Thursday, 5 Sep 2002

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa

What made the World Summit on Sustainable Development such a frenzied stew is the fact that at any given time there were at least 17 simultaneous events, all of them immensely interesting and important, at least according to their organizers. Everywhere, veils were being unveiled, launches were being launched, briefers were briefing. This made it nearly impossible to decide which events to attend, leaving many of us feeling like we were never in the right place at the right time. It reminded me of high school, when I spent Kafkaesque Saturday nights driving around with a six-pack in the back seat, chasing rumors of parties I never found.

Sadly, even the mind-boggling number of events that were held here couldn’t ensure fair representation. Grassroots groups rarely got air time equal to that of the large, national ones, and typically lacked the budgets to market themselves at the same level. At the same time, large NGOs often claimed to be the authoritative voice of civil society. Had they participated at NASREC, or visited the Landless Peoples’ Camp, for example, they would have realized that there are plenty of people who were not spoken for — and, frankly, would prefer to speak for themselves.

This situation is largely the result of a preoccupation here and back to the U.S. with the big fix. While small- and large-scale solutions can coexist, the romance with industrial-strength solutions, however altruistic, is part of the problem. In my view, a key indicator of sustainability will be the proliferation and health of small-scale approaches that seek true ecological stewardship, share power, improve peoples’ access to markets, and treat people with respect and dignity.

Colin Powell talks about U.S. forest programs.

IISD.

The issue of scale strikes me as especially critical considering the WSSD’s emphasis on partnerships between governments, business, and NGOs as a tool for achieving the goals of the summit. If partnerships are to be an answer, they must be balanced, inclusive, and accountable, and not exempt governments from their responsibilities to people and the environment. The issue of scale is also critical back home, where the federal government’s response to the forest fire crisis has largely ignored the potential contributions of communities and small businesses, and where invaluable programs like the Forest Service’s Economic Action Program are threatened with elimination every year.

All of these developments seem a bit ironic given the growing emphasis on “community” in international initiatives. If communities are as important as the governments and macro-NGOs claim, then they need to be equal partners in the process of developing solutions, and equal participants in the benefits. All too often, communities are brought in at the last minute to legitimize projects and programs in which they have had no involvement. And when we hear about incidents like Coca-Cola bribing security guards to truck in its wares even though the People’s Forum organizers had chosen not to sell soft drinks because plastic isn’t recycled here, it’s hard not to become cynical about the big boys and their largesse.

A friend of mine here summarized the feelings of many civil society participants when he said, “When I get home, people are going to ask me what I thought of the summit. And right now, I’m not sure I went.” There was no center to this event, no place we all convened, even once, to see one another’s faces, so we could say, “This is what this is. This is who we are.”

The reality is there were 60,000 summits in this town; you’re reading about just one of them. I found my summit on the endless bus rides, in the kooky parades of United Global Citizens (where everyone was singing and dressed in animal costumes), in the unexpected conversations, in my hopes of seeing my newfound friends in Nepal and Guatemala and Uganda. I found it in the haunting wail of Jang Sa-Ik, a Korean folk musician.

People can say what they want about the summit. Its failures are obvious. But the fact is that for whatever reasons, tens of thousands of people from around the world spent two weeks in the same place, talking about something they care dearly about: the future of the earth and its people. There was chaos and rage and frustration, but there was also passion and a sense of common purpose that will only grow in the years to come. So for now, we go home, and are hopeful.