IISD's Earth Negotiations Bulletin Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Sustainable Development Opens Up to the World
by Gaylene Dempsey

It began a decade ago as a daring new publication at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. Since then, Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a reporting service for environment and development negotiations, has published over 1,300 issues from UN meetings in 36 countries.

During preparations for the 1992 conference, more commonly known as the Earth Summit, three individuals from academic and NGO backgrounds--Pamela Chasek, Johannah Bernstein and Langston James (Kimo) Goree VI--discovered that there was no reliable, timely and neutral source of information available to participants on the negotiations. As an experiment, they summarized the first week of negotiations, posted their report onto the NGO computer networks and caused an immediate sensation among government delegates who ended up with copies. It quickly became apparent that governments and NGOs alike were starving for the kind of succinct, factual reporting the group was providing, recalls Goree, ENB's Managing Editor and IISD's Director of Reporting Services.

To continue covering UN negotiations, Goree decided to raise money through an unusual fundraising model that is the underpinning of ENB's longevity. Rather than selling advertising or shares, Goree forged a group of government funders who all supported ENB's free information services as a common "informational" good--promoting transparency in international policy-making.

"I started approaching ministries of foreign affairs, ministries of environment, ministries of development cooperation and found that it was possible to raise funds from governments, particularly since they were the end-users of this information," he says. "We're now just about 90 per cent funded directly from governments."

This approach has allowed ENB to grow organically and expand its coverage to other UN meetings. "ENB has grown steadily, but I've always tried to avoid what I call the 'soufflé effect'--rapid expansion, a lot of hot air and unfulfilled funding commitments--so we didn't collapse when the tech boom collapsed," says Goree.

Today, IISD sends dozens of teams of writers from about 20 countries to more than 50 international meetings per year. Armed with laptop computers and digital cameras, team members print and distribute daily summaries of the negotiations on-site. They also e-mail and post reports on IISD's Linkages web site for tens of thousands of online readers.

"We have given ENB quite a bit of money on a regular basis," says Peter Johan Schei, Norway's National Negotiations Director with the Directorate for Nature Management, of Norway's long-time support of the ENB. "Their ability to concentrate and focus a number of complex issues during negotiations into a couple of pages of information is remarkably good. They are absolutely unique in what they are doing."

ENB's neutrality and, more importantly, the intelligent, subjective selection of objective facts have been fundamental to its success, says Goree. ENB's writers know the background and the processes, have read all the documentation and are involved with negotiations over time. They are also familiar with the national positions and priorities of governments.

"(Our team members) know the personalities and understand these processes are not just state-driven; they're individual-driven as well," explains Goree. "A government's position might be influenced much more by who the delegate went out for dinner with the night before than what the capital has communicated."

Calestous Juma is Program Director for Science, Technology and Innovation at Harvard University's Center for International Development. He thinks ENB has been able to maintain objectivity because of the tone set by the leadership and the selection of people whose focus is to report what is going on, rather than promote a particular agenda.

"This is why I call it the Hansard of sustainable development," says Juma. "Their objectivity is the hallmark. They really stay clear of opinions and report the facts."

Goree says ENB has always been an early adopter of new technologies, which helped it evolve from the printed word to the online "boutique" publication it has become.

"As the need for information and the ways people got their information changed, we were there to fill that space. We were the first organization that I know of to start using list serves and the first NGO we know of to have a worldwide web site back in 1994. We pioneered the usage of Adobe PDF and came up with a PDF e-zine in 1995. In 1996 we started doing this brand new stuff called streaming audio where we would record speeches at the UN, digitize them and provide them off our server," he recalls. "We kept pushing the envelope with all of these new technologies and people just ate it up."

"They added new elements like the photo gallery, the background material, the interlinkages with information related to the negotiation," says Hans Peter Schipulle from the German ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. "They were very flexible and managed to respond to the needs of delegations, which at the outset were primarily people on the negotiation scene, but more and more a worldwide audience."

The key to success so far, says Goree, is as the niche expanded, so did ENB.

"Boutique journalism--communicating to a small scattered audience on an esoteric subject such as multilateral environmental policy negotiations--could never have happened so cheaply before the Internet revolution. Here we are with a budget of US$1.4 million communicating to a very specialized audience who follow multilateral negotiations of environment and sustainable development treaties," he says. "If you break down my budget, one of the smallest categories is publishing. You'd think that with an operation that has publishing as its primary objective, that the cost of publishing would be very high. But we don't send out anything by post anymore. It's not sustainable."

Earth Negotiations Bulletin:

Stats and Facts

• ENB began with an annual US$60,000 budget. Today, the budget is US$1.4 million
• ENB's office is located in New York City, close to the United Nations.
• ENB has six employees as well as a corps of 40 freelance writers and digital editors.
• ENB has a sister publication called Sustainable Developments, a for-hire service for meetings, conferences, workshops and symposia not covered by ENB.
• Between March 2, 1992, and March 2, 2002, ENB has produced 1,353 issues from 188 different meetings in 51 cities in 36 countries.
• ENB teams have included 98 different people representing 29 different countries.
• Over the last 10 years, ENB team members have given birth to 12 children.
• Each daily issue of ENB is about 2,000 words long. A 9,000-18,000-word final summary/analysis is distributed at the end of a meeting.

For further information about ENB and IISD Reporting Services, visit the IISD Linkages web site at http://www.iisd.ca.