Georgios Kostakos, Secretariat of the Global Sustainability Panel

Seventeen months after its launch by the UN Secretary-General in August 2010, the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability (GSP) is ready to issue its report. It took six meetings of the panel members, and many more discussions between their sherpas and advisers to get to this point. A large number of organisations and individuals, beyond the Panel and the Secretariat that supported it, were consulted and offered inputs during this period, including civil society, directly or through UN-NGLS. Was it worth the effort?

It is up to each person to judge that, once the report is out. Time will tell whether the Panel’s recommendations will have a lasting effect on Rio+20 and beyond. This brief article aspires to provide some insights on the thinking of the Panel as it advanced in its work and to indicate focus areas of its recommendations, without spoiling the excitement of their publication in the next few days.

To start with, the Panel was given an almost impossible task by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to “reflect on and formulate a new vision for sustainable growth and prosperity, along with mechanisms for achieving it”. Some twenty-five years after publication of the Brundtland Report, and twenty after Rio, could any Panel, no matter how distinguished and knowledgeable, solve the problems of sustainable development that had not been solved over all of these years? The Panel members agreed early enough with Dr. Brundtland, physically present and fully engaged as a member herself, that there was no need to reinvent the wheel. There is a sustainable development paradigm, which identifies the three dimensions or pillars of sustainability as economic, social, and environmental. The problem over the years has been the lack of implementation, in an integrated way, due to the lack of political will, and a silo approach that emphasises individual issues and not their interconnections.

If there is no need for a new paradigm of sustainable development, what can be done to strengthen and implement the old one? The Panel phrased its vision of what needs to be achieved as follows: “To eradicate poverty and reduce inequality, make growth inclusive, and production and consumption more sustainable while combating climate change and respecting a range of other planetary boundaries.”

To take the world closer to this vision, the Panel identified the need for concrete actions in three areas: empowering people to make sustainable choices, moving towards a sustainable economy, and strengthening institutional governance.

Empowering individuals entails, among other things, delivering on the fundamentals of development, such as eradicating poverty, promoting gender equality, advancing education and building skills that enable all of society to address today’s challenges and capitalise on opportunities. It also encompasses creating employment opportunities, especially for women and youth, and building resilience through universal access to the basics like food, water and energy, as well as safety nets, disaster risk reduction and adaptation planning.

Achieving sustainability requires a transformation of the global economy. That means incorporating social and environmental costs in the pricing of goods and services, as well as addressing market failures; providing incentives based on sustainable development criteria in investment and financial transactions; increasing finance for sustainable development from public and private sources, as well as partnerships; and changing the way we measure progress and growth.

Finally, an effective framework of institutions and decision-making processes should support efforts to deliver sustainable development at the local, national, regional and global level. Improving coherence and accountability would mean going beyond the fragmented institutions established around single-issue silos at all levels. A set of universal goals covering all three dimensions of sustainable development, as well as their interconnections would galvanise individual and collective action, and could be coupled with a new commitment to revitalise and reform the international institutional framework, including discontinuing existing bodies and creating new ones, as necessary.

These are some of the considerations that guided the deliberations of the Panel. The Panel’s concrete recommendations will become available at the time of the launch of its report, currently scheduled to take place on 30 January 2012 in Addis Ababa. Hoping for a positive reception, what is most important is putting all this into practice afterwards. That is where civil society can make a big difference, by encouraging and holding accountable governments and businesses, but also by taking direct action at a collective and individual level. Sustainable development will only become a reality when each one of us internalises and expresses it through private choices and public deeds.