At the iied Fair Ideas Conference

Post by Douglas F. Williamson

Saturday I went to the Fair Ideas: Sharing Solutions for a Sustainable Planet Conference organized by iied and hosted by PUC, a local university. The panelists were among the world's leaders from business, government, and international civil society.

The blogger and Julia Marton Lefevre

Many of the people who spoke and who I spoke to outside of the meeting rooms were of the opinion that the governmental processes happening at Rio Centro would not result in the transformations necessary to achieve sustainable development. The failure of the intergovernmental process and collaboration has been becoming more and more pronounced over the course of the Rio+20 process over the past two years. Just yesterday the outcome document was partially scrapped and, supposedly, Brazil was to publish its own document for discussion. Last night, I heard that states' parties began discussing Sustainable Development Goals, a continuation of the Millenium Development Goals concept, but hopefully without repetition.

Achim Steiner, UNEP

In light of the governmental process breakdown, the discussions at the Fair Ideas conference became more relevant. Paula Caballero of Columbia highlighted the divides between people and nature and between the north and the south. She also recommended that the SDG process be led by experts and scientists and not by governments. UNEP head Achim Steiner claimed that the failure has not been solely the fault of governments, but of all of us. He called for a paradigm change, but didn't elaborate on the way to get there. He continued to criticize the governmental process calling it antagonistic, a zero-sum game, distrustful, and stated that governments are unwilling to offer anything if they don't know what they'll get in return. Essentially, he claimed, the objective of governments in the process was to win, to get more than other governments while offering less.

Johan Rockstrom

Camilla , head of iied, claimed that change would come in one of two ways: either the transition would be managed, rational, and peaceful; or that the transition would be unmanaged, chaotic, and violent. She stated that she felt the second path was the more likely one at this point.

Rene Castro, the Costa Rican Minister for Environment and Energy, was also highly critical of the sustainable development process and highlighted the lack of communication across disciplines as a major obstacle.

In an afternoon session on business solutions, Pavan Sukhdev described the Corp2020 initiative and spelled out several of the major financial and business culture obstacles to the transition to sustainable business practices. One of the things he said that struck me was that corporations that are too big to fail must be responsible for themselves if they do fail instead of being bailed out by governments, meaning by taxes provided by citizens. Passing off the costs of failure onto the general public is clearly not acceptable, fair, or sustainable.

Although there were many good ideas, some excellent examples, there were no clear proscriptions for how to hasten or achieve the transition to sustainable business practices. What was clear all day, however, is that all the speakers feel the need for a paradigm change to sustainability at all levels of society.

Postscript: today at posting time I am already seeing resistance to the document proposed by the Brazilian government on Saturday.