1. The breakdown of the Rio bargain

Too much "business as usual"

At the first Earth Summit, it all seemed to make sense. Under the "Rio bargain," industrialized and developing countries, even with their differing agendas, could work together towards the shared goal of sustainable development.

For their part, developing countries would participate in multilateral environmental agreements, in particular the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. In return, developed nations would help oil the wheels through capacity building, technology transfer, removal of trade barriers and action on debt.

In reality, nothing of the sort has happened. Trade liberalization, while not in itself an obstacle to sustainable development, has turned out to be a distinctly one-edged sword. While it has opened up vast new markets for exporters in industrialized countries, it has done little for many developing nations. Trade barriers in key commodities such as clothing and agricultural products continue to cut off Third World suppliers from affluent markets such as the European Union and North America.

Just as governments in the northern hemisphere have failed to deliver on their side of the trade deal, developing countries have responded in a lukewarm fashion to their environmental commitments. The result has been largely business as usual. Habitat loss continues, finite resources get scarcer and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising.

"We've let the South down," commented former U.K. Environment Secretary John Gummer in 1997. "I'm not saying that the G77 countries are all "the good guys." But they feel that we have not fulfilled our part of the Rio bargain, and I can't say I blame them."

The conspicuous failure of the Rio bargain has not only put a question mark against the intentions of industrialized nations; it has also focused attention on the institutions whose responsibility it was, post-Rio, to coordinate the implementation of sustainable development. A number of weaknesses have become apparent, including a lack of overall vision and an inability to formulate responses that cut across all areas of policy-making.

There is a vigorous debate over the best way to remedy the failure of institutions--in particular, whether the necessary changes can be made by reinvigorating each organization individually, or whether a radical overhaul is needed.

Among the challenges for WSSD in Johannesburg is to agree on what went wrong, and then to start constructing a more inclusive and effective trade framework for the future. If this does not happen, the perception of globalized free trade as something that is fundamentally incompatible with sustainable development could gain credence.