Curtain down and Nothing Settled: Global Sustainability Governance after the ‘Rio+20’ Earth Summit

Abstract

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, was probably the largest event in a long series of megasummits on environmental protection and sustainable development. Roughly 44000 participants descended on Rio de Janeiro to take part in ten days of preparatory committee meetings, informal consultations, side events, and the actual conference. Yet despite this unprecedented high attendance by participants from governments and civil society, the outcome of the conference is less than many had hoped for. In this paper I review the outcomes of the 2012 Rio conference in detail, with a special focus on its contributions towards the reform of the institutional framework for sustainable development. Following this review, I discuss the way ahead and options for structural reform to restrengthen earth system governance.

The Future We Get Might Not Be the Future We Want: Analyzing the Rio+20 Outcomes

“…For what the Rio+20 summit will be remembered is not yet known. However, while we certainly should scrutinize additional approaches to global environmental governance beyond mega‐conferences – for example more thematically focused summits that deal with problems that are not yet regulated by international agreements or a more prominent role for sustainability within the UN General Assembly (Biermann, ) – what is most needed now is a critical reflection on how the summit results can be used to revive global sustainability governance, for example by organizing an inclusive and democratic process on the proposed sustainable development goals. We do not know the future, but we can guess that the next summit is just ahead.…”

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development: Forty Years in the Making

“…Furthermore, there is little political appetite for anything but very modest change (if any) to 'greening' the operations of the WTO and other main economic organizations. Nevertheless, it is clear that the long-term influence of the UNCSD is in part tied to the extent to which public, private, and civil society actors are willing to reform political and economic institutions (Biermann, 2013).…”

The Geographies of the Conference: Knowledge, Performance and Protest

“…Thank you to Reviewer 1 for making this important point. 2 Disappointment also flowed from the Rio + 20 Earth Summit in 2012, which was criticised for a lack of substantive political discussionlet alone agreementleading some to question the fundamental worth of such "mega-summits" in the negotiation of global environmental policy(Biermann 2013).…”