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Abstract
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the United Nations (UN) Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and its preparatory meetings, we examine how the official UN ‘participatory’ process for engaging civil society in Rio+20 negotiations simultaneously enabled and disciplined contestation through processes such as seeking consensus around a common statement, professionalizing civil society representatives and controlling protests in order to protect broad access to negotiations. We document how, in doing so, the official participatory process undermined the right to voice diverse positions. We also find that Southern access to negotiations was limited by lack of funding, human resources, location and language. Finally, we illustrate how a group of non-governmental organizations based primarily in the Global South utilized the official UN Major Groups ‘participatory process’ to build alliances to protect resource rights language in the negotiating text. Ultimately, we argue that, through the struggle to build alliances, activists critical of the green economy became enlisted in reproducing its hegemony.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank private donor Ron Oehl, the Mount Holyoke College Dean of Faculty and the Miller Worley Center for the Environment for their generous support of our research, Emma Puka-Beals for her assistance with data collection, and Eskedar Gessesse, Iman Abubaker and Shreeya Joshi for their help in data analysis and editing. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Finally, we extend our appreciation to the numerous people who shared their time and insights with us during our research. Their dedication and willingness to put in long hours in order to improve global environmental governance is inspiring.
Notes
1Recognizing the problematic nature of the term ‘civil society’, we follow the UN Major Groups practice and use the term to refer to non-national state actors, including business and local government. We use the term ‘NGO' when we are specifically referring to non-profit organizations.
2The ALBA nations include Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, San Vincent and The Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, and Venezuela.
3CEE entails an innovative method that combines collaborative ‘rapid or time-constrained ethnographic assessment [ … ] with institutional and organizational ethnography’ in order to ‘capture engagements between scientific experts, decision-makers, and private sector and NGO actors in the context of a time-condensed meeting’ (Brosius and Campbell Citation2010, 248; see also Campbell et al. Citation2014; Corson et al. Citation2014).
4The preparatory meetings began in December 2010, but we only conducted research at those between December 2011 and June 2012.
5In using the term ‘resistance’, we refer to a diversity of forms of ‘pushing back’, or the multitude of ways in which diverse sets of actors use conferences to contest or reshape hegemonic discourse. Following Hollander and Einwohner (Citation2004), we understand resistance as relational and socially constructed, entailing both action and opposition, and not always overt or recognized. Furthermore, in emphasizing the complexities of social interactions, we hope to avoid any tendency toward a binary between resistance and domination (Brown Citation1996) or the romance of resistance (Sparke Citation2008).
6The team was comprised of a professor and five undergraduate students, and we worked as part of a larger ‘umbrella’ team that included four other professors and three graduate students (Campbell et al. Citation2013; Wilshusen and MacDonald Citationin prep.).
7In order to protect confidentiality, we refer to interviewees by general position, rather than by name.
8Interview with an NGO representative, 20 June 2012.
9UNDESA compiled the initial zero draft from 677 submissions received from political groups, member states, UN organizations, intergovernmental organizations and civil society. The majority of the submissions, 493 (or 73 percent) were from civil society. The Bureau then created a massive compilation document, which was released in January, 2012 (UN Citation2012a).
10UN–civil society liaison, MGs Training Session, 12 June 2012.
11Interview with an OP, 22 June 2012.
12Interview with an NGO representative, 22 March 2012.
13Interview with an NGO representative, 4 May 2012.
14Interview with an NGO representative, 21 March 2012.
15NGO representative, Side Event, ‘Towards the People's Summit at Rio+20: alternative civil society perspectives on the zero draft’, 23 March 2012.
16Side Event, ‘What Rio+20 must do to achieve the future we want’, 13 June 2012.
17As is normal in UN negotiations, simultaneous translation into all of the official UN languages was available to delegates, but text negotiation was conducted exclusively in English. While diplomats usually have language training and/or translators readily available to them, members of civil society who do not speak English find it challenging to participate in the process.
18Interview with an NGO representative, 3 May 2012.
19Interview with an NGO representative, 22 March 2012.
20Interview with an OP, 22 June 2012.
21UN–civil society liaison, MG Training Session, 19 March 2012.
22UN–civil society liaison, MG Morning Meeting, 22 June 2012.
23UN–civil society liaison, MG Morning Meeting, 18 June 2012.
24UN–civil society liaison, MG Morning Meeting, 16 June 2012.
25Interview with an NGO representative, 20 June 2012.
26Interview with a UN–civil society liaison, 2 June 2012.
27Interview with an OP, 22 June 2012.
28Interview with an OP, 22 June 2012.
29Interview with a UN–civil society liaison, 2 June 2012; MGs – Rio+20 common statement discussion paper, Final, endorsed version, 19 June 2012.
30UN–civil society liaison, MGs Training Session, 19 March 2012.
31Interview with a UN–civil society liaison, 2 June 2012.
32UN–civil society liaison, MGs Training Session, 19 March 2012.
33Brazilian civil society facilitator for Rio+20, Side Event, ‘Towards the People's Summit at Rio+20: alternative civil society perspectives on the zero draft’, 23 March 2012.
34NGO representative, Side Event, ‘Towards the People;s Summit at Rio+20: alternative civil society perspectives on the zero draft’, 23 March 2012.
35NGO representative, Side Event, ‘What Rio+20 must do to achieve the future we want’, 13 June 2012.
36UN–civil society liaison, MG Morning Meeting, 19 March 2012.
37NGO MG representative, Green Economy Press Conference, 4 May 2012.
38Representative from the Office of High Commissioner on Human Rights, Side Event, ‘Roundtable discussion on rights at risk in the Green Economy’, 24 April 2012.
39NGO representative, Press Conference, ‘No sustainable development without human rights – honoring Principle One’, 19 June 2012.
40Interview with an NGO representative, 4 May 2012.
41Interview with an NGO representative, 22 March 2012.
42NGO representative, Side Event, ‘Round table discussion on rights at risk in the Green Economy’, 24 April 2012.
43NGO representative, Side Event, ‘Towards the People's Summit at Rio+20: alternative civil society perspectives on the zero draft', 23 March 2012.
44NGO representative, Side Event, ‘The need for a rights-based approach to sustainable development’, 14 June 2012.
45NGO representative, Side Event, ‘What Rio+20 must do to achieve the future we want’, 13 June 2012.
46NGO MGs Representative, Women, NGO, and Indigenous Peoples Major Group Press Conference, 4 May 2012.
Additional information
Catherine Corson is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College. As a political ecologist, she has conducted field research in Zimbabwe, Australia and Madagascar. Her research uses ethnography to explore the rise of market-based environmentalism and associated shifts in environmental governance in case studies from rural villages to international policy arenas. Prior to receiving her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, she spent a decade working as an environment and development policy analyst and consultant.
Bridget Brady is recent graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where she majored in environmental studies and sustainable development. After graduation, she worked with Greenpeace in New Zealand.
Ahdi Zuber Mohammed works with the United Nations Environment Programme Regional Office for North America. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a major in environmental studies. During her undergraduate studies she explored the implications of land grabs on customary land rights in Ethiopia.
Julianna Lord currently works in clean technology at Next Step Living in Boston, MA. Prior to this she conducted advocacy and policy research on domestic hunger, poverty and racism issues as an Emerson National Hunger Fellow in San Diego, CA and Washington, DC. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in economics and minor in development studies.
Angela Kim is an analyst for business intelligence software at a healthcare consulting and technology firm based in Washington, DC. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a concentration on environment and development and participated in the School for International Training's resource management programme in the Amazonas region of Brazil.