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When
delegates gather for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in August,
this region can provide insights it has gained by acting as a laboratory
for environmental governance, inter-generational equity and sustainability
It is clear that the Rio Summit of 1992 held some disappointments, and the progress toward achieving sustainable development since that gathering has been less than remarkable. But there have been some encouraging sings of change, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Because this part of the world has been in a dramatic state of transition, CEE has become a testing ground for practices that can promote sustainable development. Despite its past failures in the area of environmental protection, this region obviously has something to say to a worldwide summit on sustainable development. The question is whether the world will listen. The Rio Declaration, produced at the 1992 Earth Summit, has been characterised as a half-step that failed to take into account important global efforts toward achieving the transitional paradigm of sustainable development. Why didn't the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) live up to the expectations - indicated by the name "Earth Summit " - that it would mark a great leap forward?The state of the world in 1992 was a part of the problem. During "acrimonious" and "bipolar" debate, the states at the Rio conference split into developed and developing camps. This was resolved with the addition to the Rio Declaration of Principle 7 on "common but differentiated responsibilities" for the future course of global sustainable development. It simplistically equated development with technological and financial largesse, and lack of development with demographic problems. An alternative viewpoint was conspicuously absent from the negotiations. Still reeling from the political and social fallout of the Chernobyl disaster only six years earlier, the countries of CEE were largely left out of the UNCED process. The failure of the scientific socialist system was nowhere more evident than in its devastating impacts on the environment. Soviet scholars estimated the costs of environmental damage in 1990 as 15 to 17 percent of the Soviet Union's gross domestic product. In 1992, the whole Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union itself had just dissolved, and no country from this sphere was prepared to step onto the world stage, especially as the main environmental characteristic in these countries was degradation. What has happened in the intervening 10 years? The tapestry of the CEE region is enriched through a mixture of volatile societies with rapidly stabilising ones - a constant ideological battleground, from which globally significant ideas, and sometimes confrontations, emerge. |
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