APPENDIX 5
Memorandum from Tearfund
1. INTRODUCTION
Tearfund is a UK Christian relief and development
organisation, working with over 400 partner groups in 90 countries
to tackle the causes and effects of poverty. At the World Summit
on Sustainable Development Tearfund and partners worked on a number
of issues including water and sanitation, and climate change and
disasters. Our experience of the Summit, including representing
development NGOs on the UK government delegation at two of the
PrepComs, forms the basis of our submission to the EAC on the
impact of the World Summit on UK policy.
2. THE OVERALL
PERFORMANCE AND
STRATEGY OF
THE UK DELEGATION
AT THE
SUMMIT AND
THE DEGREE
OF INVOLVEMENT
AND INFLUENCE
OF NON-GOVERNMENT
STAKEHOLDERS AT
THE EVENT
2.1 UK delegation general performance, and
co-operation with NGOs
The UK delegation put in a very strong performance
at the Summit. We observed the delegation to be well organized,
coordinating effectively among themselves in a fast moving and
complex situation, while also sustaining regular external coordination
meetings with the EU, NGOs, media etc. The UK government team
and NGO representatives on the delegation worked notably long
hours. There may have been occasional breakdowns, but this Summit
was particularly difficult logistically and politically and it
is hard to see how the UK delegation could have worked much harder
and much more effectively.
It is important to note, too, that the UK delegation
was well organized and accessible to NGOs. The government delegation
provided daily scheduled briefings to non-governmental actors,
led by a senior official and very often with at least one minister
present. These were characterized by an openness of information
transfer and the delegation's willingness to engage in genuine
dialogue and work together where views coincided. Outside the
daily briefings, government officials also displayed a considerable
willingness to listen to NGO views and to collaborate actively
with NGO representatives, in and around the negotiating rooms,
to achieve shared policy objectives. Tearfund partners noted with
some envy the degree of access that British NGOs had to our own
government and the degree of openness with which the UK government
related to us.
Tearfund representatives were present as NGO
representatives on the UK government delegation for two of the
Preparatory Committees for the Summit. It is our view that the
government delegation was better organized and accessible to NGOs
at the Summit than it was at the PrepComs.
It is also important to note that, on request
from the Development and Environment Working Group of BOND (the
major UK development NGO network), DEFRA funded a part-time administrative
position to assist with the coordination of UK NGO activity around
the Summit and, in particular, to provide a clear channel of communication
between the government and the UK development and environment
NGO communities. Tearfund provides a Co-chair for the Development
and Environment Working Group (DEG) and has been closely involved
in the NGO coordination project around the Summit. Much of what
the DEG achieved in terms of engaging a wider range of NGOs in
the Summit, and enabling frequent, coordinated NGO dialogue with
the government, would not have been possible without the close
cooperation and funding from DEFRA.
2.2 UK performance on water and sanitation
At the Summit the UK government showed that
they were very committed to the issue of access to water and sanitation.
This is an issue of fundamental importance to the poor, with lack
of access to sanitation their most pressing environmental problem.
The government pushed hard for agreement on a new time-bound,
target on sanitation to accompany the Millennium Development Goal
on water, and was ultimately successful. It is highly unlikely
that this new target would have been agreed without the strong
commitment of the UK and the EU. Furthermore, a commitment to
the Millennium Development Goal on water was restated at the Summit,
and there was a recommitment to an older target on water resource
management plans. Again, Tearfund feels that this success was
largely due to the commitment of the UK and EU to water issues.
Tearfund campaigned and lobbied hard for the
UK government to give water and sanitation a high priority at
the Summit. The government was responsive to this work, in particular
the Water Matters campaign which called for amongst other things
a new target on sanitation to be agreed at the Summit. Tearfund
has good reason to believe that this campaign significantly influenced
the UK government to prioritise this issue.
The Plan of Implementation failed to live up
to its name, and it was clear that this would be the case early
on in the preparatory process. We commend the EU's response to
this problem in relation to water: in the absence of a definitive
Plan of Implementation it responded with the EU "Water for
Life" initiative. Tearfund believes that this was, strategically,
a wise decision as long as the initiative can live up to its objectives
(see section C). The UK took and continues to take a major role
in the development of this initiative.
We do have one area of concern about the UK's
performance on water and sanitation. One of the many problems
with water and sanitation policy is the blanket promotion of the
private sector/private sector participation (PSP) by donors as
the solution to the poor's lack of access to water and sanitation.
Tearfund believes that this approach is unproven
and research conducted by Tearfund and other NGOs shows that PSP
has so far been an unsustainable sector reform in most cases.
Language giving primacy to PSP above other types of partnerships
was agreed in the Plan of Implementation and this was a major
disappointment. We believe it would have been better to promote
innovative partnerships generally and a stronger focus on building
the capacity of developing country governments. We regretted that
during Summit negotiations the UK government did not have a clear
or strong position on this issue.
2.3 UK delegation strategy
The government's overall strategy at the Summit
is harder to assess (and needs to be distinguished from its strategy
in the approach to the Summit). Different departments were clear
about their objectives, but it was difficult to know exactly what
the government's strategy for achieving them at the Summit was,
as it was not prepared to be fully open about its bottom line,
how far it was prepared to go to defend a position, what it was
and was not prepared to trade off and so on. This is perhaps understandable,
given that tense negotiations were in train and that releasing
such information could have prejudiced its negotiating position.
However, one can deduce that the UK government
had decided to prioritise a few areas where it believed there
was reasonable hope of delivering a result and then focused its
energy and influence on these. Such areas included the need for
a target on sanitation, the launching of an EU partnership agreement
on water, and the initiative to bring about transparency in revenue
flows from extractive industries. If these were among the key
objectives, then the strategy at the Summit would appear to have
been at least partly successful.
3. HOW FAR
THE UK GOVERNMENT
CAPITALIZED ON
THE SUMMIT
TO RAISE
AWARENESS OF
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
ISSUES AT
HOME
While we believe that the government performed
well at the Summit, we are disappointed at its response to the
Summit as an awareness-raising opportunity at home. In many respects
the UK government had many key elements in place to enable it
to use the Summit for awareness-raising purposes:
— The Prime Minister was one of the
first heads of government to commit to attending the Summit, almost
guaranteeing a high level of media attention.
— The Summit was being prepared against
a background of heightened international political commitment
to the Millennium Development Goals, providing a potentially inspiring
goal to rally the public around.
— The Department for International
Development had a clearly announced objective of ensuring that
the summit was not just "environmental" but had poverty
at the centre. This drive would have been greatly reinforced by
increasing public pressure for the same.
— DFID had recently had its remit for
development awareness reinforced by the new International Development
Act, so the Summit would have given DFID in particular an ideal
opportunity to mark this fact with a major development awareness
programme.
— The Summit agenda itself included
discussion of sustainable consumption and production—an
issue where public awareness and commitment is clearly needed
to make progress.
Together, these and other factors would have
provided the UK government with a very firm peg on which to hang
a comprehensive awareness-raising programme. This could have focused
on the linkages between rich and poor worlds and between environmental
degradation and poverty, promoting concrete actions by individuals
and communities to address these. This unique opportunity was
largely squandered.
It would not be fair to say that the UK government
took no action related to awareness-raising. Rather the government
did too little, too late. DEFRA, for example, formed a communication
strategy towards the Summit, inviting NGO participation. It funded
a consultancy to run a web-based debate on the Summit. The consultancy
was also tasked to set up a web-based information exchange about
UK participants in the summit, their analysis, key issues etc,
to facilitate media contact with participants in advance. However
the DEFRA initiatives seemed to be of a limited vision which failed
to see or respond to the magnitude of the opportunity. Moreover
they were only launched in the last few months or weeks before
the Summit. Our view is that this probably allowed insufficient
warning for key non-governmental actors to ensure their consistent
engagement, and insufficient time to create a positive wave of
public opinion about the need for sustainable development at home
and abroad.
Discussions with DEFRA officials at the time
suggested that this department was possibly hampered by the timing
of the creation of DEFRA and consequent uncertainty surrounding
budgets. However, it is surprising, particularly given the Prime
Minister's early commitment to the Summit, that there was not
a more concerted and better resourced interdepartmental awareness-raising
plan in operation at least a year before the Summit. DEFRA was
known to be the lead department for the Summit and certainly acknowledged
poverty issues as a key part of the Summit agenda. However, we
did not perceive DEFRA as providing a clear, compelling and timely
government vision for the Summit. It is possible that DEFRA was
hampered by the range of departments involved in the WSSD; we
believe it could have been helped by a stronger lead from the
Prime Minister, who, despite his early commitment to the Summit,
was less visible and audible in the lead up to the Summit than
we would have wished.
4. HOW THE
COMMITMENTS MADE
AT THE
SUMMIT COULD/SHOULD
RESHAPE UK POLICIES/STRATEGIES
OR ACT
AS THE
CATALYST FOR
NEW INITIATIVES
4.1 General comment
There were a number of key commitments at the
Summit. Particularly important for Tearfund were the commitment
to a target to halve the proportion of people without access to
sanitation by 2015 and also to develop a plan of action on sustainable
consumption and production. Important voluntary initiatives to
which the UK subscribed are the initiative for greater transparency
in the use of revenues from extractive industries and the EU's
"Water for Life" initiative.
In general we believe these should influence
policy by:
— The UK government establishing clear
UK and, if possible, international processes for delivering these
commitments. For example, there is as yet no agreed process by
which the international community is to develop a plan of action
on sustainable consumption and production. The UK government should
advocate for the earliest possible clarification of an international
process, and be prepared to fund it. It should also set a date
for launching a serious UK programme for sustainable consumption
and production, and set about developing this with urgency.
— The UK government reviewing its level
of resourcing of the areas where it made commitments at the Summit
and readjusting funding accordingly. We would accept that in some
areas the best way of funding a sector such as water and sanitation
provision might be through country-owned poverty reduction strategies.
But we believe there may need to be a considerable raising of
the profile of water and sanitation provision within such strategies
if the targets are to be reached. How to do this without undermining
country ownership is a dilemma, but it is one that the government
and others will have to make greater progress in solving.
4.2 Water and sanitation
Tearfund believes that the commitments and priority
given to water, sanitation and water resources at the Summit should
be matched by an increased budget for corresponding programmes
within the DFID budget. We are concerned that over the last few
years spending on water issues has decreased. This trend should
be reversed.
We appreciate and support the focus that DFID
is giving to strategic water policy issues such as the EU "Water
for Life" initiative launched at the Summit. We hope that
this initiative will be one that attempts to improve the coordination
and coherence of international water policy. This depends to a
large extent on the strength of the individual commitment of each
member state and we hope that the UK government will lead by example
in this regard.
4.3 Climate change and disasters
Donors and governments are beginning to realise
the very real threat that climate change poses to achievement
of the Millennium Development Goals. Evidence of this awareness
is revealed in the discussion document "Poverty and Climate
Change" recently produced by 10 international agencies (including
the UK government) and launched at the eighth Conference of the
Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change. This document states, "Climate change is expected
to have both direct and indirect adverse effects on poverty and
so poses grave additional challenges to the achievement of the
Millennium Development Goals and related national poverty eradication
and sustainable development objectives."
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change
predict that climate change will increase the incidence and severity
of floods and droughts worldwide. Tearfund is concerned about
this prediction; we have already observed a rising number of extreme
weather events in the countries our partners work in, and have
witnessed their effect on the poor in terms of loss of life and
livelihoods.
Tearfund repeatedly raised the issue of climate-related
disasters at the PrepComs and the Summit itself, and urged governments
to award a much higher priority to community-level disaster mitigation
and preparedness in their negotiations and in the Plan of Implementation.
We are pleased that attention was given to climate change adaptation
at the Summit and that global agreements were made on disaster
prevention (detailed largely in paragraph 35 of the Plan of Implementation).
However, these important agreements lack targets and timeframes,
and as such it is hard to see how they will become anything more
than rhetoric unless national governments—including the
UK—take concrete steps to factor them into their policies
and co-owned development strategies.
To expand on this, the UK government (DFID)
has recently been the subject of an inquiry by the International
Development Committee into Global Climate Change and Sustainable
Development, to which Tearfund supplied written and oral evidence.
In this evidence we noted the growing numbers of poor affected
by disasters and urged the government to intensify its disaster
mitigation and preparedness work—especially at community
level—within vulnerable countries. The IDC included such
recommendations in its report. While DFID acknowledged in its
written response to this report that climate change will severely
affect much of the world's poor, it failed to inspire our confidence
that it will match such concerns with intensified efforts to reduce
the poor's vulnerability to disasters. Furthermore, in the "Poverty
and Climate Change" document to which DFID contributed, it
is stated that meeting the MDGs by 2015 will be difficult "Unless
concrete and urgent steps are undertaken to reduce vulnerability
and enhance adaptive capacity of the poorest . . .". Again,
in our opinion, satisfactory evidence that the UK government plans
to take these steps is as yet not forthcoming.
In conclusion, the emphasis placed on disaster
prevention at the Summit reveals that this issue is of global
concern, not least to the most vulnerable nations. Tearfund believes
that the Summit agreements on disaster prevention should act as
a catalyst for change within the UK government's overseas development
policy, inspiring new action and new funding for climate change
adaptation and disaster prevention.
5. HOW FAR
THE GOVERNMENT
HAS MAINTAINED
STAKEHOLDER DIALOGUE
POST JOHANNESBURG
TO INFORM
ITS IMPLEMENTATION
OF SUMMIT
COMMITMENTS
There has been considerable communication with
some government departments. DEFRA, for example, distributed a
list of contact points, post-Summit, in the light of many staff
moving on to other posts. DFID invited an NGO representative (Tearfund's
Advocacy Director) to participate in its in-house environmental
conference, shortly after the Summit, where Summit follow-up was
a major item in the programme. Tearfund has also participated
in other meetings with both DEFRA and DFID, post Johannesburg,
regarding government follow-up. These have been useful to exchange
analysis of the outcomes and clarify next steps.
Our perception from these meetings, however,
is that the government as a whole has lacked—until recently
at least—a clear, comprehensive, interdepartmental follow-up
plan. To be fair to the government, it is not surprising if after
such a complex Summit with so many departments involved there
is need of a period of assessment and regrouping before deciding
on the way ahead. Non-governmental organisations find themselves
in a similar position. However, clarity on a number of issues
is now urgently required. These include:
— Identifying and publishing the appropriate
international policy process by which the UK government intends
to follow up each of the commitments.
— Identifying a lead UK department
with an ample remit to advocate for and coordinate sustainable
development at home and abroad.
— How the UK government will report
to the public on the Summit before all momentum and profile is
lost.
We recommend that the UK government move swiftly
to report to the public on the outcome of the Summit, drawing
attention to practical action that individuals and communities
can take, as well as action it intends to take. One opportunity
to do this might be the forthcoming report on the UK's Sustainable
Development strategy although this is hamstrung by the weakness
of the international dimension in the current strategy.
We would further recommend that when the strategy
itself is reviewed in the Spring of 2003, it should incorporate
a much greater international dimension and seek to make clear
links whenever possible between poverty and environment, at home
and abroad. It should also explicitly incorporate action on key
commitments arising from the WSSD and other international conferences
over the last decade at which the UK government has made significant
commitments.
November 2002
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