite important about the centralisation versus the fragmentation of issues. But I'll allow a few more contributions from the floor first and then we'll come back to the panel for the last bite.
Ashwell Blassen, Bird Life, Zululand
Our Environmental Management Act (NEMA) is unenforceable, we can’t even prescribe to industry how to behave, and this has become pretty public knowledge. We are trying to take a policy stance at WSSD when we still have to resolve internal issues. Recent environmental issues go beyond biodiversity to pure health aspects and if we can't enforce those issues,
how are we going to compete with international specialist groups like the IUCN.
Chairperson
The unions have just brought this issue of Iscor and the poisoning of the water table to Nedlac. As you say, it's becoming much more serious.
A participant from Working for Water
My concern is the debate on poverty eradication because you go to the poor people and you raise hopes and you bring nothing in return. Most of the people who are grappling with poverty issues are women and they are just statistics. To what extent do we involve them in these strategies? There needs to be something to show on the ground, projects are not taking us anywhere. We need a strategy that will take people from project level to where they can sustain themselves.
CHAIRPERSON: The point you've raised relates to what Will was saying, that where we've had a successful case of something like working for water, why isn't it replicated into other avenues?
A representative from Cosatu
For workers if it is choice between working for a polluting industry or closing that industry and losing jobs we choose to work in that polluted environment. What strategies do we have concerning that? I also want to support the call to simplify the language. As an environmental person I have really grappled with some of the language and I am supposed to inform the leadership about sustainable development. What do I say?
Richard Humphries, SARPN
What is happening within SADC about preparing for WSSD? Has it progressed since the Mauritius document, which I do think was a quite flimsy document? Is there something more ambitious?
Patrick Malaga from Cease Fire (personal capacity)
I want to ask the person from the Department of Environment and Tourism why government is busy buying more weapons rather than using those billions of Rand to alleviate poverty? Secondly, the WSSD agenda says nothing about the demilitarisation process and how should we address that, because it also affects people’s across the whole continent of Africa, even abroad. Thank you.
Final responses from panellists
Desighen Naidoo
We have been grappling with the question of the levers for some time, both as the government team working on this as well as our broader stakeholder team. And to be honest, they're not surfacing easily and I think we can talk about that a bit.
The quick response to the NEMA question is that we recognise its weakness and we are preparing four Bills, on Bio-diversity, Coastal Management, Air Pollution and Waste. That suite of tools will give us the legislative authority to deal with issues succinctly. They're a little bit radical.
On the issue of job creation and empowerment, firstly just to point out that Jacqueline represents how South Africa has been able to engage different sectors in the process. Cosatu managed to get some of the more interesting clauses into the overall Africa document around the corporate responsibility issues. A lot of people find it quite surprising that this kind of relationship exists in our delegation. So the opportunities are there. How we roll it out is going to determine the nature of the implementation.
Getting the women's issue into WSSD text has probably been the single hardest thing to do inside the United Nations system. The opposition even within our negotiating block, the G77 has been extraordinarily powerful and we have relied on other blocks, like the EU to bring it into the text.
SADC preparations in the early phases have been fairly flimsy. The Mauritius exercise was a capacity building exercise more than around preparation. But that's been consolidated both with the Africa process, when the five regions came together and now more recently because we have a continuous engagement both at SADC level and Africa level in between all of the PrepComs. In fact we have an Africa seminar that South Africa's hosting in early May to bolster the process. And it appears to be coming together. And the thing that's bringing us together more than anything else is in fact NEPAD.
On the issue of a demilitarisation, the demilitarisation discussion has come into the clauses around peace, stability and security. It's fuzzy because there's resistance from many about being definitive. It’s not an easy process but the demilitarisation debate has been ongoing since the beginning of the PrepComs.
I'm afraid I have no enlightening comments on this country’s arms deal.
Saliem Fakir
I want to address the issue of a lever and how one gets a deal? Partly this requires an understanding of how decisions are made in the UN system. Each country has an equal vote so decisions are made by consensus, but in reality countries have economic ties and aid relationships with more powerful countries. Some of them have lots of guns.
Although you have consensus based decision-making and a one-vote system, you have blocs of countries that try to make decisions, like the G77, which is most of the developing countries and China, trying to reach consensus on issues to drive within the UN system. Part of the strategy is to try to get maximum consensus within the different blocs and then to engage the other blocs so that any outcome that is decided on will also influence the flow of resources.
If South Africa tables a programme on energy and water, as part of a global deal, it would have to work within, first, SADC, then the Africa bloc, and then the G77 and try to get consensus within that. The louder and more consolidated the voice within the G77, the more likely it is to influence the agenda. Because all the conventions have to have an outcome, there is a lot of playing around with words and the way different blocs take particular positions. Fundamentally, I think at the summit we will see a more minimalist kind of approach to trying to extract consensus and the flow of resources.
The programme of action is very important because if we can secure a programme on water and sanitation that meets the millennium development goals, we can tap into resources to support our national programmes.
Many developing countries like Mozambique, run up to 80 per cent of their government on foreign revenue. So you can imagine the importance of donor assistance for them in achieving their national goals. For this reason the debate and the levers are very much around how one plays politics within those constituencies, and how one uses the block system to try to extract decisions and direct the flow of resources, which national countries can tap into.
Sandile Ndawonde
Two issues. One is polluting industry. We don't say polluting industry must be closed down because it's polluting rivers or the air we breathe. But we know that the technocrats are looking very seriously into cleaner technology that will minimise pollution. Cosatu must understand that we, as well as the workers, are dying. Self-regulation is not going to work because we have seen in the past how industries kill people. We saw what happened with asbestos mining, what the people look like today.
Why compromise? Why don't we push together to put pressure on these big industries to invest and change the technology? Then we can all live a better life.
And then the question of language, well, it's a struggle, especially in the environmental sector because of all the bombastic words. So we're trying to work with academics and students to simplify these terms and then put the information on our website where people can access it.
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