A NOTE ON ECOLOGICAL GLOBALISATION

[ taken from: From Rio to South Africa: Daring to Dream of a Just World, Sunita Narain, Paper presented to the Rio+8 Copenhagen Forum, June 2000. Is your government signing away your future rights to the world's natural resources? Down to Earth, March 31, 2000, Global Environmental Negotiations 1: Green Politics, Centre for Science and Environment ]

The Centre for Science and Environment's (CSE's) Global Environmental Negotiations (GEN) reports are an effort to record and analyse how developing countries have fared so far with ecological globalisation. They also seek to provide the civil society, often removed from the scene of these international negotiations, the information they need to intervene to ensure that the rules that are set are democratic and just to both rich and poor nations. The first report, Green Politics, analyses three post-Rio conventions, four ongoing negotiations, and two environmental institutions.

Part of the reports major findings includes:

What we see emerging in the name of global environmental negotiations is actually an extremely lopsided governance of the world's resources, controlled and manipulated by Northern countries. Only Northern concerns are taken on board, whether it is the hole in the ozone layer which was found to cause cancer particularly to white skin, or the problem of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) travelling to the Arctic. While the treaties dealing with Northern problems, namely the Montreal Protocol and the negotiations on POPs have been put on track in record time, treaties on biological diversity and desertification, which deal with problems in developing countries, have stalled. Both Northern governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have shown a marked lack of interest in them. Even with global warming, there is more hype on part of the North than a desire to do something concrete. This is because it is clear that developing countries will suffer great damage due to climate change, and there is strong doubt that industrialised countries will be affected very much at all.

No political leader has any interest to ensure that the emerging global market or the emerging global ecological policy is managed in the best interest of the maximum number of people and on the basis of the principles of 'good governance' - equality, justice and democracy. Instead, when leaders of nation states meet to develop rules and regulations for ecological globalisation, they take positions to ensure least possible costs to their individual national economies. Environmental diplomacy has turned into petty business transactions, not the establishment of fair and just global governance systems. In a highly divided world, getting the nations together to deal with their environmental challenges means rich nations will have to provide good leadership, which generates confidence not just within their own populations but also in the populations of poor nations. In this context, the role of rich countries will be of immense importance in the years to come - particularly the role of the US, the richest of the rich. But the US Senate has not yet ratified the Convention to Combat Desertification, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the Basel Convention. The European Union and other industrialised countries invariably tend to hide behind US intransigence.

Southern political leaders have also shown a miserable lack of vision and failure to recognise that these environmental treaties are about the sustainable sharing of the Earth's ecological space - global public goods like oceans and atmosphere - on which national economies depend. What matters most is not aid or technology transfer but rights to the equitable sharing of the Earth's ecological commons. These rights will be the precondition to generate long-term sustainability through appropriate changes in the world's economic and technological systems. Unfortunately, destitute economies also produce political leaders with the mindset of the destitute who are willing to discount their future for a few dollars today, while rich economies produce political leaders who are nothing but handmaidens of their business interests.

Current international environmental treaties provide for action in increments. In other words, each treaty is evolving over the years. This approach has been highly praised by a number of experts on global environmental negotiations. But incremental action poses a serious challenge for diplomats from the developing world. At no stage of a treaty do they have a full and final picture of its implications and impacts. As industrialised countries usually take the lead in implementing an environmental treaty, the action framework is usually set in a way that is acceptable to them. Once the framework is set, developing countries are expected to join the effort, though the same framework may not be appropriate for them. Southern countries, therefore, have to intervene from the very start of the negotiations to ensure that the action framework will be acceptable to them later on. Unfortunately, given the state of distrust among nations, the efforts of developing countries to participate in setting of rules is often seen as obstructionist.

Almost every environmental treaty uses trade sanctions as a tool for bringing the environmentally deviant states to book. Western environmentalists have had no hesitation in pushing for the use of both aid and trade sanctions as a compliance mechanism even outside the ambit of the environmental treaties. CSE has pointed out since the early 1990s that there are fundamental flaws in using aid or trade as tools for controlling errant environmental behaviour even in multilateral treaties. These are extremely unjust tools because they can only be used by more the powerful nations against the less powerful ones. Imagine the impact of Maldives or Bangladesh imposing trade sanctions against the US for not meeting its Kyoto Protocol targets! An international compliance tool has to be such that it is equally available to all parties - rich or poor, powerful or powerless. Otherwise, the world is only accepting the right of powerful nations to be moral bullies whenever they choose to be so. It is disheartening that Northern NGOs also support the use of such inequitable and one-sided tools.

Finally, Southern countries cannot depend on Northern NGOs to push their interests at these environmental negotiations. This is evident from the response of Northern groups to Southern demands for equity in the climate convention, which have been met with nothing but stony silence.