The idea of diplomacy and sustainable development has
interested me in for quite some time, what happens at the international level through different processes
of globalisation inevitably impact at the local level in so many different ways. I
have tried to address these to a certain degree in my own work that looks at
sustainable development governance from both a global and local
perspective (Borne 2010). From a diplomacy
perspective the closest I’ve got to this is exploring how sustainable
development is understood within the United Nations.
But, there remains
relatively little consistent and rigorous work that is capable of adequately
exploring what sustainable development means
in this context. So it is really
interesting to read Mihaela Papa and Nancy Gleason’s contribution to the
journal Global Environmental Change. I
have previously argued that scholars steer clear of this sort of research
because of the definitional ambiguity of sustainable development which makes
operationalising research in this area challenging to say the least. But the authors do a very good job defining
their terms and creating an effective narrative. Beyond definitions, the other
problem is that once you have managed to define your terms how to you go about
collecting data, what sources do you use that are informative and rigorous? I used a combination of sources under the
banner of ethnographic research. This included
relevant text, speeches, policy documents, anything I could get my hands on
during my secondment to the United Nations Environment Programme. Combined with this, interviews with UN officers, negotiators and
observations of debates and resolutions as they were happening. Papa and Gleason have used communication documents between the coalition
partners, joint statements of the BRIC and BASIC countries.
The authors work focuses on the role of emerging power on
the international stage. Particularly,
Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) and Brazil South Africa, Russia and
China (Basic).
The authors start off by asking the questions:
Can these
countries emerge as a new coalition or negotiation bloc in this field
traditionally organised around the North –South Divide.
And if so do they have the potential to
exercise leadership and address the stalled performance of the sustainable
development agenda?
This is the first time that I have heard the term
sustainable development diplomacy used in this context. A more common term for some of the areas
described in the article is sustainable development governance which does
admittedly encompass a broader literature and field of study. However there is still a hairs breadth
between the two. Here SDD is described as;
‘a process of global policy making with the aim ‘to
produce a guiding framework for a range of policy instruments, financing
mechanisms, organisation’s, rules, procedures negotiations and norms that
regulate the process of sustainable development’ (2)
Take a look at the
similarity in the definition with sustainable development governance .
‘The sum of the many ways that individuals and
institutions, public and private manage their common affairs, a continuing
process through which conflicting and diverse interests may be accommodated and
cooperative action be taken’ (Shridath and Carlsson 1998)
The authors go on to highlight the idea of SDD through
the established conferences and conventions
which I’m not going to elaborate on here and also discuss the potential for Rio+20. The
essence of the paper though is to examine the role, strengths and capacity of
the aforementioned coalitions. They
frame the discussion from a theoretical perspective by exploring the idea of policy
based leadership and then underneath that, structural and instrumental
leadership.
Policy based leadership is seen as the ability to frame
problems, promote particular policy solutions and then implement them.
Structural leadership relates to the issue of power embedded within an actor/state
on the political stage. And instrumental
leadership is the more subtle realm of negotiation and political engineering. Of course in reality and taking a somewhat
constructivist stance policy, structural and instrumental leadership as defined
here are very difficult to actually separate. Regarding the implementation of
sustainable development the authors argues that the BRICS countries lack coherent visions of
sustainable development even in general terms and this is a barrier to taking
the agenda forward. More broadly, this
is symptomatic of the term sustainable development as a whole with definitional
ambiguity being up there as one of its most significant problems, and this is
evident at all levels and in all sectors.
With that said the authors identify two important trends within the
BRICS nations that form a collective identify and ownership of the concept.
- Linking environment and development with issues relating to energy and particularly development of nuclear energy.
- Cooperation on climate issues and the proliferation of renewable energy sources.
The authors then go on explore the relationship between
the BASIC and BRICS countries explaining that the BASIC coalition has a
narrower mandate that BRICS focusing specifically on climate change instead of
broader issues of sustainable development.
It is argued that while the
BRICS’ policy agenda has not moved away much from rhetorical support for
sustainable development, BASIC has been consistently pursuing the principle of
common but differentiated responsibilities.
This recognition is a consistent them throughout North / South analysis as
the South looks to draw out, at its most reductionist level, the inequitable
exploitation of resources by the north and subsequent resultant negative
externalities, however they manifest, that impact on a global and local scale. The
paper acknowledged that these emerging countries ability to impact the politics
of global environmental change is curtailed by the inevitable domestic and
internal pressures that exist within state boundaries growing inequalities in
income and wealth and consolidating complex domestic agendas may constrain
these countries’ joint external influence in responding to global environmental
change.
In sum the paper is a very important addition to the
literature on sustainable development governance and
should encourage more research into the discourses
of sustainable development.
References
Borne, G., (2010) A Framework for Sustainable Global Development and Effective Governance of Risk, New York, Edwin Mellen Press
Papa, M., Gleason, N., (2012) Major Emerging Powers in Sutainable Development Diplomacy Assessing their Leadership Potential, Global Environmental Change 22:915-924
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