PRESS BRIEFING BY SECRETARY-GENERAL OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT SUMMIT

Assuming that everything worked out as planned, good progress had been made in the first preparatory committee of the World Summit for Social Development, Nitin Desai, Secretary-General of the Summit and Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, told correspondents at a Headquarters press briefing this morning. 

Also briefing the press was Emil Salim, Chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the Summit.

Mr. Desai said that not only was there a clear idea of what the Summit was about, but there was also an idea of the kinds of actions that would be discussed.

The Under-Secretary-General said he had just met with the non-governmental organizations, and one of the ideas that had emerged from the discussions was the notion of partnerships for implementation.  Given what governments would agree upon as priority goals, and what they would commit resources for, the idea behind partnerships for implementation was to bring to the process the same degree of effectiveness which many community-based organizations or corporations already possessed.  It was not a substitute for commitments by governments or goals to be agreed by those governments.  “It is really more of a device to implement government agreements.”

Mr. Salim informed correspondents that, right after the press conference, four major items would be presented.  One was a brief report and summary of the secondary session of the first Preparatory Committee, which also revealed how Member States saw the implementation of Rio + 10.

The second document, continued Mr. Salim, was a summary of the multi-stakeholder dialogue.  That was the way those multi-stakeholders saw what needed to be done, how cooperation arrangements should be organized and sustained, and how they should be followed up.

Mr. Salim said the third document was his own paper, which would become the negotiated document.  It was brief because the intention was not to talk about lofty ideas, for there were already too many speeches.  The emphasis of his paper was on hook-ups, where initiatives and partnership programmes could be developed.  The purpose was to provide a base from which “we can tell the whole world –- look, we are not changing Agenda 21, but building it up and implementing it further in a new globalized world”.  What was needed, then, was not so much words, but more of the ingredient for actions.  “So anything that could not be implemented we threw out of the window”, he said.

Continuing, he said that everything left in the paper must help sustainable development to materialize.  It was not an effort characterized specifically by issues such as the environment, economic development or social development, but a blending and merging of the three.  That being the case, a focus was then needed  -– one that could bring all three issues together.  What was that focus?  Number one was poverty eradication.  Poverty eradication was not only about poverty or how to provide the poor with affordable energy, but also about accessibility to land -- the environmental aspect -- as well as the market -- the economic aspect.

The question was how could poverty eradication manage to incorporate all three aspects into one focal point.

The second focus, he said, was on changing the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption in the market economy to a production system that used fewer resources, less energy, produced less waste and had a higher optimum output. Focus three was sustainable management of natural resources:  how could one have development of resources below a threshold of degradation? 

He said all activities were currently taking place in a world in which globalization was marginalizing the developing countries.  The need now was to find out how to make the process workable for sustainable development.  So while one had to look at the issue of trade and finance, based on the Doha and Monterrey Conferences, the objective was not to repeat those conferences, but find ways in which their outcomes could be incorporated in the context of sustainable development.

Responding to a question about what would be taken up at the next preparatory committee, Mr. Desai said that the Chairman’s summary of the second preparatory session of the first preparatory committee, which had been circulated today, would be examined paragraph by paragraph to see what should be agreed upon, modified or rejected.

Addressing a question on why partnerships had emerged, Mr. Desai said it was partly because they were becoming more important in a lot of areas (the Global Health Fund, for example, or the vaccine initiative, or the Information and Communication Technologies Task Force).  “I would say that this whole notion of governments and civil society coming together to strengthen mechanisms of implementation was something that had been building up”, he said.  “What I would stress here, however, is that this cannot be a substitute for governments.”

As an example, the Under-Secretary-General said that 500 cities had recently formulated a programme to reduce their impact on global climate change.  But while that was one type of partnership initiative, it was not a substitute for the commitments arrived at by governments in the Framework Convention on Climate Change and its various protocols.  It was also not a substitute for the commitments which governments had again made as part of the clean development mechanism to support related actions.  So partnerships were really a mechanism for improving the quality of implementation.

A correspondent asked whether the criticism made by non-governmental organizations -- that governments were still trying to define sustainable development -- was a valid one.  Mr. Desai said it was not just governments alone who were still scratching their heads.  A lot of other people were also struggling to define sustainable development.  “Basically, my argument is that we should just focus on the actions”, he said. The Chairman’s text proposed very specific actions and “we should just look at that.  We also have a nominalist view of sustainable development.  Sustainable development is what Agenda 21 says it is”. In that case, the specific job would be to look at the more specific action proposals in that agenda, and “ask ourselves what it is that we really need to do”.

When asked what Johannesburg expected to accomplish, Mr. Salim said the spirit of the Conference was a “bottom-up” approach.  What did the people at the bottom want?  “Then we go back to them and say you want this –- let’s do it together, rich and poor –- but you decide.”  That was the spirit.