Here are some facts to bear out my contention. The Kyoto process looks doomed, unless the obduracy of the lone remaining superpower that places such narrow and short term self-interest above all else provokes the rest of the world to bring it to heel. The CBD process continues to amble along at its own leisurely pace. Agenda 21 has elicited some talk in the CSD but little action on the ground. And, with less then 18 months to go, Johannesburg has yet to come up on the radar screen of most of the prime players in the business, particularly the ones, such as the World Bank or UNDP, who have to put development back into sustainable development.

Ironically, WSSD, which is the first global conference with the words Sustainable Development in its title, is at the moment mostly about environment. Where are the equally important issues of equity, employment, education and empowerment? Without these, development almost certainly cannot be sustainable. Nor, as I will show in a few minutes, can it become environmentally sound.

While my own professional commitment is to work at the local and national level, it is clear to me, as I am sure it is to all of us here, that international processes are important too. On a global scale, a more sustainable world is impossible without them, and even local and community efforts like those of my organisation are sometimes impacted by what happens at the international level. Although I have not seen many instances of the poor getting much direct benefit from such international processes, the international system unquestionably can influence national governments, private companies and others in ways that can affect local communities. In any case, sustainable development can only be achieved if there is concerted effort at all levels — local, national and global.

What I would like to share with you this evening is a view from the grassroots of what the international system is doing, and what it is not doing, and what we really need to be doing. To do that meaningfully, we also need to consider who decides what is to be done and who does what. In more respectable language, we need to explore what is the agenda of the international dialogue? Who sets it and how universal is its relevance? What should it be? And how well are the decisions it arrives at implemented? I believe that a better understanding of the answers to these questions can help make Johannesburg a more fruitful exercise.

Let’s start with something about Rio, because both Chip and I were integrally involved in the processes of Rio, before and after the event. Naturally, we both carried strong feelings about what, in our opinion, happened and what didn’t.

Many of you know the history of the concept of sustainable development. Many people think its origins lie in the Earth Summit at Rio, 10 years ago. Others believe that its genesis dates to the Brundtland Commission in 1987 when the report Our Common Future was published. Actually, it goes back all the way to the early 80s. To the 5th of March, 1980, to be precise. The term "sustainable development" was put into the lexicon of international discourse by the World Conservation Strategy, a seminal document prepared jointly by IUCN, WWF and UNEP, and launched at 10 am GMT on that day.

I know this well because I was one of the contributors to the Strategy and I have to tell you that this week in New York has been a total, and rather devastating, revelation for me. Over the last several days, I have met people at all levels – in the UN, diplomats, well-informed people from different walks of life who for 20 years have been hearing – and using – the phrase sustainable development and have not yet understood it. I met programme officers, directors, even Assistant Secretary Generals of the UN, people with whom I was involved in rather intensive discussions in connection with a UNDP project and many of them simply equate sustainable development simply with environment. Certainly not all, but many still don’t seem to get it. "Many of these issues of sustainable development will have to wait until the countries can afford to deal with them."

This is not meant as a criticism of the UN or its wonderfully dedicated staff. The reactions of diplomats attending the Commissions and Committees in this building seem to show that they have even less of a clue. One of them, centrally involved in the preparations for the UN Conference on Financing for Development which are now at an advanced stage, admitted in a panel discussion in a crowded room this afternoon that the concept of sustainable development had not yet come up in their negotiations. "Oh, yes! The green thing? Sure, the environment is very important – but hasn’t that already been taken care of at other conferences?"

Case by case, compartment by compartment – that is how international discourse has been fragmented and, in the process, made ineffective. If our decisions are going to be made in the conventional, one-dimensional way, how can we hope to better a world that is entirely made up of complex linkages?

But in a sense these stories simply show that people like all of us gathered here have failed in the work we set out to do. As with all of us gathered here this evening, much of our effort has gone into preaching to the already converted. We urgently need to go beyond, to intensify our efforts rather than move back, open fronts in new sectoral territories and bring back new converts. But sometimes, I find myself wondering whether international workshops, seminars, conferences and summits are the way to do it. We have had scores of conferences on one or another of the subjects that together constitute sustainable development.

Since the Stockholm Conference of 1972, there have been at least 45 or 50 major international conferences – almost a dozen of them at the Heads of State or Heads of Government level — and frankly the world does not seem to be much better place for all this high level to-ing and fro-ing. There are more poor people today in the world than there were in 1972. There are fewer trees in the world today, fewer rivers, poorer soils, more marginalized people, and each of these numbers is getting worse. I am not alone in this perception. This week’s Economist, a magazine not renowned for its liberal views, clearly demonstrates the same thing. The lead article shows that poverty is actually on the increase, even today.

So, while we strut in and out of big UN meetings, chatting with decision makers and national representatives, the fact is that the lives of people and the health of the environment are not getting better. This was something that totally outraged Chip. And he spread that feeling of outrage to many of his friends, including myself. We are, today, living with many "gaps" and "divides". We have digital divides, housing gaps and even water conflicts. Let us look for a moment at the income gaps. I suppose most of you have seen that beautiful champagne glass in the Human Development report? UNDP has shown how the top 20% in this world get almost 100 times as much as the bottom 20%. And this ratio keeps growing. The 100 wealthiest people in the world have more money than the combined GNP of dozens of countries. And, over the last two decades, the champagne glass has kept getting wider and wider. What do we have? More and more wealth in the hands of a few rich people and less and less in the hands of billions of poor ones.

We have other kinds of gaps as well. The technology gap is one of my favourite subjects. Another is the democracy deficit, possibly the most fundamental missing link for sustainable development. The most urgent, on the other hand is the basic needs shortfall. I would like to come back to some of these in a moment.

So, what are the possibilities for international action? Perhaps we should analyse recent international negotiations and try to derive lessons from them to enable us to design more effective mechanisms for the future. Let me start, therefore, by stating what I think has happened over these years. We all went to Rio, as we did earlier to Stockholm, with a lot of expectations. One of the significant divides throughout the Rio process, as in many other international processes, was of course between the industrialised countries of the North and the developing countries of the South. Neither the North nor the South is a monolith and it goes without saying that even among each group there were great variations of opinion. But in its simplest and most essential terms, despite the real successes of the event itself, not very much has happened as a result. The operation was a success but the patient’s health has not improved. Our diplomats, Ministers, Presidents and Kings, were taken to Rio with the underlying promise – made by who? mostly by the rich countries – that if you come to Rio and sign on the dotted line – of what? of The Climate Change Convention, the Biodiversity Convention, and the Rio Principles — then we will basically fund you with something called Agenda 21 and you can take care of all your development problems. Poverty eradicated, tick it off; drinking water cleaned up, tick it off; forests protected, tick it off. It sounded like a good bargain.

Technically, of course, no one actually signed a commitment or made a direct promise – except for the two conventions – but the commitment and the promise were certainly implied in the negotiations. You sign on the Conventions and we finance Agenda 21. Was that not the basic bargain? If not, then what was all the negotiating about?

Agenda 21 had been the result of extensive series of workshops, meetings, consultations and prepcoms convened by the UNCED secretariat. It comprised some 30 odd chapters, each presenting an action plan covering the basic issues of managing economies, the environment and society to ensure sustainable development. On the basis of detailed consultations with representatives from governments, economic sectors and civil society, Agenda 21 identified the types of intervention needed to reorient global development on to a more sustainable path and presented calculations on roughly how much this would cost. The global estimates for implementing Agenda 21 came close to $ 625 billion a year, a figure that the international community could generally take in its stride, given its familiarity with the kind of money going into armaments, trade in wildlife, drug trafficking, etc, not to mention subsidies. It was further agreed that the bulk of these costs would have to be borne domestically by national budgets, and the international community would be responsible for mobilising about 20%, which came to $125 billion dollars per year. This price tag for the international component of Agenda 21 was meant to be additional to the existing North-South flows of official development assistance, which was then running at about $ 80 billion. This total of some $ 200 billion per year over a period of ten years was expected, more or less, to get the world onto a sustainable development trajectory.

Today, nine years into this ten-year period, the total amount of money that has gone into Agenda 21 is still pretty close to zero. Not the agreed $ 125 billion per year – which would have come close to a trillion dollars over the period thus far – but ZERO. Instead of ODA continuing to go up from the prevailing level of $ 80 billion, as it normally used to at a few percent a year, it has come down to half that, around $ 35 billion. So, instead of going from $ 80 billion up to $ 200 billion, it has actually come down to $ 30 or 40 billion. The only visible financial outcome of Rio is about $ 5 billion worth of commitments, most of them for the Global Environment Facility. Out of these, less than $ 2 billion have actually been spent. And those are entirely earmarked for – guess what? — climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation, the problems of interest to primarily the North.

I certainly would not want to be heard saying that climate change and biodiversity are not important for poor countries. On the contrary, it is the poor countries that are paying the highest costs resulting from these global catastrophes. It is the island and coastal nations in the tropics that are going to disappear under rising sea levels and floods. It is their agriculture that is going to need the genetic material of cultivars to stay ahead of pests and declining yields. So, I am not suggesting for a moment that the poor countries are not concerned about either of these issues. But the reason they are being funded is, let’s face it, because they touch the concerns of the rich.

Who cares about the poor? And who wishes to mount a serious attack on poverty, basic needs and the current highly inequitable global order? Well, there is not much evidence that any government does, but certainly it would not appear to be of much interest to those who decide on the subjects allotted to UN conferences. Is it a mere oversight that in all its 50-odd years, the UN system has never held an international conference, let alone a Summit, on the issue of poverty eradication? For many of the member nations, surely this must be the number one concern. Fully one half of the population of this world, three billion people, actually exists on less than two dollars per day.

Can you imagine living on two dollars a day? I don’t mean in New York, where it would clearly be impossible. In fact, only a few minutes back, I was reminded how impossible. To quench the thirst I got from thinking about what I should say at this lecture, I went, a few minutes back, to the Delegate’s Lounge to get myself a cold drink. A small glass of cola, mostly filled with ice, cost me $ 2.35. So clearly it’s not easy to survive in New York on that kind of money. But it’s not easy to survive even in a low, really low, cost country like India. $ 2 can’t get you very far anywhere today and if you try to live on that, you are going to have to give up something, either food, or water, or clothes, or shelter, or medicines, or education, or whatever. And that’s how 3 billion people in the world manage, through sheer ingenuity, to survive every day. And among all the scores of global meetings it convenes, the UN has never felt it necessary to address this fundamental issue.

Perhaps it is because the delegates who represent us here have not had to live on $ 2 dollars a day? Perhaps they got used to prices in the Delegates Lounge and cost of living is no longer an issue for them? Today, under the leadership of the World Bank, international organisations are racing to jump onto the bandwagon of "poverty alleviation". Yet, I am hard pressed to see how their programmes have in any way changed to respond to this changed priority. If global conferences are seen to be a cost effective way to define global strategies, then surely it would make sense to deal with the issues head on. And, by the way, after 50 years of international development effort isn’t it a bit embarrassing to be talking of alleviating poverty? Surely the world now has to eradicate it, and in short order.

But then again, is lack of money the only problem? Or even the main problem? I, for one, am certain that it is not. In fact, many of the environment and development ills of the Third World probably stem from too much money, not too little. Or, more accurately, too much money for the wrong purposes and too little for the right ones. Overseas investments in a recipient country, whether private or public, carry with them the genetic code of the donor or lending country. In less subtle language, this simply means that they bring with them technologies, management systems and consultants that often respond more to the priorities and approaches of the investing country than of the host country. The literature of development is replete with examples of huge, expensive projects that not only missed their stated development objectives but also led to large scale environmental and social costs which became the responsibility of local communities to take care of.

To arrive at Johannesburg thinking that lack of money is the primary problem and that more of it will solve it would be to consign the process to failure before it starts. Making development more sustainable certainly needs more money. But it also needs much more than simply money. It needs fundamental changes in the global economy, as well as in the domestic economies of nations.

The agenda, unfortunately, is set by the rich and powerful. That is why the issues discussed at most international conferences are their issues. Look at the Montreal Protocol, for example. For decades, you have access to these "miracle" compounds, the freons, and all of a sudden, they come and tell you that you have to stop using them: they are destroying the stratospheric ozone shield. It is, of course, a pure coincidence that corporate scientists have recently developed substitute substances that are less destructive to the ozone layer. The rest of the world comes with its usual knee jerk reaction: "give us the money and transfer the technology and we will sign on the dotted line".

Or take the Climate Change negotiations. Having dumped huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for a couple of centuries, the industrial countries now realise that the globe is about to get warmer and the sea level is going to rise. They set in motion a process of international negotiation that involves substantial changes in the economies of all countries, rich and poor, and considerable expenses to bring about these changes. Once again, the machinery of international negotiation cranks up, and once again the rest of the world produces its usual knee jerk reaction: " first give us the money and transfer the technology".

It is rare that the countries of the South get their act together to actually try and put forward their own issues onto the international agenda. Part of this is perhaps because they have memories of the few abortive attempts they made in the past, such as the demands for a New International Economic Order and the New Information Order. Those quickly disappeared into oblivion: they found no supporters among the countries of the North. The only issue emanating from the developing world that actually led to a major international conference was Desertification but, again, little follow up has been visible since. The rest of the time, the role of the South has been mainly limited to reacting and responding to initiatives taken by others. Usually, this response is for more money and more technology, a factor that tends to dampen the interest of the rich countries in these kinds of dialogues.

I already discussed the issue of money. The issue of technology is more sophisticated – and much more dangerous. At least some of the trouble that the world finds itself in can be traced directly to the technologies we have chosen and the way we have used them. There are, no doubt many who will disagree: I have heard eminent scientists say that if there are a few things wrong with technology, a little change here, a little fine tuning there will take care of the problem. I am afraid that line of thinking does not mesh well with the vast social exclusion and environmental destruction we see around us. If it were true, we certainly would not have needed to call world leaders all the way to Stockholm or Rio or Johannesburg next year. The cry for more technology by southern delegates is, therefore, not necessarily in the long term interest of the South.

What sorts of solutions, then, should our delegations to Johannesburg be looking for?

My own work points very strongly to some solutions that are actually quite simple to understand and consequently to implement. Before I get to them, let me recognise the existence of a fundamental law of cybernetics, which applies to any system, including organisations and policy frameworks. This is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. Ashby’s Law simply states that for any solution to work, it must be as complex as the problem, neither more nor less so. In other words, we cannot hope to solve a complex problem with simplistic solutions. But simplistic is not the same as simple. Within a simple statement, understandable by all, and carrying the seeds of its implementation can lie various levels of complexity, also understandable by all. By setting self-organising systems in motion, with well-defined rules and appropriate rules, it is possible for a simply stated solution to acquire the requisite variety to match the variety (complexity) of the problem.

Let us apply this logic to the concept of sustainable development. As all of us know, sustainable development has several dimensions: economic, social and environmental are the primary ones of concern to us here. They are manifested in such issues as resource efficiency, equity and justice, and environmental conservation. It is hard to see how the world can be sustainable if substantial portions of its resources are being destroyed or depleted, either through overuse or because of waste. That is what happens with the use of wrong technologies, bad fiscal policies or distorted prices that do not reflect the real, environmental or social costs of those resources. It also happens when there are extreme disparities in society: the rich overuse certain types of resources (mainly non-renewable), while the poor often tend, out of the exigencies of survival, to destroy other types of resources (mainly renewable ones).

In addition to maintaining the resource base, sustainable development also means energising people and their communities. It also means education, enterprise and empowerment. And thus enabling them to find meaning and dignity in their lives. Perhaps above all, it means building their capacity to make endogenous choices – their own choices, reflecting their own realities, their aspirations and their knowledge of their resource endowment.

If sustainable development involves such a rich mix of considerations, of which economic growth is only one, then how do we bring it about? Well, in one sense, it is a highly complex business and will require, as Ashby’s Law indicates, a highly complex response. In another sense, however, by breaking it up into manageable parts, it is not all that difficult: there are actually only two things you have to do to get on the sustainable development path. The first is to make your consumption patterns (or lifestyles) sustainable and the second is to make your production systems (or livelihoods) sustainable. That’s all, really. If you do these two things, you are well on the way to a sustainable future.

Unfortunately, the changes required to convert societies to sustainable consumption patterns are not always seen as convenient or acceptable. Throughout the UNCED process and at Rio itself, I recall constantly being asked by audiences and media persons questions such as "Do you mean to say we’ve got to give up our cars for sustainable development?" That’s not a pleasant thought in some societies. No, it is probably not necessary to give up all cars; but yes, we may well have to give some of them in favour of other forms of transport. Or design better cities that need less movement of people and goods. Or find other satisfiers for the desire we currently have for excessive mobility. But this is not the central issue: the basic principle is that whatever we consume and waste must be within the capacity of nature to take care of on a continuing basis. This means that the prices and incentives that drive consumption behaviour have to be realigned to promote conservation of resources and a more equitable access to the goods and services on offer in the marketplace. In any case, despite the importance of this subject, the questions of lifestyles and consumption patterns hardly ever came up for serious discussion in the Rio process, and I wonder if it will for Johannesburg. q

This two-part lead article by Ashok Khosla comprises extracts from the Chip Lindner Memorial Lecture, delivered by the author at the Dag Hammarskold Auditorium, United Nations, New York, 30th April 2001.  The second and final part of this article will appear in the September 2001 issue of the DA Newsletter.