Five years after Rio: too little, too slow.

• Author: Schmidt, Kira
• Position: 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

When representatives of 178 nations and thousands of non-governmental organizations convened in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Environment and Development in June 1992, their goal was to determine how to respond swiftly and effectively to mounting environmental and social crises occurring across the globe. Five years after the disbanding of that historic Earth Summit, most of those crises persist, and some have worsened. Around the world, people are anxiously asking: What was accomplished?

The main outcome of the Earth Summit was the adoption of Agenda 21 - a voluminous 40-chapter plan of action for sustainable development. To assure that this ponderous document would lead to real action after all the delegates had gone home, the representatives in Rio also called for the creation of a UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), an intergovernmental body whose job would be to monitor and catalyze implementation of the Earth Summit accords. (See Hilary F. French, "Hidden Success at Rio," September/October 1992.)

The CSD held its first meeting in 1993. To some observers, the new institution was an immediate disappointment, because it had no power to extract binding commitments from governments, or to enforce agreements once they were made. And it had no actual programs of its own, "on the ground." Others, however, anticipated that the CSD would serve as a high-level political forum, in which each nation's progress (or lack of thereof) could be exposed to the power of public pressure. The record of the past five years suggests that both of these views have been to some degree confirmed: the CSD has indeed seemed powerless at times - yet it has also managed to shift the light in which many global issues are now seen.

This June, the UN General Assembly is convening a special session to assess the Commission's progress and to consider its future. The progress is hard to measure, because the CSD's role is not to implement sustainable development directly, so much as to spur other institutions (including both governments and non-governmental organizations), which can be exasperatingly slow to act. But the CSD can claim the following accomplishments:

* It has spurred national governments to submit reports to account for their progress in implementing Agenda 21 at the national level. Despite the reluctance of many governments at the Earth Summit to agree to a national reporting requirement, 74 countries and 10 regional organizations have...