Thursday, 30 May 2002

BALI, Indonesia

“What are we going to do about the United States?” That was the message on stickers some participants here wore on Tuesday. The slogan arose from a comment the head of the conference made during a meeting when he thought his microphone was turned off. The question quickly became a rallying cry for the disgruntled, at least until U.N. officials banned the stickers — and any criticism of a “member state” — from the meeting’s premises.

Yet it’s still easy to find people willing to share their frustration with the U.S. delegation. Among many delegates and NGOs, the U.S. is seen as trying to avoid any commitments that come with funding requirements or timetables, and of being too supportive of corporate interests. The delegation itself is at times upset about its own position. “Our job,” one official said jokingly, “seems to be to keep the Third World in its place.”

So despite the official ban on criticism, there is plenty of anger and frustration to go around. At this meeting, my green press badge is the equivalent of a psychiatrist’s couch, magnetically attracting people who need to vent. “Our government is doing nothing,” one Indian delegate said to me after leaving a discussion on water scarcity. “Too many countries are remaining silent,” said Greenpeace’s Remi Parmentier. Frustration in the negotiating rooms sometimes leads to petty attacks; a German activist was chastised by her government’s delegates for going swimming during the lunch break. “They said my wet hair makes it look like I’m not working,” she complained to me.

My own anger was provoked during a briefing the U.N. gave at midday. “We’re making much better progress today,” the spokesperson said after delegates broke for lunch. But I had just spent the previous hour watching negotiators try to agree on the wording of a single paragraph. The U.S. and a coalition of developing countries kept suggesting changes to a section of text they all agreed was relatively unimportant. If that was progress, what was happening in other rooms where issues were much more contentious?

And then there are the larger, more haunting questions: Even if progress is being made in the negotiating rooms, does it really matter? Will anyone’s life actually be affected by the agreements signed here? Perhaps there’s some trickle-down environmentalism at work, but for many of us it’s hard to see the connection. Linda Engstrom, an orangutan researcher representing the Swedish Society for the Conservation of Nature, said it best: “I’m sure all of this is important, but it just seems so disconnected from reality.”

The relevance of these international meetings was a question I put to Earth Day founder Denis Hayes in an interview last year. Hayes attended the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the first major meeting to discuss environmental issues. Stockholm, Hayes said, seemed like a failure to him and most of the participants at the time. But in the years following, governments began creating environment ministries and drafting some of their first environmental laws. The impact of Stockholm wasn’t immediately apparent, but it was long-lasting.

If these deliberations are going to have a legacy, they might be remembered for their focus on the controversial notion of voluntary partnerships between private corporations, the U.N., and national governments. A seminar on these “Type-2 Partnerships” was the hottest ticket in Nusa Dua this evening, with discussions continuing long after the scheduled closing time.

To summarize the idea, countries like the U.S. believe that private sector companies have expertise and financing that can help developing nations bring water to their people, power rural villages, and generally foster development. Isolated examples of this kind of work exist in several countries, but so far they have had mixed results.

Among the many NGOs and countries opposed to, or at least suspicious of, the plan, a general fear is that national governments will abdicate their public responsibilities to unelected, unaccountable corporations. “These partnerships can not replace leadership by governments,” one participant said. She and many of the groups represented would prefer to see a discussion on an international treaty addressing “corporate accountability.” The topics sound academic, but they are attracting fierce debate in the conference halls.

In the room next door, however, a more modest legacy was being built. Taking a seat behind a nameplate for the Syrian delegation, I watched a panel of activists from seven countries share their experiences in making governments more accountable by passing laws requiring environmental impact statements, public sharing of information on air and water pollution, and other tools that many of us take for granted. In the audience, a delegate from tiny Andorra stood up to recount her experience at the conference.

“Yesterday I spent my day in long negotiations over some disputed text, and I wondered what I was doing here at all,” she said. “But this has been different. We have so many problems in Andorra trying to get the government to listen to its people, but what you’ve said here today will help. We’re going to follow your examples and see if we can’t get them to change.”

Andorra. It’s a small start, admittedly, but it’s still something to build on.