Sustainable Development and Inequality

Sustainable Development and Inequality

By Lucy Law Webster

The aim of this paper is to make a case for the idea that not only are the main IFI approaches to development unsustainable and inequitable, but to also indicate that without much greater equality than now, sustainability will not be possible, and that without sustainable development, there will be no viable long-term development for anyone. Islands of well-being will not last in a sea of destitution because many elements of sustainability are inherently transnational and class neutral. Disease and air pollution are two examples.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) that took place in Johannesburg from 26 August to 4 September, 2002 identified a number of goals and strategies to reach them that are intended to permit sustainable development. This can be defined as economic and social development, which is sufficiently benign in its use and replacement of human and material resources to engender enough growth to meet the perceived needs of both rich and poor on a basis whereby adequate growth can be maintained indefinitely. The paper considers the hypothesis that the goals and strategies of WSSD are not realistic unless the growth envisioned greatly benefits the poor and significantly narrows the gap between rich and poor within countries and among countries. It is posited that for feedback loops to succeed in providing sustainable development over very long time periods they must be very broadly inclusive, to work for all large segments of the world population whose activities affect the global environment.

The paper reviews several of the goals that emerged from WSSD with a view to examining the extent to which they can be expected to reduce poverty, and in order to discuss the probable dynamic relationship between reducing poverty and sustainability. It also considers the related evidence that efficiency and distribution cannot be separated. The paper is organized under the following topics:

1. Perspectives on the WSSD objectives and outcomes
2. Agriculture and the relation between efficiency and distribution
3. Access to clean water and sanitation and enhancing broad participation
4. Energy and the problem of global climate change

1. Perspectives on the WSSD Objectives and Outcomes

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) that took place at Johannesburg in August and September 2002 can be viewed as a struggle between nations and groups that were working directly for comprehensive, adequate solutions to global problems for all humanity, and those with more short-term, narrow objectives, at least within the time frame and the potential of that meeting. At the same time, most government delegations sought a consensus concluding Plan of Implementation and put considerable effort into achieving a final negotiated document even if it represented a rather low common denominator of agreed proposals.
Some government delegations stressed that it was not the magnitude of the goals, but the commitment to implementation that mattered. The Canadian Minister of the Environment, David Anderson, said at a closing press conference on September 4, “the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 set visionary goals, not the implementation roadmap to achieve those goals. Rio gave us key framework conventions on biodiversity, climate change and desertification. It set out the concept of sustainable development in Agenda 21. So we needed to focus on implementation—how to achieve those goals.” The idea was to set feasible goals and then devote more effort than before to meeting them. This was to be achieved not just through the implicit commitment of governments to the negotiated text of the Plan of Implementation, but also through a large number of ancillary dialogues and partnerships that met prior to and during the Johannesburg WSSD with a view to cooperation afterwards.
The efforts of the United States to limit the commitments that were made were only partly successful; some targets and time lines were in fact set in spite of the effort of various powerful countries to block specific obligations. For example it was agreed to set goals for access to clean water and both goals and timelines were endorsed with regard to access to sanitation. Also, the negative stance of the United States on the Kyoto Protocol was partly countermanded by the ratification of that protocol by Brazil, Thailand and Malaysia during the WSSD period and by the statements of Russia, China, Canada and Australia that they would ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the near future. This was seen by many as demonstrating that the unwillingness of the United States to be bound by sustainable development goals would not prevail against the will of most countries and virtually all non-governmental, civil society groups present at WSSD.

The will to get things done was reflected in the paragraphs agreed entitled “Means of implementation.” These called for “a substantially increased effort, both by countries themselves and by the rest of the international community, based on the recognition that each country has primary responsibility for its own development.” Reference is then made to the controversial Rio principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” This says that:
“States shall cooperate in a spirit of global partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem. In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, States have common but differentiated responsibilities. The developed countries acknowledge the responsibility that they bear in the international pursuit of sustainable development in view of the pressures their societies place on the global environment and of the technologies and financial resources they command.”

The agreed implementation goals further called for increased flows of financial resources as elaborated by the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development, including foreign direct investment and official development assistance where the developed countries that had not done so were urged to make efforts to reach the target of 0.7 percent of GNP. These paragraphs also called for strengthening efforts to reform existing international financial architecture for the more effective participation of developing countries, reduce unsustainable debt burdens through debt relief and debt cancellation and generate new innovative sources of finance for development such as new uses of special drawing rights. This section of the Plan of Implementation also called for substantial trade-related technical assistance and capacity-building measures and support for the WTO Doha Development Agenda Global Trust Fund.

There was wide satisfaction with most of these ideas and with the fact that the concept of differentiated responsibilities was maintained and not removed from the text as several status-quo delegations had attempted to do. Nonetheless there was a significant difference between the bold demands of NGOs for commitments that would be adequate for long-term, global needs for sustainable development, and the formulations endorsed by governments, which were vague on inter-governmental responsibilities and left more to individual countries and implied more privatization for implementation than previously.
Even the governments that wanted the international community to make real commitments tended to stress objectives that were open ended without clear measurable criteria of success. Sustainable development based on good domestic governance, partnerships and country-driven approaches was stressed, together with respect for the rule of law. Most of the concrete aspects of this set of formulations were to be dependent on the less developed countries themselves. There was some, although limited, recognition of the need to counter the asymmetries of globalization if poor countries and poor people were to have a chance. One area where developed countries gave verbal heed to the demands of developing countries concerned the question of removing or reducing agricultural subsidies. However, contrary to the wishes of most LDC delegations, it was agreed to address this problem through the World Trade Organization. Thus removing agricultural subsidies was not permitted to be a major focus of the Johannesburg outcomes. Other broad questions had also been excluded from the agenda of WSSD at the start of the whole series of conferences on environment and sustainable development. For example, issues concerning the positive and negative impacts of industrial development, or concerning the impact of war and conflict on development had been left off the agenda. The aim was to develop an integrated approach within a defined area even though various issues that were recognized as creating the context for sustainable development were deliberately not addresses. This early definition of the scope of the dialogue in itself created a problem for groups and delegations that had the broadest and most long-term objectives for WSSD.
National governmental delegations of 196 states participated in WSSD. Each delegation had its own ideas on what it wanted to come out of the conference, but broadly speaking, there were status-quo positions on a range of major issue. For example, the United States and the oil-exporting countries generally had status quo positions that opposed efforts to constrain pollution from carbon-related emissions, while other delegations had status quo positions that opposed the reduction of agricultural subsidies, which many developing countries viewed as important to protect their home-grown produce. On any given issue, a large proportion of the governmental delegations, especially the most vocal were the delegations with the most status quo positions.

In contrast, on any given issue the most vocal non-governmental representative were those with the least status-quo positions. While there were approximately 9,000 people registered as members of official governmental delegations (including clerical and security staff) 8,046 non-governmental representatives were registered at the official intergovernmental conference, as well as some 4,000 media representatives. A very large proportion of the 8,000 plus civil society non-governmental participants were from public-interest research and advocacy groups, but an estimated 1,000 came from private corporations, and there were also significant numbers from trade unions, women’s groups, youth groups and from religious and other faith-based groups.

The non-governmental civil society groups sought commitments to goals that would best serve the needs of poor people and the goal of long-term sustainable development. Even the representatives of private corporations who were at Johannesburg were looking for partnerships with governments and with NGO groups where they could make a constructive contribution to change for sustainable development. Or to be more accurate they sought ways to do well while doing good. At the same time, the corporate sector of the civil society contingent at WSSD was met with mixed reactions. Some saw the private sector presence as a sign that there would be new resources to implement plans. Others saw it as a part of the form of globalization that they did not want. Privatization of resources such as water supplies and energy was strongly opposed by the delegations of many developing countries and by many NGOs, as was the liberalization of trade.

The non-governmental environmental activist organizations that played a role at the Summit opposed trade agreements that would allow agro-industry (often state subsidized) to compete with local producers in less developed countries, while in many cases keeping the markets of industrialized countries closed to many LDC products. These groups worked with many LDC governmental delegations to oppose such trade liberalization.

They also worked together for energy policies that they believed would work to prevent long-term catastrophes such as massive global warming. They stressed the need for comprehensive approaches. Furthermore they viewed the prominence given to business interests within governmental delegations and as part of the civil society contingent at the conference as indicative of a tendency to sell out to the private sector. During the process of Prep Comms. leading up to Johannesburg, several NGO coalitions had prepared an assessment of progress in implementing the Agenda 21 results of the Rio Conference of 1992. This claimed that there was a “failure of the promises and commitments of ‘sustainable development’ and the concomitant triumph of the globalization and liberalization paradigm manifested in the World Trade Organisation, Bretton Woods institutions and the increased wealth and power of trans-national corporations. . .” This concern was especially notable with regard to the commodification of water, as discussed below.

The fact that the United States had managed to isolate itself by its refusal to support the Kyoto Protocol and by its general negative stance toward commitments such as setting goals and timetables, was made clear when Secretary of State Colin Powell was jeered, interrupted and slow handclapped during his speech. He was the only delegate treated in that way, and the rude behavior was clearly not directed at Secretary Powell personally, but at positions taken by the US negotiating team during WSSD on behalf of the Bush Administration. NGO participants at WSSD were especially critical of the fact that the US had blocked or tried to block whatever relatively progressive assertive wording was in early drafts of the Plan of Implementation on targets and timetables and on the establishment of effective monitoring mechanisms and on having any carrots and/or sticks to encourage compliance with what was agreed.

The NGOs saw sharp contrasts between the weakness of the WSSD commitments to implementation and the clear enforceable legal character of various WTO-based international trade agreements. There was a constant undercurrent of criticism of WSSD as a sell out to large multinational business interests and a victory for privatization. The failure of the intergovernmental organizations and governments to themselves take responsibility in the Plan of Implementation for as many firm commitments as environmentalists thought desirable was seen by the NGOs as a betrayal of poor countries and poor people within countries, as well as a betrayal of longer-term environmental needs. This attitude of complaint and protest was reflected in two large, but peaceful, marches held during the final weekend of the conference.

2. Agriculture and the Relation between Efficiency and Distribution

In the Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, “Poverty eradication” is the title of the first section after the introduction. In this section, participating states agreed to “Provide access to agricultural resources for people living in poverty, especially women and indigenous communities, and promote, as appropriate, land tenure arrangements that recognize and protect indigenous and common property resource management systems.” One general theme of the section relates to the idea that to “increase food availability and affordability” would break down embedded cycles of poverty and make it possible for sustainable agricultural techniques to be introduced together with more efficient harvest management. It was also envisaged in the presentations during the conference and in the agreed negotiated WSSD final Plan of Implementation that having more food available for more people would require and also facilitate the establishment of more equitable and efficient distribution systems. This should be done in part, according to the WSSD plan, by promoting community-based partnerships linking urban and rural people and enterprises.

The Third World Network, a major NGO at the WSSD, which is based in Penang, Malaysia, identified agriculture as an outstanding challenge to achieve sustainable development. Their view, which in broad outline was shared by most participating NGOs, focused on several issues where they saw tension between the interests of the poor and the agenda of the most powerful country delegations at WSSD. (At such a conference it becomes clear that although each state has just one vote, some are more powerful than others in being able to affect what actually happens in global environmental policies and practices and in setting norms that other countries may follow or rally against.) Three agricultural issues that were seen by NGOs and many less-developed-country (LDC) delegations as important for the poor were: a.) ecology/technology issues, b.)WTO framework issues, and c.)access to land and related social and human rights issues.

a.) Ecological farming was championed by people from NGOs and LDCs. The case was put forward that chemical-based approaches to high productivity are faltering, that agro-industry should not be allowed to replace that with genetic engineering when what is needed is ecological farming, which would increase productivity and ensure that income would go to the actual farmers. In a monograph “Sustainable agriculture is Productive!” Lim Li Ching of the Third World Network defined agriculture as sustainable “when it is ecologically sound, economically viable, socially just, culturally appropriate, humane and based on a holistic scientific approach.” This approach was seen as an important measure to tackle the requirement for broad, equitable distribution of food and essential basic needs at the same time as addressing the quest for higher levels of productivity. Small-scale community-managed and environmentally-sound forms of agriculture and aquiculture would replace chemical-based Green Revolution crops and over-fishing with trawls. The aim of such production is to augment local food supplies and to build on traditional practices that have not overtaxed natural resources. There is growing evidence that the chemical fertilizers used for Green Revolution crops have eroded crop biodiversity, increased soil infertility and caused pest immunity to pesticides; and it is clear that over-fishing has depleted some stocks and harmed the livelihood of small-scale fishermen. Thus the claimed benefit of high productivity is questionable, at least for sustainable productivity, and there is clear social disruption due to differential advantages for the farmers best able to buy expensive fertilizers and the fishermen best able to invest in trawling nets. A Third World Network briefing paper by Martin Khor reported results from Dr Vandana Shiva and Dr Racharia in India showing high yields for indigenous varieties of rice selected to meet diverse regional needs such as semi-arid tracts of the South India Deccan. This paper also reports results from the Philippines where the MASIPAG alliance of farmers and university scientists pioneered alternative rice farming methods using seed bread for particular regional weather conditions. The claim is made that the wrong estimation methodology has been used to assess the value of such low-input, energy efficient ecological farming methods. The Third World Network calls for research to rectify this mis-measurement.
b.) The agricultural component of many structural adjustment programs has tended to include cuts in government expenditure on the rural sector, privatization of state marketing arrangements, liberalization of agricultural imports and reductions in agricultural subsidies. These pressures increased after the WTO and its agricultural agreement were set up. Under this agreement, non-tariff controls must be converted to tariffs and these must be reduced by 24% over 10 years. The resulting cheaper imports threaten the viability of small farms in many developing countries, and lead to fears of greater food insecurity as developing countries become less self-sufficient in food. In Guyana, for example, the surge in imports of food products has undermined domestic production of cabbage, carrots and the minca peas that had been developed and spread throughout Guyana in the 1980s. In Sri Lanka, increased food imports led to reduced domestic output of vegetables, notably onions and potatoes. The Third World Network authors point out that EU and North American countries have been notorious for their high protection and subsidizing of their own farm sectors. Consequently, highly subsidized and artificially cheap food from rich countries enters poorer countries that are being pressured to cut their tariffs.
c.) Insecurity of land tenure is not only an economic problem for the rural people in many developing countries; it is also a social problem. The fact that many farmers are tenants, beholden to landlords and the related exploitation of the landless is viewed by the Third World Network authors as the major cause of rural poverty and insecurity. On this point the paper by Martin Khor concludes that “the issue of the human rights of these disadvantaged groups is crucial in the striving for sustainable agriculture.”

Several themes emerge from these claims and goals of people at WSSD who aimed at representing the interests of the poor in contradistinction to the claims and goals of the international financial institutions (IFIs) and the policies and programs that they have promoted. While groups such as the Third World Network focused on long term sustainability and the breadth of distribution of the benefits of growth, the IFIs have promoted policies that emphasize growth without apparent regard for sustainability or distribution. The IFI policies have tended to benefit the richest countries and the richest groups within countries and within sectors because those are the groups that can produce and purchase the higher technology “solutions” to problems. As illustrated above such solutions are often short-lived for agriculture, and inequitable in the distribution patterns attained.

A major reason for the impossibility of citadels of privilege comes from the same dynamic that opens up a prospect for equity:
• Earth has just one ecological system with its different parts organically intertwined.
• More specifically, it appears that the greatest pressures on the long-term viability of the ecosystem are placed there by the richest and the poorest.
• In so far as this is true, palpable breakdown of viability tends to become most evident at the extremes, where, for example, the poor denude the land for firewood, or where the rich refuse to control carbon-related emissions that could seriously destroy the ozone layer.
• In this context of high visibility of the impacts of the behavior of extreme groups with very unsustainable behavior, people, including scholars and policy makers, may conclude that some measure of adequate equality matters.

Furthermore one reason to hope that people will find an assertive means to achieve an adequate level of equity and equality to permit sustainable development arises from the following dynamic:
• Corporate globalization is moving onward to flaunt its power for the powerful and to reveal the harm it does to the poor.
• As this impacts harmfully on sustainability, (depleted firewood with soil erosion, new resistant disease strains, etc.) more people may demand regulatory controls and government redress and/or policies designed by poor people and poor countries to meet their own needs.
• This will (or could) lead to ecological agriculture, locally designed to meet regional needs, using a combination of traditional and modern university-based ideas.
• This could lead to higher production generated where it is to be consumed, which is where it is most needed to reduce the forms of extreme poverty that weigh most heavily against sustainable development and environmental viability.

As Joseph Stiglitz has noted, it is the idea that competitive economies will lead to an efficient allocation of resources so long as appropriate lump sum redistributions are undertaken, that provides the rational for the belief that questions of distribution can be separated from issues of efficiency, and that one can “push for reforms which increase efficiency, regardless of their seeming impact on distribution.” If it is found that profit-driven development is less effective than “people-serving” development, that finding should influence policy priorities. In fact the evidence reported from various agricultural programs and community development efforts discussed at WSSD indicates that local action, which leads to production in the village or city to which it is to be distributed is more effective than production that needs to be redistributed. It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore this point and the related literature in any definitive way. The aim here is to indicate that, even if profit-driven production has an efficiency edge over production that leads directly to equitable distribution, the net effectiveness in getting production to the optimum populations of end users means that the latter type production is more cost effective. Furthermore, if equity and a certain measure of equality are essential for long-term sustainable viability, then these are essential measures of efficacy.

The basis for the idea that reasonable equality and equity are essential for long-term sustainability is simply a question of physical ecology and environmental geography. This has been discussed on the previous few pages in relation to agriculture and the concept of sustainable agriculture. The relevant ecological issues are further discussed in the next section in relation to water access and sanitation issues, and in the subsequent section in relation to energy and climate change.

3. Access to Clean Water and Sanitation: Enhancing Broad Participation

The effects of overgrazing, and denuding the land for firewood are well known, that this leads to erosion, uncontrolled runoff, floods interspersed with draught, and the silting of rivers, marshlands and harbors. Water that previously sank into the soil to nourish crops and replenish ground water thus escapes without providing anywhere near the optimum benefits that it is capable of providing. In the end, the related part of the Plan of Implementation read as follows:
Develop integrated water resources management and water efficiency plans by 2005, with support to developing countries, through actions at all levels to:
(a) Develop and implement national/regional strategies, plans and programmes with regard to integrated river basin, watershed and groundwater management, and introduce measures to improve the efficiency of water infrastructure to reduce losses and increase recycling of water;
(b) Employ the full range of policy instruments, including regulation, monitoring, voluntary measures, market and information-based tools, land-use management and cost recovery of water services, without cost recovery objectives becoming a barrier to access to safe water by poor people, and adopt an integrated water basin approach;

However during most of the conference, it was unclear whether governments would take even that amount of responsibility for global and regional water resources. On August 29, a group of NGOs including Consumers International, the Danish 92 Group, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth International, Greenpeace, Northern Alliance for Sustainability, Oxfam International and the World Wildlife Fund published an edition of “eco-equity” with an article titled “Rivers Are Running Into Oblivion” stating that an essential paragraph on water management had been removed from the negotiating text during the final Prep Comm. before Johannesburg. Saying that there are 261 major trans-boundary rivers where 40 percent of the world’s population make their homes, they stated that the text of the Plan of Implementation was confined to addressing national planning for water resource management. “It seems pointless to go through a major international exercise such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development to agree on issues at a national level, but not on those of major global significance,” they stated. This was partly rectified in the final text.

There are two main issues that relate to water and sustainable development. One concerns the management of water, fresh water, rivers, marshes, lakes and seas. Here the question is how to identify the optimum means to conserve and renew water resources for all the people and all the agricultural, power, transport and other uses worldwide. It is clear that practices that lead to drought or to the clogging of rivers will undermine efforts to meet the needs of people. The other water issue relates to the problem of access to clean water for drinking and household use.

Access to clean water was a focal issue at WSSD for several reasons, and most poignantly because it provided a case history in the struggle between those who claimed that each (or many) such essential basic needs constitutes a human right, and those who saw the commodification of water as the best way to make it available. The fact that the Township of Alexandra, standing next to the very upscale Sandton area where WSSD was held, had recently begun to charge for its water made the story especially dramatic. During a press conference on August 30 sponsored by the WSSD secretariat, Victor Menotti of the International Forum on Globalization said that whereas governments had previously advocated an inclusive hands-on form of development, they were now supporting a hands-off approach that favored privatization and protected foreign investors. Such a takeover of the sustainable development process, he said, would lead to the privatization of water and other basic rights.

Forty percent of the world’s population in 80 countries currently suffers from serious water shortages according to a Third World Network briefing paper by Celine Tan. And one billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water with 2.4 billion lacking access to adequate sanitation. By the end of the WSSD conference it was agreed to halve those two numbers by 2015, but it was a hard-fought, closely matched battle, and it remains to be seen what will be the actual meaning of commitments made in the Plan of Implementation document.

In her TWN paper, Celine Tan states that “the biggest threat to universal access to clean water and adequate sanitation is not mother nature but corporate globalization. Privatisation of water is aggressively exported to the developing world under the rubric of poverty reduction and debt relief strategies, free trade and economic development.” The privatization proponents claim that scarce water resources can be most efficiently managed using competitive market principles. However, because water can easily become a monopoly, it is not at all clear that placing it in private hands is the best way to serve all the potential end users.

A worst case scenario can be envisaged that would give the management of rivers and lakes to private companies working for large profits and offering large kick-backs to corrupt governments that would sell water-supply contracts for towns and cities to large multi-national corporations. Aside from opportunities for corruption, the scope for the externalization of the negative effects of development is enormous. Corporate developers can all too readily obtain profits from those able to pay while causing two main types of negative externality costs. On the one hand the social and environmental impact of moving villages in order to flood valleys with reservoirs is rarely bourn fully by the corporations that benefit from the control and sale of the resulting water. And at the other end of the production and distribution chain, the potential end users who cannot afford the water they need, are often driven to pay for bottled water or to dig wells that may or may not provide safe water and which almost always costs more than other larger water access programs from which the poor are often excluded by private pricing policies. Celine Tan states that water is a 400 billion dollar global business controlled by European transnational companies such as Vivendi and Suez Lyonnaise, and by British firms such as Thames Water.

In addition, privatization tends to exclude the poor from participation and learning. Large development schemes such as water development projects involving dams and the redirection of water flows have a high hurdle of entry where only large (usually multinational) corporations need apply. Thus something like a digital divide is created separating big business from the small entrepreneur. An alternative approach would provide investments to directly benefit the poor by expanding their opportunities to themselves make major contributions to the economy

The question of dignity and empowerment for the people lies at the base of the efforts to have a solid commitment to halving by 2015 “the proportion of people lacking access to improved sanitation,” from the current level of 2.4 to 3 billion people who, in the words of the World Bank, do not have “adequate means of disposing of their feces.” The World Bank gives the higher figure and the Third World Network the lower figure in the range. Also, as regards the number of people without access to adequate quantities of clean water, the World Bank gives the number 1.3 billion as compared to one billion cited by the Third World Network. In either case the numbers are large, and constitute a large base to be halved by 2015. The fact that getting even that commitment into the text of the WSSD was a major struggle shows how little consensus there is on any program to do what is needed to enable poor people to play a full empowered role in sustainable development. Only on the penultimate day of the intergovernmental negotiations was the goal of halving access to sanitation agreed in the Plan of Implementation text. During that process, the fact that an earlier date and higher proportion of the base number was not seriously discussed was one of the issues of protest and complaint by many of the civil society advocacy groups at WSSD.

4. Energy and the Problem of Global Climate Change

Most of the governmental delegates and a large share of the non-governmental participants at WSSD believed that it would be prudent to reduce the levels of carbon emissions that evidently contribute to global warming. This dominant view held that, however much or little of the observed patterns of global warming can be attributed to human activity, a serious effort should be made to reduce this impact. In contrast, some of the industry representatives at WSSD believed that such action was not necessary or even intelligent because, they argued, the human contribution to global warming is so small compared to the effects of various natural cyclical processes that it would be wiser to make a concerted effort to adapt to climate change than to try to prevent it.

The idea of adapting to climate change is one point on which there is potential cooperation between the less developed countries and the corporate interests that want to sell their technological fixes. This is the case even though many of the corporate interest people do not believe that much of significance can be done to affect climate change patterns in view of the overwhelming weight they assign to natural causes of global warming and related trends. At the other edge of the continuum of attitudes and premisses, the most adamant environmental public interest groups do not generally believe that environmental challenges can be met by improving efficiency and using new technological approaches because they assign a large weight to the impacts of human activities on the environment. The most thorough environmentalists do not believe that it is possible to have both growth and environmental stability; and that consequently preserving the environment will require a reduction in growth, at least in the countries that are most industrialized and thus have most impact on the environment. But both forms of explicit pessimism—that what people do cannot matter very much, and that it matters very much but cannot be effectively addressed without a measure of sacrifice that is unlikely—were outside the main-stream thinking at WSSD. Most participants, both governmental officials and civil society scholars and activists, gave support to the idea that development can include some growth without probably destroying the long-term environmental viability of the planet and humanity.

The main argument lay within the bounds of the common claim that sustainable development is probably possible and certainly worth attempting. The main difference within these bounds was between two operational perspectives that were demonstrated by statements and by the positions taken on specific options. On the one hand, the status-quo countries and interests claim that there is no urgency for policy changes or for greater equality. They place efficiency of production ahead of efficacy of access and distribution. Consequently, trickle-down systems wherein corporations can be given control over energy production are seen as adequate. On the other hand, the people who believe that sustainable development is difficult but just barely possible see an urgent need for major changes. They see the current petro-carbon based global economy as exacerbating climate change, not only directly through emissions, but also indirectly because potential renewable resources such as biogas and wind and thermo-exchange systems would be more efficient in delivering affordable energy to poor people (although less profitable for large corporations and their mega-grid systems). Thus if local systems could be expanded according to the plans of local communities this would give more poor people more opportunities to participate in their own development and would create a benign cycle that would wean people away from the environmentally disastrous practices that strip the land of vegetation for firewood. There is a role for rich and poor, inter-governmental, governmental, and civil society and industry in such a process.

The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities cited earlier has been controversial because a number of industrialized countries do not wish to draw attention to the idea that the life styles of their citizens put disproportionately large burdens on the global environment, nor do they like to give attention to the fact that they have the greatest ability and resources to correct the problems they have caused and that they have in fact partially acknowledged this responsibility in the framework agreements on climate change and the Kyoto protocol. But policy changes are possible; many people and many groups are anxious to be of help.

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