The World Summit on Sustainable Development : Part - ll

Ashok Khosla

No less important than sustainable consumption and lifestyles is the question of sustainable production and livelihoods. Today’s production systems are not sustainable. They are too capital intensive, too resource consuming, too heavily subsidised (first by nature and then again by a distorted economy) and too wasteful. Yet, virtually every country wishes today to "become competitive in the global economy" by emulating the same technological strategies.

Let us look at what this implies in terms of economics. The capital investment needed to create one job in a modern industry in the US averages about one million dollars. In some industries it may be as low as $ 500,000; in others it can be $ 1.2 million – the cost of creating one workplace. It is said to cost about DM 2 million in Germany and more than $ 2 million in Japan because of higher levels of automation. In the North, it basically costs anywhere between one and two million dollars to create a job in modern industry. In a country like China or India, the costs can be brought down somewhat, but not a lot – most of the technology, equipment, know how is imported. The figures range from $ 100,000 to $ 500,000. Now let us look at the implications of this.

In other words, there is just no way with present economic options that the problem of unemployment can be solved. We need a fundamentally different approach. One such possibility has come to be called sustainable livelihoods. This is what my organisation Development Alternatives works on. A sustainable livelihood is a job that gives a decent income, gives you some status in society and some dignity and meaning in life. It also conserves and, if possible, regenerates the environment. It provides opportunities for people to work right in their community instead of having to migrate to the slums of a big city. And, the purchasing power and lifestyle provided by such a livelihood would be at least comparable to that of a factory worker in an urban area where the wages have to be much higher than in the village to compensate workers for higher costs of living.

How can the global economy flourish if fully one half the population of the planet is unable to participate in it, either as consumers because of inadequate purchasing power or as producers because of inadequate skills and resources? On the other hand, if the whole population of the world does start participating in this economy in a manner that resembles the industrialised economies of today, how will our life support systems be maintained? These not so simple questions are what we need to address at Johannesburg.

For people like us here, the world gets better and more interesting everyday. We live longer, know more, travel to more places, have more things than people at any other time in history. But it is not so for more than half the people of our world. For many of them, things are getting worse, not better. It need not be that way, but to change from the trajectory the world is currently on to another, more socially equitable and more in harmony with the imperatives of nature, and thus more sustainable, we have to be prepared to make much harder decisions than we have in the past.

No doubt, what I am suggesting will evoke the normal response that we have to be "realistic" and work within the constraints of the international system. But who sets the constraints? The leaders who represent us at these conferences may well be afraid of the political consequences of taking more courageous positions on the international stage, but as citizens, we also have the duty to demand real solutions on behalf of our constituencies. My constituency is the large number of men and women who remain outside the mainstream economy even after 50 years of international development.

They don’t know about the World Bank or UNDP or, indeed, UNEP and what these agencies do for them or about Rio or Johannesburg. Nothing seems to change in their lives, no matter how many conferences and summits the leaders of their countries attend. And, many things get worse. Certainly, we have conquered many diseases, but we also have growing epidemics of TB, malaria, HIV/AIDS. We have all kinds of new building materials, yet there is today the largest number of shelterless people in the world. We have all kinds of scientific methods for managing our environmental resources, and still the forests, rivers and soils keep disappearing. And for many, many people, destiny is something completely outside their control.

New Mine Sets

I think what the world needs is a different set of paradigms. Since no one seems to like the word paradigm, let us call them mindsets. Actually, since my English is not too good, I thought they were called mine-sets. I would like to share with you the three mine-sets that I believe have brought us here.

The first mine-set, which might be called the "hit and run" mine-set, was actually the one that the 1972 Stockholm conference was called to deal with. It is summed up by ‘mine and plunder the resources of the earth and leave the clean-up to others’.

The second mine-set, which can be thought of as the "egocentric bully" mine-set, an attitude that afflicted certain participants at the Rio Earth Summit, and continues to be the guiding force today – for example at the Kyoto Protocol discussions – and this is ‘what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is up for grabs’.

The third mine-set, which might also be described as the "might is right" mine-set, an attitude that has been seen on the global stage in places as far apart as Grenada and the Gulf, is simply stated as ‘mine and bomb the natives if they don’t give you what you want’. I doubt if the issues arising from this mine-set will come up at Johannesburg, and hopefully it will be some years before we have to convene conferences to deal with it, but it is an incipient attitude that could come to the surface at any time in a unipolar world such as today’s.

So these are three mine-sets that have increasingly manifested themselves over the past several decades and they make the planet, with its growing, intertwined and interdependent linkages a more and more dangerous place.

Earlier, I suggested that a very simple way to treat sustainable development is to break it into its components, lifestyles and livelihoods, and design interventions at the global, national and local levels to make these sustainable. I tried to show you how, despite Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, such a strategy could lead to better outcomes for all, now and in the future. But there is, actually, a substantially simpler way that can lead to effective operational solutions, which are even easier to understand and implement. Since WSSD is to take place in the African continent, these solutions are highly appropriate for hammering out at Johannesburg.

The simplest and, with a little public familiarity, the most effective way to arrive at a sustainable future is to take care of the two primary preconditions of sustainable development:

1. Meet the basic needs of all

2. Protect the environment

So, if Johannesburg is to really produce outcomes that lead to a more sustainable path for our world, it must first make decisions that lead to improving the lives of the three billion poor living in it and slow down the destruction of its natural resources.

It is obvious that the people with interests vested in the existing system will not see this approach as simple at all, nor as practical, because they will perceive such decisions as inevitably resulting in calls on them to pay huge amounts for meeting these two preconditions. But they need to be shown that their fears are not justified since, as Agenda 21 showed, these preconditions can actually be met at a quite affordable price. In actual fact, the costs can be brought down further if the solutions are designed to build the capacity of each economy to solve its own problems and to generate its own resources.

We should also remind them that not everyone out there is waiting simply for a handout. People all over the world want a chance to make their own lives, and the job of international agreements is to help national governments to enable local governments to build the capacity of their citizens to stand on their feet and create their own livelihoods.

Once the basic needs of everyone are met, decision makers could agree that the international community will no longer have to exercise responsibility in this field.

As you can see, I am a firm believer in genetic coding. Everything, and not just biological life, has its form of DNA. I mentioned earlier that technology carries its DNA. When technology is bought from another country where it was designed or adapted for local conditions, it brings with it the memory of the factors of production appropriate for that country. These are in turn determined by such issues as the resource endowments of that country, the skills available and the stage of industrialisation. All of these may well be completely different in the importing country, often making the technology highly inappropriate.

Similarly, the instruments and institutional structures we have for financing today are patterned after the ones that gave birth to them. In economies that are small and poor, the financial institutions are often designed by western experts and patterned after the experiences of such entities as the World Bank or the regional development banks. This can introduce major distortions in their structures and functions. It costs the World Bank close to a million dollars to appraise a loan. How can it but design projects of a size that has to be a minimum of, say, $150 million to $200 million. Big power plants, big mines, big road networks, big factories, big, big, big. Fortunately they stopped building big dams, not so much because they might cause more damage than benefit but because they were found to evoke strong opposition locally and the loan repayment could not be guaranteed. The success of the Grameen Bank demonstrates the kinds of innovations we need in this sector. Johannesburg provides an excellent opportunity to make such initiatives happen on a large scale.

Sustainable development requires a different way of doing things. It is about smaller projects. It needs decentralisation. And it uses renewable resources wherever possible. This means that our present systems are just not geared for this kind of development; there is a basic mismatch between what is being delivered by both the public sector and by the mechanisms of the marketplace on the one hand and what is needed on the ground on the other. Their genetic code, the DNA built in to them, promotes the wrong choice. It has a kind of terminator gene.

My organisation Development Alternatives, was set up twenty years ago, one of the first organisations whose mission was specifically to promote sustainable development. After a couple of years working in the field, we realised that the primary and most effective means to achieve this was to create sustainable livelihoods on a large scale, which thereafter became our primary objective. The creation of sustainable livelihoods needs many things, such as good technologies, effective management systems, access to finance and grassroots democracy. Development Alternatives has, gradually, built up its competence in all these areas, making it a truly multi-disciplinary action research organisation.

We have innovated a variety of technologies to enable small, decentralised enterprises to produce products and services needed in every village and at the same time to create several local livelihoods. Our technologies include cookstoves, briquetting machines, handlooms, recycled paper units, roofing tile units, and equipment for manufacture of building materials, including microconcrete roofing tiles. We also make small check dams and plant forests on denuded land. With all these, the enterprises create jobs. The capital needed to create one of these jobs averages less than $ 1,000 dollars. Our work has led to the creation of perhaps as many as half a million jobs, sustainable livelihoods. Can you imagine what happens to a village community when its adults start working and making some money?

And the environmental impacts are often extraordinarily positive. We make small dams, called check dams or stop dams. They simply slow down the water flowing in streams and help recharge the groundwater aquifers. They can be any where from 10 metres across to 100 metres. They cost a pittance: a dam of average length costs roughly $ 8,000. With such a small investment, we can totally revolutionise the lives of several villages – as many as 10,000 people for an investment of not much more than One Dollar per person. These dams essentially change the whole landscape within 15 to 18 months. In two seasons, the stream is perennial again and provides not only water for drinking and irrigation throughout the year, but also fish, transport, wild birds and recreation.

Now, how would the conventional systems of financing deal with that? Clearly, they can’t. The only way they can deal with it is by proposing yet another Three Gorges Dam or a Ten Gorges Dam or a Twenty Gorges Dam. If it doesn’t cost $ 500 million or a billion dollars, it’s not worth doing. And that’s not sustainable. There may well be occasional projects that need that but they are certainly not common. So, we have to now look critically at our financing systems, our marketing systems, our technology to determine whether the existing ones can lead to genuinely sustainable outcomes.

If any issue has been identified thus far for discussion at Johannesburg, it seems to be what the UN calls IEG, the institutions of international environmental governance. In normal usage, the term governance refers to the processes of decision making at the local level, the national level, the international level. The discussions under this rubric generally focus on issues such as democratisation, participation, transparency and accountability. There is a growing body of opinion that grassroots democracy is a prerequisite for sustainable development. Why? Because unless communities have a sense of ownership over their resources, they tend to neglect them. And acquiring a sense of ownership requires some attributes of real ownership, such as the right to tax and the right to decide how to use the resources. These are issues of profound implications for sustainable management of natural and other resources, but they lie largely in the realm of national and local policy. Even so, although an international negotiating forum such as Johannesburg probably cannot play much of a role in getting sovereign governments to introduce genuine democracies, it can certainly serve as a place to exchange ideas.

But in the UN, the term governance currently has a different, and rather specific, meaning. Over the last few years, various ministerial and other fora have been paying attention to how the mandates of different international institutions can be realigned to make them more efficient, and particularly more cost-effective. And in the field of environment, since there has been a proliferation of bodies after the Rio Summit – CSD, UNFCCC, CBD, in addition to evolving responsibilities in UNEP, DESA, UNDP and the World Bank – this goes to the core issue of the capacity of the international system to deal with the environment and sustainable development. Isn’t it odd that UNEP, which has so much of its work devoted to developed country environmental issues, is located in Nairobi and CSD, whose mandate is largely development issues of concern to the South, is located in New York? And why are the convention secretariats located in scattered places like Bonn and Montreal, when they should be in constant contact with each other and UNEP? What precisely should be allocated to whom, is the question that governments would like answers to, and Johannesburg is a good place to work them out.

But surely "governance" ought to have a meaning bigger than just defining who is responsible for what parts of the environmental problematique in the UN family. It also should be about accountability and about direction. The world is not the same as it was in 1944 when the United Nations was set up. Governments are no longer the only or even dominant actors affecting the lives of people throughout the world, though they continue to have a monopoly in governing international institutions. Civil society, corporations and other groups are now growing rapidly in terms of their influence on people’s lives. Since the Earth Summit at Rio, these groups have taken increasingly active roles in UN discussions, particularly in UNEP and CSD processes, but the time has come to explore how these roles can be further strengthened and formalised.

Not since the 1960s has there been so much attention given to poverty alleviation by the international development institutions. Yet few of them have been able to identify specific interventions that can take them towards this goal. The one intervention that seems to offer powerful results, as noticed by not only civil society organisations but also the British development agency DFID, seems to have been sidelined by both UNDP and the World Bank.

Should the matter of governance not also address the need for building institutions that work and produce visible results? Isn’t it time that international agencies got a bit of their internal act together? I have been in and out of the World Bank and the UN system, sometimes as a staff member or advisor, at other times as an external observer, for some 30 years – since the Stockholm Conference, in fact. And out of those 30 years, I don’t recall more than a very few when there wasn’t some deep restructuring or other going on in these agencies. I have personally observed more than half a dozen restructurings in the World Bank and UNDP – periods stretching over one or two years – when pretty well everything comes to a halt. Each time they change the leadership, there seems to be a signal for fundamental restructuring, of objectives of strategies and staffing patterns. If these huge, expensive structures want to get governments to be more efficient, they must set a much better example of efficient operations themselves.

It is now time for us to be much more demanding of ourselves. The UN system has had several decades of support from the world’s tax payers, and a lot of their expectations. What have we done with all of that time and money and hope? The time has come for more accountable institutions. At least businesses have a bottom line that provides some degree of accountability in terms of commercial performance. And (some) governments have to face elections. But international agencies operate with systems of accountability that are quite inadequate. And civil society is in some ways the least accountable of all. All these issues need to be dealt with some degree of seriousness.

There are many issues of sustainable development that need to be dealt with at the international level. What is the nature of the institutions, technologies, and collaborative mechanisms that we need to get the world on to a more sustainable path?

Some of these have been discussed many times at earlier conferences, but could stand further discussion. Others may be relatively new: ten years is a long time at the rate science moves these days. How do you improve technological choices: promote renewables, reduce waste, substitute for coal and so on? How do you design new financing systems that will promote small industry, enterprises and so on? How do you develop information systems that support the aspirations of real people, instead of researchers, decision makers and other intermediaries? The incredible new opportunities that information technology, biotechnology, and all the other technologies are giving us, which if allowed to go the market way will marginalize and divide people even more, but if they are properly handled, could actually solve most of the basic problems of the world within a few years.

But first, let us look at the current gap that most deeply threatens the whole process of international negotiation to which we are all so strongly committed. This is, of course, the Implementation Gap. Closely related to it is the Accountability Gap. Who is asking what it is that we are doing about the promises we made at Stockholm, at Nairobi, at Mexico, at Dublin, at Tblisi, at Paris, at Rome, at Rio, at Istanbul, at Beijing, at Copenhagen, at Cairo or at any of those other wonderful places that our diplomats love to travel to? This is a gap that is widening precipitously. Every time we hold a conference we promise more, and we do less. And there is no one to hold us accountable, not even civil society. Governments took on the responsibility but they are too busy scratching each other’s backs.

I believe that the Implementation gap and the Accountability gap are now becoming the major cause of our other problems. We now have to close them. And I am going to propose that the road from Rio to Johannesburg has to be the road across this gap. Right down this corridor, today, the first preparatory meeting is taking place to consider what should be discussed at Johannesburg at the next Earth Summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Delegates have come to New York from all over the world this week with one aim: let’s find something interesting to talk about at Johannesburg. Personally, I think it our duty to tell them that they don’t need to look for any more interesting problems to talk about at Johannesburg. For the people of the world, by far the most interesting thing would be to find out what has happened to all those agreements and promises?

Thus, there is only one thing that WSSD really needs to do: check out the performance of those governments, major groups, civil society organisations and others who made commitments. Let the Heads of State assemble at Johannesburg and receive the reports and deliberate whether this process is yielding results and, if not, what can be done to make it better. I know that it would take a lot of leadership and courage from the Presidents and Prime Ministers to come all the way to South Africa and receive reports on how little is happening to protect the interests of the planet and its inhabitants. How would they go back and face their electorates? Perhaps they won’t subject themselves to such an event.

If, however, Johannesburg were to do just that – evaluate the progress made on implementing all those promises and commitments, it would certainly be guaranteed to win the title of the most interesting conference ever, a distinct first in history. q

This two-part lead article by Dr. 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. This is the second and final part of the article. Its first part appeared in the August 2001, issue of DA Newsletter.