The Way Forward: Beyond Agenda 21 (Dodds, 1997)

The Way Forward: Beyond Agenda 21 (Dodds, 1997)

Edited by Felix Dodds

In the years since the Rio Earth Summit, what has been achieved? "The Way Forward" is the essential guide to the progress made at the intergovernmental level and also by national governments, NGOs and grassroots agencies; considers the successes and failures of the last five years; and identifies the main developments that need to be addressed in the future. The contributors come from a variety of disciplines, and all are leading experts in their fields. The essays represent all the interest groups involved - NGOs, governments, international agencies, the business community and community action groups

From Wikipedia, Agenda 21 is a [300 page] non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the United Nations with regard to sustainable development. It is a product of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. It is an action agenda for the UN, other multilateral organizations, and individual governments around the world that can be executed at local, national, and global levels. The "21" in Agenda 21 refers to the 21st Century. It has been affirmed and modified at subsequent UN conferences.

The United States is a signatory country to Agenda 21, but because Agenda 21 is a legally non-binding statement of intent and not a treaty, the United States Senate was not required to hold a formal debate or vote on it. It is therefore not considered to be law under Article Six of the United States Constitution. President George H. W. Bush was one of the 178 heads of government who signed the final text of the agreement at the Earth Summit in 1992

During the last decade, opposition to Agenda 21 has increased within the United States at the local, state, and federal levels. The Republican National Committee has adopted a resolution opposing Agenda 21, and the Republican Party platform stated that "We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty." Several state and local governments have considered or passed motions and legislation opposing Agenda 21. Alabama became the first state to prohibit government participation in Agenda 21. Many other states, including Arizona, are drafting, and close to passing legislation to ban Agenda 21.

Activists, some of whom have been associated with the Tea Party movement by the The New York Times and The Huffington Post, have said that Agenda 21 is a conspiracy by the United Nations to deprive individuals of property rights. Columnists in The Atlantic have linked opposition to Agenda 21 to the property rights movement in the United States. Glenn Beck co-wrote a dystopian novel of this title.

A June 2012 poll of 1,300 United States voters by the American Planning Association found that 9% supported Agenda 21, 6% opposed it, and 85% thought they didn't have enough information to form an opinion.

p.4 Agenda 21 does not constitute a legally binding commitment for anyone... It is designed to stand as a blueprint for sustainable development, providing some ideas on the problems that confront us all and on the ways in which these could be tackled.

p.5 Possibly the biggest failure at Rio was that no new money to implement the programme was pledged. The secretariat was asked at PrepCom II to work out how much it would cost to implement Agenda 21. They estimated that it would take around $625 billion a year, of which $125 billion would come from developed countries transferring funds to the South through increased aid.

p.13 Success next year will depend on finding new resources to fund the implementation of Agenda 21. Barbara Bramble outlines what some of those might be in Chapter 15, but the most obvious is a tax on air fuel.

p.88 the term principles expresses a general truth which guides our actions, serves as a theoretical basis for the various acts of our life, and the application of which to reality produces a given consequence.

[Indicators for Sustainable Development, Gary Lawrence, p.179-189]

p.179 The creators of Agenda 21 concluded that one barrier to a more sustainable future for our species and our planet is the lack of relevant and accessible information upon which to base our decisions and to measure our progress... Programmatically, two different information-related problems were called out for specific attention: information we need which does not exist and information we need which exists but which is not accessible. Most of the responses to this call for more and better information have taken the form of activities to develop 'indicators' and 'sustainability indicators'.

p.179-180 For data to be useful to us, it must describe things which actually matter to our future. Objective and relevant data needs to be converted into information if it is to be useful in the development of sustainability indicators.

p.180 The term information is used to describe the aggregation of data into a form that is both relevant to the issue at hand and accessible to those who are engaged in addressing it.

p.180 Putting Chapter 40 into action in the past five years... organizations... have expended significant intellectual and financial capital in attempts to improve the information base for future decisions and for the development of sustainability indicators.
Many of these efforts have provided dramatic increases in the capacity of communities to understand the causes and effects of the change in relationship to sustainability goals.

p.181 Sustainability indicators are supposed to help people to understand what is happening to those attributes of the earth which make existence possible and pleasurable.

p.181 sustainability indicators... are intended to answer the question: 'How might I know objectively whether things are getting better or getting worse?'

p.181-182 Indicators are intended to provide the quantitative or qualitative measures from which we can deduce the current state, direction and rate of change for the attributes of our existence.

p.183 People are very good at working out solutions when they believe that the problem is theirs to solve.

p.184 If the development of information from the data collected does not relate to the things which people value, then they probably do not matter very much.

p.184,185,186 Indicators can generally be categorized into three types: distinct, comparative, and directional... distinct indicators... measure one thing... They have no normative content; there is no determination whether the number is good or bad, it just is... Comparative Indicators... One way to start supplying meaning to distinct indicators is to compare them to similar indicators in other places... Directional indicators are less focused upon numerical representations and are more focused upon action.

p.185 Most distinct indicators are numerical representations of a condition that do not arouse the lay person to act: they lack the mechanisms which allow individuals to conclude 'intuitively and, therefore, I should do something about this'... In most cases, what is lacking is not data but an understanding of what is important and the resolve to act... Collecting data is not a legitimate end in itself with regard to achieving goals... We must be willing to do something about what we learn.

p.186-187 Directional indicators are less focused upon numerical representations and are more focused upon action. Some people measure progress in relationship to specific standards or benchmarks. Others measure change in relationship to the state of nature which existed when the indicators were first developed. Each group is more concerned with direction than with absolutes... In many cases, it may be more important to know whether you are making progress towards the goal than it it is to know the gap between the current situation and the goal you have set.

p.187 To understand whether the efforts undertaken over time are having an effect, you would focus more on the direction... Through testing, it is possible to determine, for any given period of time, the actual achievements compared to the goal. This information tells you what the situation is, but provides few clues about what to do. If you measured over time and understood whether the rates were improving or getting worse, you would know whether the efforts you are undertaking... were working or not. Knowing the relative change over time... represents more effective information for evaluation and intervention.

p.189 Information that is measured should evoke happiness when the situation improves and unhappiness when it gets worse. If the change doesn't matter... you are not monitoring the right data.

p.189 Without better information it will be mere chance that produces better decisions.

[Perspectives on the Future from the UN: The First Steps from Promise to Performance, Nitin Desai, p.215-224]

p.217 Sustainable development is a complex concept... it is clear that sustainable development requires actions which are oriented around resources, economic sectors and driving forces.

p.220 Sustainability needs to be injected into the agendas of the entities that determine... policies