IN THE final days of the World Summit, ministers were touting partnerships between industry, government and community groups as the magic ingredient for delivering a green and poverty-free future. But a 91av investigation reveals that many of the claims being made for the scheme are false.
The partnerships initiatives are one of three formal outcomes of the summit, besides the plan of implementation and a ministerial statement. The first batch of projects submitted to the UN offers a bewildering array of ideas. At one end of the scale, a Dutch group has a “bicycle refurbishing initiative” to collect 100,000 old bikes from the rich world, repair them and send them to Africa. At the other end, South African power company Eskom wants approval to create an electricity grid across Africa.
In between are proposals to cut flaring of unwanted gas from oilfields, help small islands keep out alien species, police the trade in fish caught for aquariums, fill Africa with solar cookers and eco-villages, save the orang-utan and much more. Thousands more projects will follow soon. Unlike old-style aid projects, governments claim, they will tap into local enthusiasm and open the chequebooks of industrialists looking to boost their green credentials.
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In some cases, such as mining company Rio Tinto, businesses see the partnerships as a way of cementing good relations with communities within which they work. Or, as with Ikea’s partnership with WWF on buying timber certified as “sustainably harvested”, they may want to be able to tell their customers that their shops sell “green” products. In other cases, though, companies undoubtedly see a profit margin in their collaborations. Nothing in the partnership agreements would prevent this.
Nonetheless, the projects will work well, according to Britain’s Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett, because they will be “locally driven” by communities and directed to achieving the summit’s targets. Business involvement will be philanthropic rather than predatory, she says.
The intended beneficiaries will “own the projects themselves”, says Jan Pronk, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s envoy to the summit. In the past, aid was top-down, he told the summit, but this time round it will be bottom-up. The UN, which is meant to approve and certify all the partnerships, will become “a people’s organisation”.
That, at least, is the rhetoric. 91av’s investigations reveal that UN documents on the first 172 project proposals tell a rather different story. Only a handful even mention community groups in developing countries as partners. And just two – youth networking projects in the Philippines and South Africa – list such groups as a leading partner.
That doesn’t mean the rest are bad projects, but it does undermine the claims that the partnerships are locally driven or a break from the old “top-down” model. And fewer than a dozen are directed at changing consumption patterns in rich countries, which the summit supposedly regards as just as important to the planet’s future as action in the poor world.
Enthusiasts say the partnerships represent a long-awaited recognition that governments cannot do everything, and many Western environment and development groups are keen to tap into the cash and kudos behind the new partnerships industry. Some have already signed up for projects.
But others fear that they are a way for governments to abdicate responsibility and privatise the business of philanthropy. “How can you have a partnership between the polluter and the victim, the land-taker and the people whose land is taken?” asked Chee Yoke Heong of the radical Third World Network based in Malaysia.
Even the conservative US National Wildlife Federation condemned its government’s approach to partnerships such as encouraging water companies to sink wells in Africa as “a formula under which the public owners of water would be coerced into surrendering to private interests”.
The UN says it will approve and oversee every partnership project. It aims to ensure that the projects directly tackle goals agreed in Joburg, and that there are no rip-offs, no corruption and no do-gooders riding roughshod over local communities. Transparency and accountability, targets and time frames are the buzzwords. Yet how this will be put into practice is far from clear. The rules for approving projects are still being worked out.
Even if a workable set of rules can be agreed, there is doubt about whether they will actually be applied. The US is already being accused of flouting the UN’s right to assess the partnership projects. When USAID administrator Andrew Natsios answered questions on whether the UN would vet his new billion-dollar portfolio of partnership projects involving water, health and housing, he would accept only that they were “subject to Congressional scrutiny”. Yolanda Kakabadse, a former environment minister of Ecuador, accuses the US of failing to pursue the summit’s aims in the partnerships it is setting up. “They are hijacking the summit,” she says.
Some also doubt whether partnership projects really represent a new approach to solving the world’s problems. Kakabadse, who is now president of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), thinks they are old hat. “IUCN has been doing partnerships like this since 1948,” she says. “For them to mean anything different, there must be new funding.”
And the omens aren’t good. One of the first partnerships is already failing. The Johannesburg Legacy project, led by the IUCN, aimed to raise $5 million from delegates, governments and corporations at the summit. The money was to be spent on solar energy and forestry schemes in South Africa that would soak up the estimated 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted by delegates attending the summit. So far it has raised just $300,000.