Background

1. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development -- the Earth Summit, as it came to be called -- was held in Rio de Janeiro, June 3-14, 1992. Its timing was such that it happened exactly 20 years after the first international conference on this subject: the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.

2. Indeed, the subject of the Rio Conference, "Environment and Development," was not new. Perhaps the innovation was in how the issues were presented and the political context in which agreements were made. The 1972 Stockholm Conference succeeded in putting the issue of Environment firmly into the international agenda, and even into the national agenda in many countries.

3. While the concept of sustainable development had been around for some time [N.B. One example is the Just Participatory and Sustainable Society (JPSS) programme of the World Council of Churches in the 1970's.], it was the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) that first managed to integrate concepts of economic development with environmental protection and sustainability. Still, the WCED's recommendations were mostly at the technical level.

4. It was the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development that set itself the task of putting the environment agenda squarely into the development agenda, and thereby really succeeding in placing the issue of sustainable development on the agenda.

5. The question that needs to be asked now, a year after the Rio Conference, is whether the conference succeeded in this task? And if yes, to what extent? This paper tries to contribute some thoughts to a debate that could be held about these questions.

6. The Earth Summit was preceded by a most intensive preparatory process -- a process that had a lot to do with the formal outcomes at the end. At the Inter-governmental level, the UN General Assembly created the UNCED Preparatory Committee -- an open committee of the General Assembly, which met five times  during the 1990-1992 period. [One organizational, and four substantive sessions.] The PrepCom, as it became known, was open to all member states, and inter-governmental and other UN system organizations could send observers.

7. In addition, an unprecedented process to involve a large number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the work of the PrepCom began. From the first meeting on, NGOs came to the meetings of the PrepCom to listen, to make statements, and most importantly, to discuss between themselves the important issues that were on the agenda.

8. One important way for the UNCED secretariat to help the process of NGO participation was through the Global Electronic Network (GEN), developed by the UNCED Information System. One of the first public announcements of the UNCED Secretary General was the announcement of GEN, in a Press Release on Earth Day, April 22, 1990. The objective of the GEN was to provide an improved flow of information from the UNCED Secretariat to a large constituency worldwide, naturally including governments and organizations of the UN System, but most importantly, organizations in the non-governmental sector. The system was not meant to replace existing means of distributing information within the UN System -- essentially the dissemination of printed documents to UN Missions and to participants at specific meetings -- but rather to supplement it with a system that could reach a broader audience, considerably faster than usual.

9. Initial discussions took place with the New York-based Telecommunications Cooperative Network (TCN), as well as EcoNet of the Institute of Global Communications (IGC) in San Francisco to create public, read-only bulletin boards or conferences on these respective networks. [ A read-only bulletin board allows the information supplier (in this case UNCED) to send (upload) to an electronic bulletin board documents and short pieces of information, to be read by anybody with access to a computer, a modem, and a telephone line. ]  All official documentation was uploaded into EcoNet and to TCN, including all key documents, updates, reports of meetings, as well as key press releases. In the case of EcoNet, translation of key documents in French and Spanish were also uploaded into separate conferences, thereby allowing non-English speakers also to participate more effectively.

10. The availability of PrepCom documents via this electronic channel had a number of advantages over-and-above the official channels of distribution. First, documents were "available" faster, as they were uploaded as soon as the final versions were released by the UN Conference Secretariat in New York. Secondly, potentially anybody could have direct access to the documents, without having to wait for the official distribution process -- a procedure which often takes considerable time and money. By the second meeting of the Preparatory Committee, many NGOs expected GEN delivery of key documents well before the beginning of the session. A number of governments, realizing the higher speed of the GEN, also began to use these essentially NGO networks to get the official documents for the PrepComs.

11. Making official UNCED documents available on the TCN, EcoNet and later the GeoNet networks continued until after the Earth Summit. The last documents made available were the final outcomes of the Earth Summit, including the Rio Declaration, the full text of Agenda 21; the Forest Principles, and of the two conventions on Climate Change, and Biodiversity. In final form, in addition to being available as documents, they can also be accessed on-line, as full-text, searchable data bases.

12. The GEN, however, was much more than a one way flow of information from the UNCED Secretariat. Early on, following the appearance of official documents on EcoNet, a number of active individuals and NGOs started creating read-and-write conferences on EcoNet and related APC networks. The "official" UNCED bulletin boards carried all official UNCED documents, which anybody could read or copy into one's computer (download), but network users could not add information to them. The read-and-write conferences created on APC networks, however, allowed users to send in their own views on various aspects of the UNCED preparatory process. The number of electronic conferences and their readers both mushroomed, so that by the time of the Earth Summit, there were some two dozen UNCED-related conferences, in addition to the 6 official ones of UNCED. Similarly, toward the end of the UNCED preparatory process, the UNCED-related conferences were among the most popular of among thousands of other electronic conferences available on APC networks.

13. It was not long before these electronic conferences developed their own dynamics and became proactive, as opposed to remaining reactive to what came out of UNCED. It is no exaggeration to say that the dialogue developed by NGOs on the APC networks was one of the key tools that helped NGOs to contribute fully to the UNCED process. The level of information flow from a UN agency to the NGOs, as well as that between NGOs concerning a large UN conference was absolutely unprecedented.

14. The overall experience of the GEN demonstrates that electronic networking is an essential tool in helping NGO participation in an inter-governmental process. Following the UNCED process, it is no longer possible to envisage a large inter-governmental conference without such an "open window" of information flow with the NGO community. It is encouraging to note similar developments taking place for various UNCED follow-up activities and other large gatherings, such as the Human Rights Conference of the UN.

15. The UNCED Preparatory Process was unique in its effort to bring representatives of various communities (stakeholders) and their views into a substantive preparation process. This was done through creating working parties at the Secretariat level, through the organization, and in the support of various other preparatory activities.

16. About a dozen of the key issues listed in the original UN General Assembly Resolution were sufficiently important to justify creating specific "working parties" around them. [ Resolution 44/228 of December 1989, which contained the basic mandate for, and the proposed agenda for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. ]  These groups were created to advise the Secretariat in developing various preparatory papers for the PrepCom and included representatives of the relevant UN organizations, as well as key non-governmental organizations. The point was to have a broad representation of opinion available to the Secretariat. While no such system is perfect, the experience of the UNCED working parties demonstrates the validity of such an approach. In many cases, it was through working parties that some agencies of the United Nations came together for the first time to discuss key issues together and with representatives of other organizations that were not part of the "System." In these working parties, the links between and among issues became apparent, and through them, it was also possible to develop responses that involved more than any one traditional, sectoral agency.

17. Another, and perhaps more important, phenomenon was the organization of a large number of preparatory meetings. While these are common during the build-up period for any large conference, the difference for UNCED was that in addition to the "standard" regional conferences, a wide variety of different communities decided that environment and development, and sustainable development were key issues for their own agendas. The scientific community organized their Ascend 21 input; the business community responded with The Business Council for Sustainable Development. Churches, indigenous communities, youth, women and others likewise did their part.

18. All of this attention managed to underscore the fundamental thesis of UNCED -- namely the interrelationship of environment and development issues was not just an "armchair idea," but it was reality. The protection of the environment is a major concern for women's groups and for the business community. The same way, poverty and over consumption are issues that the traditional "environment" groups have to grapple with.

19. Preparatory activities were also undertaken at the national level. Countries were asked to prepare "national reports on environment and development." By yearend 1992, 175 national and regional reports had been received by the Secretariat.

20. During the four substantive PrepCom sessions, the complex agenda of the Conference emerged -- eventually to become the 40 chapters of Agenda 21. The hundreds of preparatory documents, research papers, national reports, solicited and unsolicited communications received have found their way, by one means or another, into the official documents.  [The UNCED Secretariat, in cooperation with the Ottawa-based International Development Research Council (IDRC) has assembled all these documents, as well as the final report of the Earth Summit, to be available in June 1993, as the "UNCED Archives" on a single CD-ROM, for the first anniversary of the Earth Summit. ]

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