Twenty-five years in the making: why sustainable development has eluded the U.N., and how community-driven development offers the solution.

AuthorCarroll, Ellie
  1. INTRODUCTION II. THE ISSUE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE A. A New Concern Emerges B. The Brundtland Commission C. Sustainable Development, Defined D. The Millennium Summit E. The Kyoto Protocol III. A NEW APPROACH? A. Monetary Incentives and Subsidies Are Not Effective On Their Own B. Elements of a New Approach IV. ECOVILLAGES: A FLAGSHIP FOR THE NEW APPROACH A. An Ecovillage, Defined B. Modeling the Ecovillage in Traditional Communities C. Community-Driven Development in Developing Countries D. The Role of the U.N. in the New Model V. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION

    The goal of sustainable development, a term first coined by the United Nations (U.N.) in 1983 (1) remains somewhat of a mystery for the countries who aim to implement it. Twenty years after the official introduction (2) of the notion in 2003, it was noted that:

    1. [T]he pace, scale, and depth of progress towards sustainable development has been inadequate;

    2. [T]he root causes of unsustainability remain firmly in place even if some symptoms have been tackled; and

    3. [M]ost people do not yet "feel the burn" to act, whether in government, business, or as individuals. (3)

    Today, more than twenty-five years later, scarcity of natural resources and climate conditions now demand that environmental concerns move to the forefront of the decision-making agenda. (4)

    Because individuals and communities do not feel compelled to act on behalf of the global environment and the future generations that will inhabit it, the statements in aforementioned list items one and two are readily observable. Secondly, the United Nations [U.N.] has not proposed a model for its member states to follow in implementing sustainable development. Furthermore, even if it had set forth a model at some point over the last twenty-five years, no single, homogeneous model mandated by an international authority is suitable for every community on the earth to realize a greater level of sustainability, as the needs of different areas of the world are as diverse as their geographical and cultural surroundings. (5) What the U.N. can do, and must do, is promulgate a set of standards, (6) turning to the many local communities of the world to implement sustainability through means that suit their geographical needs and available resources. This approach would allow communities to use the ingenuity of local residents to develop a specific plan of action and implement a sustainability program that is suitable to each cultural and geographical area.

    Hence, the power structure behind sustainable development should be the converse of what it has been. Instead of a mandate cast from the U.N. down to member states, a successful strategy should be implemented from the bottom of the global power structure up to the international level. Such a strategy should begin with neighborhoods and municipalities, with a focus on rebuilding the social connections that have deteriorated over the years. (7) Armed with this renewed social capital, communities may self-enforce the values of sustainability that may be brought to the attention of residents through education and awareness. (8)

    Ecovillages, either in pure form or some variation thereof, (9) are a very useful tool in the building of sustainability education and social capital, (10) and are widespread enough around the globe to afford a tailored model of sustainability to the many communities of the world. (11)

    Part II of this Comment explores the history of environmental conservation as a global concern, detailing past efforts of the U.N. that have fallen short of implementing sustainability through "hard law" treaties and "soft law" commitments. Part III evaluates current U.N. efforts toward sustainable development, and lays out the key elements of a new, successful approach--education and social capital. Part IV proposes inverting the current system to put sustainable development policymaking in the hands of grassroots organizations, utilizing ecovillages and other local efforts as flagships for implementing the appropriate sustainable development strategy for the communities in which they are situated. Part IV also describes how these community-driven efforts may solve sustainability problems in developing countries, and explores the proposed role of the U.N. within the new structure, emphasizing that it is aptly situated to aid sustainability education, bringing the goal into the mainstream.

  2. THE ISSUE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

    1. A New Concern Emerges

      The 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden yielded the creation of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP). (12) Stockholm was the first global conference to focus upon environmental issues. (13) Here, world leaders produced a declaration comprising twenty-six principles that note the world's need for guidance in environmental preservation. (14) In the declaration, UNEP called on the governments of U.N. member states to support and implement programs aimed at the preservation of the human environment. (15) This "soft law" (16) mandate set the stage for sustainability, and became the predecessor to the official definition of sustainable development promulgated in 1983. (17)

      The principles enunciated in Stockholm included using natural resources wisely so as to not deplete them for future generations, (18) protecting the capacity of the Earth to create resources for the use of its human inhabitants, (19) and the use of "rational planning" to reconcile the inherent conflict between the utility of nonrenewable natural resources and their preservation for future generations. (20) As noble and sweeping as these principles may appear, environmental concerns nevertheless continued to attract low attention from the nations of the world. (21) Consequently, deforestation, global warming, and other conditions stemming from the unbridled use of nonrenewable resources continued to deteriorate. (22)

    2. The Brundtland Commission

      In 1983, the U.N. General Assembly adopted Resolution 38/161, which advocated the advancement toward development of "the Environmental Perspective." (23) Under the Resolution, the General Assembly created a World Commission on Environment & Development (WCED), led by Norwegian Environmental Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, (24) to advise the U.N. regarding the achievement of its newly-adopted goal of the "Environmental Perspective to the Year 2000 and Beyond." (25) WCED was offered four areas of focus in which to work and develop propositions to the U.N., including "long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development to the year 2000 and beyond," and promoting "interrelationships between people, resources, environment, and development." (26) At the request of the General Assembly, the WCED was instructed to prepare a report that includes strategic insight as to how the U.N. may accomplish its goal of sustainable development. (27)

      The WCED, informally known as the Brundtland Commission, first met in 1984, and over the course of 900 days, which included the infamous Chernobyl explosion and a host of other man-made environmental disasters, it explored the areas which it was created to ameliorate. (28) Abiding by its mandate, the WCED presented the Brundtland Report, entitled "From One Earth to One World," to the U.N. General Assembly in 1987, providing the first U.N. elaboration on the idea of "sustainable development." (29)

    3. Sustainable Development, Defined

      "Sustainable Development" was broadly defined in the Brundtland Report not as "a fixed state of harmony, but rather a process of change in which the exploitation of nonrenewable resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with the future as well as present needs." (30) A far less cumbersome definition calls it "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (31) Patricia Romano, a commenter on the subject, likens the concept of sustainability to managing one's finances on a fixed budget--one must use only what he needs for a given period, as overspending in one month means less remains to meet the needs for the next month. (32)

      In the decade following the introduction of the Brundtland Report, (33) world leaders held a series of "mega-conferences" (34) regarding the creation of a more sustainable world. (35) At these summits, however, the individual problems of environmental depletion were discussed as remediable through homogeneous, ineffective global solutions. (36) As a consequence, these conferences produced vague goals with no concrete plan of action. (37)

      The first meeting of the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro resulted in the publication of another "soft law" (38) commitment to sustainable development, which consisted of yet another equally-broad statement on the topic of sustainability that contained no true method of implementation other than a recommendation to simply remain mindful of the goal in further development. (39) The Earth Summit, as the Rio conference was named, issued Agenda 21, a title signifying the U.N.'s hope of bringing sustainable development into the twenty-first century. (40)

      Agenda 21 revealed no new plan of action, but again merely restated the broad, amorphous goal of sustainable development. (41) The document cited a need to develop strategies to mitigate the negative impact that the human population has on the environment, and it offered ambiguous guidelines to do so through developing better modeling capabilities, increasing public awareness, and attending to the importance of long-term sustainability in policymaking and development. (42) However, instead of acting on the goals that have been repeatedly stated, the Earth Summit merely reissued the same pledge produced by earlier...

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