One major outcome of the recent deliberations on environment and development (The Brundtland Commission, The Earth Council, The ‘92 Global Forum, etc.) is a growing realisation the achievement of sustainable development will need fundamentally new kinds of organisations and decision systems. These must be capable, to a greater degree than ever before, of combining insights from different disciplines and sectors. In the long run, we will need to build institutions that are capable, within their own structures, to produce results which are optimal form the perspective of development and environment. This means that they will have to learn to internalise into their goals and strategies both sets of issues. One means for achieving this is to evolve methods by which the pricing of resources and productive activities includes their full costs and benefits. Another way to achieve better and more transectoral decisions is for institutions with different perspectives to collaborate and form partnerships which can produce better understanding and resolution of conflicting goals. A partnership with clearly defined responsibilities and expectations can be an effective method for overcoming the barriers to communication between the different constituencies of society. This is a more immediate approach and the Rio process demonstrated how powerful it can be. Leaders from many of the sectors (U.K. Prime Minister John Major in Government, BCSD President Stephan Schmidheiny among corporate leaders, the World Council of Churches among religious organisations, Development Alternatives among NGOs are examples) have called for new initiatives to bring together representatives of sectors that have rarely found anything in common in the past. The Manchester meeting convened by the British Government (described on the next page) will be one of the first significant global attempts to form such partnerships. The Business Initiatives in Rural Development (BIRD) programmes is an example of a sustainable development partnership which has shown considerable potential. Launched by Development Alternatives in 1991, it has led to several partnerships between major companies and NGOs. The purpose of these partnerships range form rehabilitation of people displaced by new industrial plants to pollution monitoring and R&D for industrial waste utilisation. The concept of partnership is certainly fundamental to the inter-sectoral dialogue. But if is not to become yet another “flavour of the month”, one more casualty among the battalions of failed good ideas, careful design work is needed to raise the probability of success among new partnerships. There will be room for informal partnerships in which the expectations and results have evolved over time with experience and growing mutual trust. But, in general, successful partnerships will also need some degree of formal underpinning with written agreements and explicit targets and milestones. While partnerships will be an essential element in any sustainable development strategies, we must, of course, also recognise the equally essential role of individuals and institutions who prefer to blow the whistle rather than negotiate round the table. It is crucial that organisations, policy oriented or activist, be established and nurtured by society with the specific purpose of disagreement and confrontation with the powerful vested interests that exist in society, with whom negotiating can otherwise be only a losing proposition. Any society that aims for sustainable development must support its greens on the front lines, no less than it has historically supported its industries and other economic institutions at base headquarters. Given the differences in the working cultures of different types of organisations, there are many pitfalls ahead. But we can feel encouraged by the number of organisations and constituencies in the environment movement and in business corporations who have even in the three year UNCED process, reversed their view that it is unacceptable to have any kind of dialogue with other sectors. |
||||
|
||||