By John Mugabe, NEPAD Science and Technology Advisor and Associate Professor, Institute for Technological Innovation, University of Pretoria. (Courtsey: Nepad Dialogue)
In September 2002, almost five years ago, the international community descended on South Africa’s city of Johannesburg to summit on implementing sustainable development. It was an event organised as a result of anxiety and frustration with the very slow progress in implementing Agenda 21 adopted 10 years earlier in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro during the United Nations Conference of Environment and Development (UNCED). The Johannesburg Summit was expected to be the turning point in the search for sustainable development: from political debates to concrete actions to fight poverty, stem environmental degradation and achieve global social inclusion.
The lead up to the Johannesburg Summit was characterised by many meetings of the United Nations General Assembly; mini-summits tagged pre-coms, numerous experts’ workshops, and regional consultations. These were expected to frame a global agenda of action to achieve sustainable development.
Their main outputs include the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), volumes of background studies on water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity, and a strategic plan on technology transfer and capacity building. The technology transfer strategic plan was adopted after many days and nights of negotiations in Indonesia’s city of Bali.
What the international community did in Johannesburg was to consolidate the outputs of the pre-summit events into a political declaration and a plan of implementation of sustainable development. Just as they had done ten years earlier in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s leaders issued the political declaration on the end of poverty, victory for the environment, and globalisation that benefits all of humanity.
The plan for implementing sustainable development is innovative in so far as it recognises the special interests and priorities of developing countries, particularly those of Africa.
The Johannesburg political declaration and plan of implementation are today rarely referred to by the world’s leaders, policymakers and even environmental activists. They are now together with Brundtland’s report Our Common Future and UNCED’s Agenda 21 in the collections on book shelves. These may be forgotten until again the UN General Assembly calls for another world summit on sustainable development 10 years after Johannesburg.
What did Africa get from Johannesburg?
For Africa the Johannesburg Summit was a moment of anxiety with great expectations. Coming a few months after the launch of NEPAD and the transformation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) into the African Union (AU), the summit was expected to do more than secure international endorsement of Africa’s development plans. It was expected to galvanise specific international commitments and actions to support the realisation of NEPAD.
However, what the Summit did was to provide African leaders and institutions with a rare opportunity to reassert the need for debt relief or forgiveness, globalisation with a human face, and the importance of multilateralism. For some leaders it was a moment to remind the rest of the world that African countries are sovereign states and interference in their internal affairs is not entertained.
On the whole Africa got an opportunity to be heard on its soil but lost a chance to articulate its sustainable development agenda.
Today, 20 years after the publication of Our Common Future and 15 years after UNCED, Africa is talked of as a continent not achieving the MDGs and sustainable development. It is still the place full of the world’s poorest people, who live in increasingly degraded environments and are getting more and more socially excluded.
The images of Africa are still those of a continent with countries and people that are extremely impoverished. It is ‘pictured’ as a place of hunger and starvation, wars and conflicts, corruption and economic inequalities, and water scarcity and environmental decay.
These persistent images of Africa are largely a result of the failure of African leaders, regional organisations and the United Nations system to ‘unearth’ and portray African transformations: silent revolutions that are starting to take place on the continent.
Is the Pan African Parliament (PAP) the sign of hope?
Perhaps the starting point is for institutions such as the AU Commission, NEPAD Secretariat, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Bank to review national and regional efforts to implement chapter 8 of the WSSD Plan of Implementation. A critical review and evaluation of these institutions’ programmes and performance are also needed. Indeed there is a need to have some sense of the relevance and contributions of these agencies to African sustainable development.
Some of these institutions may be doing commendable jobs to enable the continent to secure sustainable development.
The AU Commission has instituted a number of initiatives that are bringing peace and ending wars in some countries. It is leveraging political support and peace-keeping missions in Dafur, Burundi and the Ivory Coast. NEPAD has institutionalised the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) and already Rwanda, Ghana and Kenya have successfully undergone peer review of their political and economic governance systems. NEPAD’s programmes for agriculture, infrastructure, education, health, and science and technology are starting deepen regional cooperation for development.
NEPAD and the AU have developed flagship programmes for harnessing and applying science, technology and innovation to achieve sustainable development. Specific initiatives for water, health, agriculture, energy, and innovation policy have been launched under the aegis of the AU/NEPAD African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology (AMCOST). These have received political support from African leaders through specific decisions made at the January 2007 AU Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The challenge is to ensure that AU summits’ decisions are implemented. The Pan African Parliament established about two years ago and civil society should play a major role in monitoring and advocating for the implementation of AU summits’ decisions. They need to actively engage NEPAD and the AU Commission on the implementation of Africa’s Science and Technology Consolidated Plan of Action and other programmes for science and technology.
PAP should also review how well UNEP and NEPAD are promoting the implementation of the African Environment Action Plan.
PAP can become a watchdog for the implementation of chapter 8 of the WSSD and related programmes of the AU and NEPAD. It should build institutional capacity to provide political oversight and activism for UN programmes such as UNEP and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Africa.
PAP can be built into the African mechanism for ensuring that the international community and African leaders turn political declarations into concrete programmatic actions.
Its current challenge is to take a long-term focus on sustainable development. This requires that its programme of work is organised around the main sources of economic change and human development: science, technology and innovation. Indeed without African investments in science, technology and innovation there will be no realisation of the goals set in chapter 8 of the WSSD Plan of Implementation.
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