GREEN GLOBE YEARBOOK 1994 127 An Overview of Follow-up of Agenda 21 at the National Level

No single event can be expected in itself to resolve the many complex issues that will be confronting the world community in this decade. However, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit, represented a unique opportunity to provide the basis for the major shift out of our inertia required to put us on the pathway to a more secure, equitable, and sustainable future. Some believe that we missed this opportunity to change the course of development, basically because governments failed to agree that at the core of this shift it is necessary to achieve deep changes in the prevailing economic system. And for that, strong action and political will is urgently needed to achieve a more careful and more caring use of the Earth’s resources and greater co-operation and equity in sharing the benefits as well as the risks of our technological civilization. The expectations and hopes engendered by the Earth Summit—the largest gathering ever of more than 120 heads of state and government—were to provide a new basis for relations between North, South, East, and West: a new global partnership based on common interest, mutual need, and shared responsibility, including a concerted attack on poverty as a central priority for the twenty-first century. In the final analysis, the social and economic issues like poverty, consumption patterns, trade, and external debt were weakly treated in Agenda 21, and the possibility of laying out an alternative model of economics for sustainability was basically aborted from the beginning of the UNCED process. Efforts concentrated on the environmental issues and the strongest section of Agenda 21 corresponds to Section II: ‘Management of Resources’. From an institutional and structural point of view, UNCED represented an incredible opportunity to evaluate and assess the current international order composed of the following four macro