Implementing Agenda 21

The Unsaid in UNCED

by Nigel Cross and Kitty Warnock

When a development project goes wrong, and leaves people and communities worse off (which is often), there is always someone who can point to the absurdity of the enterprise in the first place. How could the irrigation engineers have failed to realize that water extraction from the lake would lead to salinisation (AC: can't find this in dictionary: salination, maybe?) and desertification? How could the aid agency have been so dumb as to send food to an area of surplus production; alternatively, how could they have been so naive as to purchase food locally, enriching an already fat merchant class? Corruption aside, someone thought they were making the right decision, based on the best available information at the time.

"The best available information" is a euphemism for a pragmatic, technocratic bottom-line that justifies implementation of the project in the absence of more convincing data. Did Shell act on the best available information when it decided to dump the Brent Spar oil platform at sea? They claimed so, but campaigners thought otherwise;the evidence was partial, aquatic life had not been consulted (reword). In the end, even the campaigners got it wrong and were forced to apologize. The right information is hard to come by and can be interpreted differently by different interest groups.

Information production is no longer enough. Information needs to be debated, set in a socio-cultural context; it must be the result of a participatory process, as opposed to a window-dressing exercise in "consultation."

The UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) made a stab at linking information with participation. The Rio Declaration roundly stated that, "Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development," and went on to highlight the role of information. "States," it said, "shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available." Public awareness is consistently cited throughout Agenda 21 as a necessary condition for the realization of UNCED goals;sustainable production and consumption, improving the status of women, promoting health, and reducing the impact of natural disasters.

So far so good. The UNCED emphasis on governments' responsibility to inform citizens goes some way towards acknowledging that freedom of information is a prerequisite for public debate. But it is a partial, didactic, top-down approach that does not distinguish between public awareness and public understanding and involvement. Awareness without understanding, and a focus on problems without an informed debate on appropriate solutions, can lead to pressure for simplistic policies that can often do more harm than good.

Agenda 21 remains vague about the mechanisms for involving stakeholders in decision making. Perhaps because of the legion of special interest groups and non-government organizations that lobbied UNCED, there is the usual exhortation to strengthen the role of NGOs: "Independence," says Chapter 27, "is a major attribute of NGOs and is the precondition of real participation." This assumes that NGO independence leads to freedom of action, creativity in researching and seeking solutions, and a willingness to gather a plurality of views. It certainly implies that the state is not always right; civil society is more likely to be right-on.

But the umbilical connection between a vibrant civil society and an independent mass media is not addressed in Agenda 21. In Europe or North America, governments are accustomed to the power of the Fourth Estate. Electoral victory or defeat is attributed to media bias. Public and judicial enquiries, consultation processes and lobbyists all assume the media will play a crucial role in informing and influencing public opinion. But for all the Western rhetoric about "good governance," the critical link between media pluralism and "good governance" or "good development" has been consistently understated.

It is, of course, sensible to approach the media with care. In developing countries there is often a legacy of government-controlled media, and the word "journalist" may smell of the secret state, or of government press releases. Journalistic standards dictated by a ministry of information or security do not meet the needs of civil society. But this scene is changing in some developing countries, for example in francophone West Africa, where there is a burgeoning independent press. These developments and the influences that bring them about need to be encouraged as an important element of the development dynamic.

After UNCED there has been some donor and agency recognition that information should not only be top-down and didactic. Democratic decision-making requires something more: locally generated information, and affirmative action in favour of Southern perspectives receiving greater representation in the North. Information activities are beginning to be seen as good in themselves and not just as an add-on to a technical or material development programme.

Development agencies are, at one level, convinced of the fundamental contribution of information to development, but they hesitate before investing resources in information activities. They're not sure what will work, what kind of information is needed, nor how it should be supported. And;in these days of close cost-monitoring and squeezed budgets;there is legitimate concern that measurable targets and indicators of success are elusive. Part of the problem is that the information/communications field is rapidly changing. The quantity of information available is huge, but the lack of interpretative resources in developing countries means the South faces both information overload and information shortfall. In theory, the means to handle information;satellites, electronic media, digital technology, the Internet;are increasingly available and potentially democratic. But in practice there is a new information elitism, which further disenfranchises the majority of the world's population.

So how do the majority of the world's people, barely literate, and with only intermittent access to local language radio, influence development or respond to the UNCED agenda? With vigour. All over the world people are using community-based organizations, the ballot box and the media to express their views. But until such views count in the corridors of governments and funders, sustainable development is a long way off.

Pastoralists Raise their Voices

One way people influence official decision making in democratic societies is by developing their own policy solutions to their problems and campaigning for their adoption by government. Information is at the heart of this process of political empowerment. Community organizations take the initiative and control the process of gathering, reflecting on and presenting information, and generating public debate.

Pastoral groups in East Africa, after years of oppression, are attempting this approach. Loss of land to agriculture and a changing economic context have undermined the viability of their economic and cultural systems, while development projects have failed to produce benefits and positive change. The decline is exacerbated by the hostility and scorn nomadic pastoralists have been subjected to by governments and settled populations. In 1992, NGOs representing and working with pastoralists in Kenya came together to exchange experiences and ideas for improving the situation. As well as initiating research and practical projects, they determined to try to change the negative attitude of the general public, which is born largely of ignorance and prejudice, and to seek better designed and targeted policies from government.

At the same time, in neighbouring Tanzania, a group of journalists decided that the public needed better information in order to build an understanding that would reduce the frequent clashes between pastoralists and (state-backed) agriculturalists. They decided to travel with nomadic pastoralists and present their side of the story to the public;a rare initiative for hard-pressed, city-based, underfunded developing country journalists. This grew into a region-wide media campaign, which was the catalyst for recognition by the Kenya Pastoralists' Forum of the role that professionally presented information could play in achieving their goals.

The forum invited an independent Nairobi-based development media organization;the Interlink Rural Information Service;to work with them to increase public and government recognition of pastoralists' perspectives. The first result of this collaboration has been a series of media features published in Kenya's independent national papers on the reasons for pastoralists' low participation in the education system. This is probably the first time the public has had the chance to read about pastoralists' life in such a direct, detailed and unprejudiced way.

Parallel with the campaign to break down the prejudices of the newspaper reading public, which is the largely urban, educated public whose views inform government decisions, the pastoralists' forum will present a series of policy papers directly to government and development decision makers. Each of these papers is initiated, debated and approved by the members of the forum and written with the help of the professional writers. For the first time, politicians will hear what pastoralists themselves think can be done to improve their situation. It is too early to say what impact this will have; this is very much in the UNCED spirit of facilitating real participation.

Making Women's Rights Real

Participation is not just about minorities gaining access to decision makers; it can also be about empowering majorities. Women's reproductive rights were recognized at UNCED and taken further at the International Conference on Population and Development and the Fourth World Conference on Women. But how can these rights be realized when they are so fundamentally bound up and constrained by the social, cultural, psychological, educational, economic and political systems in every society?

When reproductive decision making is so fundamentally bound up with and constrained by these systems, debate needs to be opened at all levels in order to turn rights into realities. Informed and in-depth media reporting has the potential to feed normally unheard perspectives directly into national and international debate.

Panos' Reproductive Health Programme aims to generate more widespread and inclusive public debate on issues of reproductive health and choice, and the related issues of gender equity and women's empowerment. The programme's first activity was a series of commissions for journalists in developing countries to research and write about under-reported reproductive health issues in their countries and show how these are shaped by women's position in society. The journalists' reports were published in their national newspapers and in the book Private Decisions, Public Debate: Women, Reproduction and Population. The reports were aimed at decision makers, NGOs and the media.

Panos also helped some of the journalists and others attend the ICPD and cover it for their media. Such access is costly and sadly rare, but it is essential to stimulate debate at national and community levels.

To support even wider discussion of the issues, Panos is also working with the indigenous language press. One workshop has already been held in Bangalore to provide journalists from Asia with contacts and understanding of issues in order to cover complex and sensitive subjects in depth, avoid the sort of sensationalist and dogmatic reporting that often characterizes reproductive issues, and stimulate real reflection and debate.

The media can also be a vehicle for communities to monitor their governments and hold them accountable: one Egyptian journalist in the Panos programme has used the opportunity to draw public attention to the Egyptian government's failure in her opinion to carry through its commitment to end female genital mutilation.

In conclusion, here is information working as it should for sustainable development;a free press in a democratic political system speaking for, with and to the people. This is, after all, the spirit, if not the text, of UNCED.