Landing into stalemate?

I arrived into Rio late last night, and headed straight to the small apartment that is to be home for the next ten days. Sarah, fellow WDMer had landed a few hours before, and already orientated herself around the city and had plenty of information to share. Whilst we are here, Sarah will be spending her days at the People’s Summit coordinating with social movements, participating in actions and discussing alternatives to the false solutions that are being proposed at the official summit, and I will be following what’s going on inside the Rio+20 conference (officially known as the UN Conference on Sustainable Development).

Today, I headed on the long journey to the Rio Centro, where the official summit will take place – typically this is over an hour’s drive from the city centre, a space far from the world of real people of Rio, which can be easily monitored and policed. Arriving at a UN summit is always a dizzying process. Working out the bus routes, negotiating the registration process, and orientating yourself around a massive, overbearing and stuffy conference space – in this case a huge airport-style hanger designed for 15,000 people – approximately the same population of the town where I grew up. 

The Rio+20 summit is supposed to celebrate the Earth Summit that took place here 20 years ago, to reaffirm the political commitments made then, and develop new action plans to counter the economic and environmental crises that are significantly more serious then they were two decades ago. I’ve arrived at the conference on what is supposed to be the last day of a three day long ‘preparatory committee’ meeting; the third to have taken place since 2010. This is meant to be where countries work out the final details of a text that can be agreed by the heads of state that will gather at the official part of the Rio +20 summit on the 20 – 22 June. Before that, a slightly farcical process called the ‘Rio Dialogues’ will take place – a set of stuffy and stilted discussions along ten themes that are highly unlikely to significantly challenge the current economic paradigm that has led us to the desperate economic and ecological crisis point we currently find ourselves facing. This is supposed to be the space for civil society to input into the process, with the irony being that by this point in the process, text is theoretically supposed to be close to finalised. This stands in a stark contrast to the People's Space taking place back in Rio, where social movments from Brazil and beyond will develop their own declaration of what the people of the world really want to see.
 
After clearing the registration process, I headed to a meeting with allies from the global justice movement and we shared what we knew about where things were up to with the offical process. So far, only about a third of the original draft text has been agreed, there is a long way to go to for anything meaningful to come out of this process. What had been a 20 page document now extends to over 80 pages, and is littered with brackets (negotiation speak for where countries are disputing what’s contained in the text) and notes highlighting the vastly differing opinions between countries. There isn’t even agreement from northern governments to restate their commitment to the original Rio Principles agreed twenty years ago.

In the time that has passed since, the world has only moved backwards. The inequality gap has grown, biodiversity has shrunk by over 30 percent, the world has been gripped by a financial crisis and market mechanisms that have supposedly been developed in order to prevent climate change are dismally failing to tackle the climate crisis.

As the night sky draws in, it looks like the negotiations will continue late into the evening. There are rumours that they could continue into the weekend, but no one, not even representatives in the official country delegations, can be sure how things will pan out. Currently, the atmosphere is bleak. Developing countries, negotiating together as a block called the G77, are standing strong. They are refusing to sign up to new concepts such as the undefined 'Green Economy' without developed country governments reconfirming their pre-existing commitments to providing finance and technology transfer, and the concept of equity (in negotiating speak ‘Common But Differential Responsibly’) that grew out of the original Rio declaration twenty years ago.

Meanwhile, developed countries look set to backtrack even on these commitments. What is expected to happen now is for the Brazilian government, as the host country, to rework a new version of a draft text with the aim of putting forward a version that countries may be able to agree on. This could prevent the talks reaching collapse, which will be politically desirable for many governments. However, on the flip side, this will essentially mean aiming for the lowest common denominator so no one has to admit to failure.

As a growing ecological and economic crisis unfolds in front of us, those holding the economic power are so busy protecting their own self interests that they are refusing to even recommit to the basic promises made twenty years ago. It is looking increasingly likely that the only meaningful outcome from Rio+20 process, where we can put any hope for the future we want to see, will be back at the People’s Summit taking place back in the city.