Brandt Commissions on global
development
On January 14, 1977, Robert McNamara, the
president of the World Bank, announced the idea of establishing a
commission of experienced, respected politicians and economists. He
proposed that the members of this new international panel should
not be official representatives of governments, but would work
independently to formulate 'basic proposals on which global
agreement is both essential and possible'. The commission was to
make recommendations on ways of breaking through the existing
international political impasse in North-South negotiations for
global development.
Willy Brandt was asked to preside over the
commission, which was to be equally represented by the developed
North and the developing South. Through various discussions, Brandt
carefully shaped the commission so that it would be met with
collaboration, rather than opposition, by North and South
alike.
On September 28, 1977, Brandt announced that he
was prepared to form and chair an 'Independent Commission on
International Development Issues'. The Brandt Commission was to be
autonomous, would not interfere with ongoing international
negotiations, and would make recommendations to help improve the
climate of North-South relations. In composing the membership of
the Commission, Brandt wanted it to represent as many views and
interests, and as much political and regional balance as possible.
Brandt's idea was that a majority of partners would be from
developing countries, including representatives from both the Left
and Right, women, a prominent industrialist, and a trade
representative.
Although no members of the Commission were from
communist nations, Brandt did discuss the Commission's work with
Eastern European Party members, as well as the Soviet and Chinese
leadership. Brandt's decision not to invite members from the
communist world was based upon the consideration that those nations
were slowly moving towards greater involvement in North- South
negotiations, and he did not want to force them into taking a
premature position.
The first session of the Commission was held from
December 9- 11, 1977, at which the Commission's terms of reference
and a working agenda were agreed upon. The concept of 'mutual
interest', it was agreed, would be central to the reports,
influencing international political attitudes toward greater
cooperation.
The Commission was supported by a Secretariat
that consisted of specialists on various development problems.
Almost all of the staff had previous experience with the World
Bank, and all were well aware of the type of proposals that would
be needed to achieve successful and viable development programs at
the international level.
The Commission's purpose was to influence public
opinion to help change government attitudes, as well as to make
proposals for revitalizing North-South negotiations.
Broadly speaking, the Brandt Commission's reports
gave new life to earlier North-South proposals by placing them in a
new context, which emphasized a dual relationship: the northern
nations dependent on the poor countries for their wealth, and the
poor countries dependent on the North for their development.
The Brandt Commission's two reports, North-South
(1980) and Common Crisis (1983) give primary emphasis to the
internationaissues of food and agricultural development, aid,
energy, trade, international monetary and financial reform, and
global negotiations. The Brandt Reports also sought solutions to
other problems common to both North and South, including the
environment, the arms race, population growth, and the uncertain
prospects of the global economy. Since these problems ultimately
concern the survival of all nations, the Brandt Commission's
recommendations were presented as a structural program to address
the world's problems collectively.
Bruntland Report
In 1987 the Brundtland Report, also known as Our
Common Future, alerted the world to the urgency of making progress
toward economic development that could be sustained without
depleting natural resources or harming the environment. Published
by an international group of politicians, civil servants and
experts on the environment and development, the report provided a
key statement on sustainable development, defining it as:
'development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs'.
The Brundtland Report was primarily concerned
with securing a global equity, redistributing resources towards
poorer nations whilst encouraging their economic growth. The report
also suggested that equity, growth and environmental maintenance
are simultaneously possible and that each country is capable of
achieving its full economic potential whilst at the same time
enhancing its resource base. The report also recognised that
achieving this equity and sustainable growth would require
technological and social change.
The report highlighted three fundamental
components to sustainable development: environmental protection,
economic growth and social equity. The environment should be
conserved and our resource base enhanced, by gradually changing the
ways in which we develop and use technologies. Developing nations
must be allowed to meet their basic needs of employment, food,
energy, water and sanitation. If this is to be done in a
sustainable manner, then there is a definite need for a sustainable
level of population. Economic growth should be revived and
developing nations should be allowed a growth of equal quality to
the developed nations.
Gaia Atlas of Planet Management
A prototype for a global and cultural view of
conservation management is the Gaia Atlas of Planet
Management first published in 1985. It mapped and analysed a
mass of environmental data, statistical predictions, and often
conflicting opinions and solutions. The procedure was to examine
each critical area of concern in terms of the factors limiting
human production or quality of life, and propose a range of
alternative strategies to put things right.
Blueprint for a Green Economy
Blueprint for a Green Economy (Earthscan,
London) which was published in September 1989. Blueprint for a
Green Economy's theme was that economics can and should come to
the aid of environmental policy. Properly interpreted, economics
provides a potentially powerful defence of conservation and a novel
array of weapons for correcting environmental degradation.
Moreover, it offers the prospect of doing it all rather more
efficiently than traditional approaches based on "command and
control". In Blueprint 2 this message was extended to
set out an agenda for international and government action to deal
with the problems of the global economy -climate change, ozone
"holes", tropical deforestation, and resource loss in the
developing world. The message is similar to that of Blueprint
for a Green Economy that was originally prepared as a report
for the uk Department of the Environment. Its remit was to dwell on
the meaning of the term "sustainable development".
Blueprint for a Green Economy was
commissioned in December 1988 by the Department of the Environment
and was designed to advise government if there was a consensus
meaning to the term "sustainable development". The rest of the
terms of reference related to the implications of sustainable
development for the measurement of economic progress and the
appraisal of projects and policies. Tthe chapters in
Blueprint for a Green Economy on "valuing the environment"
and "market-based incentives" (green taxes, etc.) were were added
because one of the production team thought the official report told
an incomplete story.
Blueprint 1 concluded that:
-
sustainable development is readily interpretable as non- declining
human welfare over time - that is, a development path that makes
people better off today but makes people tomorrow have a lower
"standard of living" is not "sustainable". This is consistent with
the Brundtland definition that sustainable development means making
sure that development "meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs";1
- the
conditions for achieving sustainable development include the
requirement that future generations should be compensated for
damage done by current generations - e.g. through global
warming;
-
compensation is best secured by leaving the next generation a stock
of capital assets no less than the stock we have now (the "constant
capital" requirement). This enables the next generation to achieve
the same level of human welfare (at least) as the current
generation. If they fail to do this, the responsibility is theirs,
since they have inherited the same "productive potential" as was
available to the previous generation;
- the
capital in question is both "man-made" (Km) and "natural" (Kn).
Natural capital refers to environmental assets;
- the
requirement to keep the total of capital (Km + Kn) constant
is consistent with "running down" natural capital - i.e. with
environmental degradation - so long as Km and Kn are readily
substitutable for each other. Thus, the "constant capital" rule is
consistent with removing the Amazon forest so long as the proceeds
from this activity are reinvested to build up some other form of
capital;
- the
constant capital rule requires that environmental assets be
valued in the same way as man-made assets, otherwise we
cannot know if we are on a "sustainable development path". We
cannot know if overall capital is constant in the Amazon
deforestation case unless we know the value of the services and
functions that we surrender when it is lost. To put it another way:
valuation is essential if we are to "trade off" forms of capital.
This is the relevance of valuation; nor is there any escape from
it. We "trade off" either explicitly, or implicitly, since all
decisions imply valuations;2
- but
careful inspection of the values of natural capital (i.e. looking
at what environmental assets do for us) will show that the
trade-off has been biased in favour of eliminating or degrading
those assets in favour of either "consuming" the proceeds (i.e. not
reinvesting at all) or investing too readily in man-made assets.
Very simply, if the "true" value of the environment were known, we
would not degrade it as much;
- for some
environmental assets termed "critical capital", there is no
question of an acceptable trade-off. Once allowance is made for the
high values of natural capital, for the
uncertaintysurrounding the functions and benefits of natural
capital, and for the fact that, once eliminated, the effects are
irreversible, then there is a strong case for a
precautionary approach in which the bias is towards conserving
natural capital. It is in this sense that environmental
economics offers a rationale for even greater protection of the
environment than is conventionally thought; (i) the
instruments for securing sustainable development include the
traditional "standard- setting" regulatory approach (which we
called "command and control" - cac) and a panoply of
measures which make use of the marketplace. These "market-based
instruments" (mbis) include taxes on emissions and discharges,
deposit-refund systems and tradeable emission and resource-use
permits. mbis are more powerful than cac because (i) they keep down
the costs of complying with regulations; (ii) they act as a
continuous "irritant" to the polluter, who therefore has a repeated
incentive to avoid the mbi by introducing cleaner and cleaner
technology; (iii) the consumer has a clear incentive to avoid
polluting products because their prices will be higher than clean
products (other things being equal); (iv) environmental taxes can
be used in a "fiscally neutral" way to reduce other distorting
taxes in the economy;
- the
measures of economic progress based on "gnp" (Gross National
Product) need to be changed because gnp fails to measure the true
"standard of living". It largely ignores environmental assets and
treats them as if they have a zero or near-zero price. (And if
something is underpriced, too much of it will be consumed.) But the
first priority is to construct environmental and economic
indicators that show the links between economy and environment.
Adjusting the national accounts (which compute the gnp) is
expensive and not as high a priority as constructing
"environment-economy indicators";
-
"cost-benefit thinking" would greatly enhance the chances of
conservation competing with "development" on equal terms and,
indeed, would generally improve the quality of decision-
making.
First Environment Summit (1992)
The ideas of the 1980 World Conservation
Strategy. were adopted by the UN in the 1992 Environment Summit as
a set of costed strategic objectives. The Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro was unprecedented for a UN conference, in terms of both its
size and the scope of its concerns. Twenty years after the first
global environment conference, the UN sought to help Governments
rethink economic development and find ways to halt the destruction
of irreplaceable natural resources and pollution of the planet.
Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life were drawn
into the Rio process. They persuaded their leaders to go to Rio and
join other nations in making the difficult decisions needed to
ensure a healthy planet for generations to come.
The Summit’s message — that nothing less than a
transformation of our attitudes and behaviour would bring about the
necessary changes — was transmitted by almost 10,000 on-
site journalists and heard by millions around the world. The
message reflected the complexity of the problems facing us: that
poverty as well as excessive consumption by affluent populations
place damaging stress on the environment. Governments recognized
the need to redirect international and national plans and policies
to ensure that all economic decisions fully took into account any
environmental impact. And the message has produced results, making
eco-efficiency a guiding principle for business and governments
alike.
Second Environment Summit (2002)
When the United Nations General Assembly
authorized holding the World Summit on Sustainable Development, it
was hardly a secret— or even a point in dispute— that
progress in implementing sustainable development has been extremely
disappointing since the 1992 Earth Summit, with poverty deepening
and environmental degradation worsening. What the world wanted, the
General Assembly said, was not a new philosophical or political
debate but rather, a summit of actions and results.
By any account, the Johannesburg Summit has laid
the groundwork and paved the way for action. Yet among all the
targets, timetables and commitments that were agreed upon at
Johannesburg, there were no silver bullet solutions to aid the
fight against poverty and a continually deteriorating natural
environment. In fact, there was no magic and no miracle— only
the realization that practical and sustained steps were needed to
address many of the world's most pressing problems.
However, it is now it is becoming increasingly
obvious that local operational management plans to meet these
objectives stand or fall by the attitudes and values of people in
the developed world towards natural resources and the needs of
other cultures as members of one humankind. It is at this
level that the NGOs come into thier own, stepping in to fill a gap
left by governments. Thiis provides guidance for how the world can
one day get beyond the sort of impasse that has blocked
international progress on many economic, social, and environmental
issues in the past decade.
In his recent book, High Noon, J. F.
Rischard argues that the sheer scale and complexity of many
problems have reached the point where traditional nation-states and
intergovernmental processes can no longer cope with them, let alone
get ahead of the avalanche of problems now rushing toward us.
Rischard goes on to suggest that traditional hierarchical processes
at the international level should be supplemented by what he calls
"global issues networks"—voluntary alliances of governments
and NGOs working under the auspices of U.N. bodies such as the U.N.
Environment Programme or U.N. Development Programme on specific
challenges that face the world today.