In an interview with Bulletin Editor Pavel Antonov, Mark Malloch Brown, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, discussed sustainable development and also the troubled Bali meeting, which was held in June to prepare for the Earth Summit in Johannesburg. Was the preparatory meeting in Bali reason for pessimism en route to the World Summit on Sustainable Development? Let me be clear that Bali represented a crisis, and not a breakdown in the process leading towards Johannesburg. It was a warning call that unless we really mobilize political support for Johannesburg in advance, the summit may not succeed. The fact that we've had these problems at Bali gives a lot of chance to governments to get their act in order before Johannesburg. What were the major problems you spotted in Bali? First of all we leave Bali with a text for Johannesburg, which has a lot of brackets in it - because people haven't agreed on the language. The reasons for that are several-fold. First, the United States, which put up a huge increase in development assistance at the conference on financing for development at Monterey, is much more focused on how to get that money programmed and spent, rather than making new commitments for Johannesburg. Second, the developing countries ' governments were suspicious of the real good intent of donor countries in helping save the planet. Third, you have a number of countries which face serious short-term problems in their public finances - Japan, Germany and others. This combination of financial caution on the part of some donor countries, and distrust in their motives and commitment on the part of some developing countries, undermines a lot of their capacity to build a consensus. What is the role and place of Central and Eastern Europe in this phase of the process? Central and Eastern Europe is a region with under-investment in the environment going back decades - a very dirty industrial model under communism which did enormous damage to your natural environment. … The fact is that there is still a huge backlog of environmental problems to be addressed. And the only way to clean it up is common action. This we see for instance in the Adriatic, where Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the European Union share a common waterfront. But don't you think that this region, with its delayed industrial development and comparatively well preserved nature, can set up a new model of development? I agree with this, in the sense that this is a funny and schizophrenic region. With its perverse quality of development of the pre-1989 years, it had pockets of heavy and dirty industrialisation, and other pockets where traditional life was barely touched by the communist economic model. That means that, indeed, unspoiled nature lives cheek by jowl with polluting industry. So yes, I think there is both a legacy of industrial damage to the environment and a nature sector that escaped harm - precisely because economic activity under communism was so partial. In a sense, you just have to make a strategy: You have to preserve what was untouched and allow economic development to arrive in a managed way that doesn't spoil the pristine character of what is left - while at the same time try to clear up the bits that were touched. Will there be a United Nations Sustainable Development Programme? Yes. My organisation, the UNDP - it is a United Nations ' sustainable development programme. It is the heart of our mission, the sense of what we are. We are constantly trying to integrate the economic, the social and the environmental, because these are our three pillars. And the balance, the trade-off between the three is proper, decent people-oriented development everywhere. I think what the world is going to see is this elevated from a strategy of development thinking, into actions with governments and civil society from the developing countries, into something much bigger, which is a new principle of political organisation, implemented by countries and inter-governmentally.

Photo: Courtesy of UN Development Programme MARK MALLOCH BROWN: UNDP is “the United Nation’s sustainable development programme”