What is Agenda 21?

Agenda 21, which was adopted during the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the “Earth Summit,” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the blueprint for 21st-century sustainability. Agenda 21 is a global commitment to sustainable development that many governments throughout the world have endorsed. The International Commission on Sustainable Development monitors countries that have promised to participate in Agenda 21 and encourages them to promote it at the local and regional levels within their respective countries. Agenda 21 focuses on the conservation and protection of our surroundings and natural resources in order to promote the growth of society and economies.

The Earth Summit’s Conventions, Principles, and Declarations provide principles for dealing with poverty, hunger, resource usage, and environmental degradation. Agenda 21 lays forth a framework for this to happen, laying out a sustainable development action plan and setting goals for activities that combine economic growth and environmental conservation.

An Overview

Agenda 21 has had varying degrees of success. Even though it is a comprehensive strategy for achieving sustainable development, it has not always been implemented systematically. There are, however, examples of Agenda 21 achieving beneficial and long-term results.

Overall, according to expert assessments, development on Agenda 21 has been slow. Most of the 39 Agenda 21 Chapters were judged as having only moderate progress by expert evaluators. Three chapters (Chapter 4 on Changing Consumption Patterns, Chapter 7 on Promoting Sustainable Human Settlement Development, and Chapter 9 on Environmental Protection) were graded as making no progress or regressing.

Only five chapters were rated as making good progress or better by both assessors: chapters 27 and 18 on NGOs and local governments’ involvement, chapter 35 on Science for Sustainable Development, chapter 38 on International Institutional Arrangements, and chapter 39 on International Legal Instruments and Mechanisms). The two assessors’ ratings differed for a few chapters, but overall, the two sets of ratings are pretty consistent.

Successes

Agenda 21 (and the original Rio Earth Summit in general) helped to popularise the concept of sustainable development, if not make it a household term. Moreover, it influenced the language of later international agreements and papers (such as the WTO preamble, the Cairo population agenda (1994), the Social Summit conclusion (1995), the Beijing Women’s Conference (1995), the Habitat agenda (1996), and the Rome Food Summit) significantly (1996).

In contrast to more technology-oriented “solutions” in the so-called “development decades” of the 1960s and 1970s, Agenda 21 has had a clear and positive impact in helping to put the concept of sustainable human development at the core of development (for example, strategies based on rapid industrialisation and large-scale agricultural projects).

Agenda 21’s greatest accomplishment, in my opinion, has been in instilling ambition in what sustainable outcomes may be achieved on a sector-by-sector basis. Thus, for example, Agenda 21 has made significant progress in our knowledge of biodiversity, agriculture’s contribution to development, and the role of indigenous peoples in society.

The Commission for Sustainable Development was established as part of Agenda 21 to address environmental and development integration (CSD). The Commission resulted from a compromise between those who sought to turn the Trusteeship Council into a Sustainable Development Council, making it one of the UN’s permanent entities, and those who desired no follow-up mechanism.

CSD’s appointment as a functioning commission of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) resulted in early successes on issues such as persistent organic pollutants (which eventually led to the Stockholm Convention on POPs), prior informed consent (which led to the Rotterdam Convention on PICs), and oceans (which led to the United Nations Open-ended Informal Consultative Synthesis).

It would start the discussions and then send them off to be further negotiated in other processes. Furthermore, Agenda 21 has fostered a far more robust sense of decision-making participation. This recognition of non-governmental actors’ critical role has spread to all levels of government, international law, and international governance.

This includes advocating for more granular demographic data for analysis and decision-making. Agenda 21, for example, has aided in the inclusion of a gender perspective in all development initiatives, including gender-differentiated government statistics. In addition, agenda 21 was the first UN initiative to define stakeholder roles and obligations. The nine chapters on “Major Groups” have significantly impacted participation in Agenda 21 implementation and monitoring.

The engagement of the Major Groups has been improved, as detailed in Chapter 23, with established systems in place to acknowledge their contribution to sustainable development debates. In particular, as discussed in Chapter 27, the prestige and relevance of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have risen dramatically in recent decades. Moral stakeholders, watchdogs, mediators, implementers, advocates, and experts are all roles that NGOs play. They’ve become more professionalised, and UN agencies have become increasingly reliant on NGOs in mutually beneficial partnerships.

Various NGO networks are pushing multiple parts of long-term development. However, it is debatable how much of this “increased engagement” is really hype. Local Agenda 21 is widely regarded as a success in linking global goals to the local action, and it is one of the most extensive follow-up programmes to UNCED. In 2002, over 6,000 local authorities around \sthe world– the Major Group addressed in Chapter 28– were found to have adopted some kind of policy or undertaken activities for sustainable development, either as a main priority or as a cross-cutting issue.

However, since then, no comprehensive poll has been performed. Interest in sustainable development appears to have waned as it competed with industries that promised actual resources, such as climate change. Agenda 21 was a descendant of previous UN action plans that attempted to cost each line item. However, agenda 21 was a revolutionary vision for action that set a considerably higher ambition and achievement standards than previous initiatives. It also created a compelling action narrative, which was progressive in and of itself.

Conclusions

Agenda 21 is still relevant twenty years after the Earth Summit, and it is the UN system’s most comprehensive effort to promote sustainable development. While there are significant gaps in coverage, the difficulties that humankind is currently grappling with are more or less identical to those addressed in Agenda 21 chapters.

Despite the fact that Agenda 21 has gained widespread acceptance among nation-states, its implementation is far from universal or successful. Progress has been spotty, and despite some good practices, most of the Agenda 21 goals have yet to be realised.