THIRD* MEETING OF THE PREPARATORY COMMITTEE
MARCH 25 - APRIL 5, 2002, NEW YORK

"It's clear that the US's game plan is to systematically undermine the rest of the world's attempts to reach agreements of global significance. We all know that environmental degradation, social inequity and war do not respect national boundaries: Only agreements between nations will give us any chance of holding back the tide." [ Whose Side Are You On? Greenpeace Press Release; April 5th ]

"The proposed partnerships are having a 'chill effect' on negotiating meaningful multilateral agreements rather than helping the necessary implementation. The Johannesburg summit will only be a success if governments agree an ambitious implementation program for which time is running out." [ With Us or Against Us to Save the Planet? Friends of the Earth press release at PrepComm III; April 5 ]

The third Preparatory Committee Meeting for the World Summit on Sustainable Development was held from March 25 to April 5 in the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Its aim was to discuss and to start negotiating the outcome of the second PrepComm in January 2002, which included the results of national, regional and international preparatory conferences, official working group deliberations during the second PrepComm, and the conclusions of the Multi-Stakeholder-Dialogue.

The negiotiations were run mostly on the basis of the so-called "Chairman's Paper", that received lots of critiques and comments from civil society. As NGO observer at the PrepComm III see it, the "usual suspects" such as the US or Australia, but also the OPEC countries, were blocking meaningful targets and timetables being inserted into the negotiating text for the Summit, which NGO believe must set clear social and environmental limits to globalisation. Generally, it is percieved that two weeks of chaotic negotiations resulted in a long document, strong on platitudes but weak on substance. The EU and the majority of the G77 developing countries failed to show the necessary leadership in the face of US obstructions. Also, the EU was unwilling to respond to G77 concerns on finance and trade in the wake of the Monterrey negotiations.

Delegations deliberated on the Chairman's Paper in three working groups. The deliberations were structured by reading out the individual paragraphs and by collecting comments from the delegations, turning the twenty pages of the original Chairman's Paper into more than one hundred pages of brackets and bold inserts, coming from all major blocks such as the European Union, G77/China, and the United States.

Hence, the second week of the PrepComm started with much frustration and confusion about these documents. Delegations as well as observers complained the compilations were unreadable and impossible to work with. Deliberations were delayed by separate meetings by the European Union as well as G77/ China, and were basically stuck for the rest of the second week. The working groups managed to read most of the two documents without progress, some chapters remained untouched.

In a parallel, informal process, delegations deliberated on partnerships - the so-called Type-II-Outcomes, consisting of partnerships of the different sectors - governments, major groups, and business. NGOs believe that governments were hiding their unacceptable negotiation results on the Chairman's Paper by putting special effort into pursuing these partnership initiatives (especially with business) as a main result of the WSSD. NGOs opposed this "privatisation of implementation" and insisted that UN processes must be about governments fulfilling their global responsibility.

The third PrepComm eventually ended without reaching its goal, and the closing plenary session decided to postpone further negotiations to Bali by beginning three days early. The fourth PrepComm would start with internal discussions within the delegations, and continue with informal-informal sessions for two days before the official PrepCom started. In the meantime, the Chairman and the WSSD-Secretariat were advised to compile a new "clean" Chairman's Paper.

*Four international meetings of the "Preparatory Committee" (PrepComm) prepared the summit on an international level. The first PrepComm discussed the modalities for the preparatory process as well as the Summit itself. The second meeting intended to look at issues such as the implementation of Agenda 21 and reviewing national and regional progress. This third meeting pledged but failed to come up with an outcome document. The fourth meeting re-negotiated the text from the third PrepComm and finally agreed on 80% of the draft outcome text that contains hardly any clear targets or timetables. Pressing for these is what NGOs now demand governments to prepare for in the run up to the World Summit.