| JOHANNESBURG--Sustainable
development first took its intiative in Stockholm,
1972, when environmental scientists considered
alternate fuels through natural resources. By 1992,
a social
dimension as well as an economic paradigm was added
at the World Summit on Sustainable Development
in Rio. Ten years later in Johannesburg, what has
developed,
or has not developed? Some believe that we are
back at square one.
Professor
Pincas Jawetz, representative of the Sustainable
Energy Institute at the United Nations, discusses
his opinions on this matter with The Earth Times
as well as his proposal,'Prompbook on Sustainable
Development' which suggests restructuring the United
Nations to allow for the creation of a new space
that deals with global issues.
A consultant to the U.S. Department
of Energy, and former member of the Hudson
Institute, he prepared what became a
U.S. Energy Policy based on production
of alternate fuels. He is also a fellow
of UNITAR and Professor of Sustainable
Development at New York University, and
member of the center for UN Reform Education.
In "The Promptbook on Sustainable
Development," sponsored by the Center
for UN Reform Education, Jawetz suggests
that it is the actual structure of the
United Nations that obstructs sustainable
development because the UN is a sovereignty
of nations, each of which has their own
rights and their own perceptions of these
rights. "It is playing democracy
rules with non-democratic states," he
says, and therefore, "the structure
of the UN does not allow for global understanding."
Jawetz
first criticism is with Rio's summit,
claiming that it stood on only
three legs: environment, social understanding
and economic development, and excluded
human rights and good governance, attributes
that he calls "the foundation of
sustainable development."
The promptbook
is what Jawetz proposes is the UN path
to save the global environment
as "it takes the issues and brings
them from the sovereign side to the global
common side."
He describes
the world as consisting of world global
commons: the oceans,
outer space, the atmosphere and Antartica,
and that among the properties owned and
incorporated in these global commons
are all clean air and clean water. He
suggests, "in order to manage these
common properties a Global Commons Administration
(GCA) should be established."
"The goal" he describes "is
not global government, but the establishment
of a separate authority for the global
commons; an authority to have the right
to govern the extraterroritorial areas." And
this new space, he says, must be structured
by the United Nations, functioning as
an independent body in ways similar to
the WTO.
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