Marrakech Advisory Committee meeting

Minutes and decades

The minutes from the May 8 Advisory Committee meeting are out and available.  There the objectives of the Advisory Committee were explained: (1) to give ownership of the Marrakech Process and 10YFP to the countries, (2) to better engage stakeholders in the Marrakech Process, and (3) to ensure the openness and transparency of the process of elaboration of the 10YFP.

Get with the program(s)!

Arab Hoballah (UNEP) also described the main objective of the 10YFP being “to promote SCP to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation while also reducing social inequity.” He also stressed the need to identify the “key programmes” that should be included in the framework. This point is one which NGOs have been raising ever since the Marrakech Process began, which for some reason has been on the backburner for the past five years. However, there has been a tendency to veer away from the original WSSD directive: That these programmes are to be “in support of regional and national initiatives to accelerate the shift towards sustainable consumption and production.” Adriana Zacarias described the identification of these core programs as the main question. The obvious question that follows is: What kind of support from the UN system is needed by regional and national initiatives?

This question needs to delve deep into the diversity and complexity of stakeholder and country interests and priorities. This requires more than consensus statements on generalities but precise identification of services that the UN system can realistically provide to a range of different national and regional initiatives.

Yet this question is too often pushed aside in favor of such discussions as “how to better promote the Marrakech Process.” This easily leads to a classic institutional circle in which the discussion of means becomes its own end. Fortunately there is now “a sense of urgency” given the review of progress on this framework takes place next spring. After six years of discussions the result still seems confused and unfocused. Perhaps this will all change when the new frameworkpaper (due in June) finally comes out. We will see.

Point of the programs: support

In Stockholm, NGO Forum participants discussed this problem and agreed the focus needed to be on the task of defining and designing programs providing practical support to NGOs, business and governments in different countries and regions. For those of us engaged in national and regional initiatives and still waiting patiently for this active support, the discussion is quite basic. The needs have been articulated repeatedly for years — we need technical assistance, finance support, opportunities for multistakeholder dialogue (esp. with governments), informational databases, as well as independent monitoring and evaluation. As to the various Taskforces, a key question posed to them was what kinds of support would they provide to national and regional efforts addressing those issues? The so-called “framework” was more a question of the institutional cooperation and management of those programs, ensuring that useful support was indeed being effectively provided.

To some degree this emphasis is now appearing more in the discussions, yet the majority of attention appears to be more on process (i.e., promotion of the Marrakech Process) than actual program design. Is it possible this work, within the politically charged UN context, is too…sensitive?

What can we expect?

It is hard to say what we can realistically expect from the CSD 18-19 sessions. Some think we should all be calling for an ambitious international Program of Action on SCP rather than a more modest but possibly more practical set of support programs. Others think we should be calling on governments to simply meet the commitments they agreed to in 1992 in Agenda 21, such as the call for each country “to develop a domestic policy framework that will encourage a shift to more sustainable patterns of production and consumption” — not to mention “in the review of the implementation of Agenda 21, an assessment of the progress achieved in developing these national policies and strategies.” Agenda 21 also called for “new concepts of wealth and prosperity” and “the evolution of new systems of national accounts,” along with actions on government procurement, pricing, labeling, packaging, and other familiar areas. To be fair, Agenda 21’s “programme of action” on sustainable production and consumption had its gaps and weaknesses, yet it remains the actual benchmark for assessing progress — especially now that implementation of those governmental and UN commitments has essentially been deferred for 20 years.

While waiting for more in-depth discussion of meaningful support programs, we are hearing about the “branding of the Marrakech Process” with a PR strategy “involving journalists to write articles on the achievements and best practices of the Marrakech Task Forces and various stakeholders.” Hmmm. Maybe we should withhold judgement until we finally see the long-awaited first draft, which was scheduled for release by now. Hopefully this document will have the substance we have been waiting for. Hopefully we will find more than PR.

New Marrakech Process website

And for those who have not already discovered it, there is now an official “Marrakech Process” website, which provides a helpful new resource and reference point. One disappointment, speaking of “support,” is finding no reference or link to either our Marrakech NGO Forum website or blog — despite, strangely enough, a whole page “About the NGO Forum.” While the text cites our NGO statement in Stockholm, there are no direct references to the people and process following up on this. Instead of highlighting the slowly growing community of NGOs associated with the Forum, we are defined here as “a space.” While there is no space on the page highlighting our efforts to build a consultative process encouraging input into the Process,  there is room to fill a quarter of the page with a picture of a polar bear. Please! If you want us NGOs to be engaged in this process, give us a bit more support here for our efforts!