10 YEARS AFTER RIO: DEBATING DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES

World Summit Paper #2; concise outlook on Sustainable Development Implementation by Karl H. Segschneider; May 2001

This is the second publication in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s series World Summit Papers. The first publication, Towards the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2002, provides a detailed factual basis for an overview of the whole sustainable development process, related institutions, groups, problems and issues. The second publication is aimed at groups not directly concerned with the preparation for Johannesburg, groups that might be at times less familiar with the whole context. The paper offers altogether six chapters, different in character: Chapter 1 provides a conceptual review of the development paradigm between 1949 and the present; chapters 2 and 3 focus on a detailed summary of the Agenda 21 agreement and the ecological and economic definition of sustainability, respectively; chapter 4 concerns the impact of Agenda 21 implementation on Thailand in examples that might be translated to other developing countries as well; chapter 5 focuses on the World Trade Organization and the Commission on Sustainable Development and the United Nations; and Chapter 6 on the Johannesburg preparatory process with final suggestions of some topics for debate. As it was impossible to narrate the many international activities related to the post-Rio process a second “development implementation timeline” has been added to the “debating development perspectives timeline”, which presents an overview of the history of the “sustainable development paradigm”. Although this paper is not written to primarily satisfy sustainable development specialists, we do hope that it, nonetheless, provides interesting reading for all groups actively or passively concerned with sustainable development. Throughout a focus on economic issues in development is prominent – not because an opponent of growth was requested to write this paper, but because economic powers seems to increasingly develop into an opponent of sustainability. We hope that by consciously approaching the troubled relationship between sustainable development and the current economic system, this publication will encourage positive criticism towards the accumulative economic paradigm and generate interest in active participation in the search for an alternative.

[ pdf; 86 pages ]