Foreign Policy In Focus Special Report: Global Environmental Protection in the 21st Century

The 1992 Rio Earth Summit was heralded as the turning point for global environmental policy. More than one hundred countries came to the Rio summit, which sought to merge two critical international concerns—environmental protection and economic development—that had been evolving on different tracks during the 1970s and 1980s. For developing countries, the merger of environment and development was a major improvement over earlier environmental conferences and provided hope for increased North-South cooperation. In addition, the cold war had recently ended, and the rise of a one-superpower world meant that East-West conflicts would not dominate this conference, as they had earlier international environmental efforts.

Capital Flows to
Developing Countries
1970-1997

Source: World Bank

Perhaps as important as the formal commitments was Rio’s endorsement of the concept of sustainable development. Although the precise meaning of sustainable development was not clarified, governments emerged from Rio knowing that they had at least generally agreed to the further integration of the economy, the environment, and social equity. Beyond that, the constructive ambiguity of the concept sustainable development provided a framework that allowed both the North and the South to walk away with something from Rio. Essentially the South received renewed commitments for increased development assistance, a recognition that the North was substantially responsible for global environmental degradation, and a commitment that the North would take the leadership role in addressing global environmental problems. In turn, the North won the South’s promised cooperation in addressing environmental issues as long as they were integrated with issues of social and economic development. These reciprocal commitments offered a broader consensus for moving forward on the global environment than did any previous environmental negotiation.

Seven years later, however, the momentum from Rio has dissipated and the reciprocal commitments have been largely abandoned. Official development assistance from the North to the South has declined since Rio, and the new emphasis is on private sector flows of capital. Some Northern countries (including the United States) even maintain that such direct and indirect investment flows make up for declining development assistance by facilitating environmentally sound technologies.

The Rio treaties remain poorly implemented. Negotiations on the climate change regime reflect a deep split between developing and industrialized countries. The Biodiversity Convention, which the United States has never ratified, has had little impact. Perhaps most critically, institutions such as the Commission on Sustainable Development and the preexisting United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), as well as the environmental secretariats, continue to take a back seat to economic powerhouses such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Domestically, some countries introduced interesting multistakeholder processes for implementing Agenda 21. These include province-wide roundtables in Canada for building consensus for sustainable development and issue-oriented working groups in Chile that brought multiple stakeholders together to make recommendations regarding every chapter of Agenda 21. Few, if any, countries have gone beyond discussions, however, and embraced sustainable development in ways that fundamentally challenge the systemic orientation toward economic growth—an orientation that ultimately undermines the promise of Rio and is environmentally unsustainable.

The Promise of Rio