FEATURE - Ecojargon the lingua franca at Johannesburg summit
Date: 08-Aug-02
Country: NETHERLANDS
Author: Matt Daily
They'll be immersed in the eco-jargon that splits experts from the lay community - most of whom have no idea what the broad, vague phrase "sustainable development" actually means.
Virtually every discipline comes with its own code words designed to divide the uninitiated from the seasoned pro.
"Often they are carefully designed words with specific meanings. Some become part of language and some fail to get there," said Nick Nuttall, head of media services at the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi.
"They're an attempt to define very big subjects in very short words which can really mean nothing. They're a compromise."
Most people may not consider themselves "stakeholders" in the summit, but the wide reaching impacts are likely to go far beyond the governments who sign any pact agreed in Johannesburg to the companies and communities who will benefit from - or pay for - sustainable development.
"I avoid using 'stakeholder' and use 'all sections of society'," UNEP's Nuttall said. "There's a lot of corporatisation of the language. It sounds a lot like 'shareholder'."
With half the world's leaders and hundreds of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) attending, the U.N. conference officially titled the World Summit on Sustainable Development, but nicknamed Earth Summit 2 or Rio+10, may set new standards.
And that's not to mention the alphabet soup of acronyms at what will be the largest ever MSP (multi-stakeholder process) on WEHAB (water, energy, health, agricultural biodiversity and sustainable ecosystem management).
The term "sustainable development" first emerged from the 1970s environmental movement, but it languished in obscurity for a decade until a United Nations commission took up the task of linking environmental responsibility to economic growth.
"We looked for a joint phrase and came up with 'sustainable development'," said Gro Harlem Brundtland, who led the group that produced the landmark 1987 U.N. report "Our Common Future".
The team led by Brundtland, a former Norwegian prime minister and current head of the World Health Organisation, defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
TRANSLATION TERROR
But squeezing the term into the international environmental lexicon was another matter.
"We spent a long time translating it into all the languages of the world - it was especially difficult in German," she told Reuters.
Whatever its early problems, "nachhaltige Entwicklung" has become common currency in environmentally progressive Germany, which voted its Green party into power in 1998.
The Brundtland commission and "Our Common Future" laid the groundwork that led to the 1992 Rio "Earth Summit" and the guiding "Agenda 21" action plan that sought to guide policy makers trying to reduce world poverty, improve access to water and energy yet spread the social benefits of economic growth.
Despite the early U.N. efforts, the "sustainable development" moniker failed to catch on with either the public or development groups, according to the forthcoming book "Walking the Talk" from the Geneva-based World Business Council on Sustainable Development.
"Environmental groups do not appear to like the concept because they did not 'invent' it and because it has the word 'development' in it," wrote author Stephan Schmidheiny.
Development groups dislike it for "being too green, feeling that all the emphasis is on the needs of the future rather than the needs of the present".
ECOBABBLERS VERSUS GREENWASHERS
Critics have derided the U.N. bureaucracy and green groups for engaging in 'ecobabble', a derogatory term defined as using the technical language of ecology to make the user seem ecologically aware.
Environmental groups, for their part, accuse companies and states of "greenwashing" - disseminating disinformation to create an environmentally responsible p