Notes from the Chair: Rescuing the Commission on Sustainable Development From the Driftwood of Deserted and Dead Debate.

• Author: Upton, Simon

The Seventh Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD7), which culminated in a meeting of 60 Government Ministers in New York in April 1999, needed to make some tangible progress.

It did.

The Commission is a review body that was set up in the wake of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 to monitor progress in implementing Agenda 21 - the principles for sustainable development that were adopted at the Summit. This year, the main themes on which it focused were the world's oceans, small island States, the burgeoning global tourism industry, and sustainable consumption and production patterns.

For New Zealand, with its slender resources, to find itself in the chair was a little unnerving. We had not been on the Commission (which numbers 53 States) before, let alone in the chair. We knew very little about the CSD's processes, but soon learnt that in some quarters the Commission had acquired a reputation as a talk shop. Many feared that it was rapidly generating into a forum that would soon be deserted by Ministers who found the experience, in the words of one of them, "an exercise in banality".

As a consequence, I determined that our primary goal would be a procedural one: to rescue the reputation of the CSD as a forum which environment and development Ministers attended because it provided a unique and valuable opportunity to advance global issues on a broad front.

We thought that this would be best achieved by injecting a good measure of genuinely interactive debate (in place of sterile set-piece speeches) and a commitment to record disagreements, as well as agreements, to avoid the turgid, lowest common denominator text that so often issues from the maws of multilateral negotiations.

We did enjoy one stroke of luck. I was to be the first CSD Chairman to chair a meeting I had organized. (Before this year, bizarrely, someone chaired a meeting that someone else had organized, who then organized the next for someone else to chair).

To advance these goals, I travelled extensively to meet ministers from countries that are members of the Commission and tried to build momentum for change in capitals, while a small but dedicated team of New Zealand diplomats worked on the New York diplomatic establishment.

It was worth the effort. The ministerial segment of the conference was, in UN terms, a new departure. Meetings started on time, read statements were kept in their place, and some genuine debate ensued.

The success of our approach was, I...