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What we learned at the G20 and Rio summits
Many in the media have already shrugged off the recent G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico and the United Nations’ Rio+20 earth summit in Brazil as failures, long on promises to speed economic recovery and promote sustainable growth, but short on actual commitments and deliverables.
As business representatives who took part in both events, we beg to differ. Sure, there were plenty of missed opportunities, but a lot was accomplished. And while much remains to be done, useful lessons can be drawn from each summit to help us move forward.
The G20 summit resulted in a clear understanding that European governments must move beyond austerity in an effort to restart global growth, and developments in the eurozone in the days since have been encouraging. Clearly the G20 is an important mechanism to coordinate responses in a crisis, and it is fulfilling that mandate once again. G20 governments also renewed their pledge to avoid protectionist measures that could derail growth. And the summit provided strong impetus to move ahead on bringing Canada and Mexico into the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks.
In short, while the ultimate form and scope of business input to the G20 going forward remains to be determined, Mexico set a clear precedent that private-sector views should be sought out and can be successfully integrated into the summit process. This is important, because the full cooperation from the business community is essential to implement and follow up on decisions made by G20 leaders.
The results were a bit more mixed at Rio+20. As the summit wrapped up, the blame game began, with environmental activists and trade unions dismissing the outcomes as inadequate and not ambitious enough. But this ignores the extraordinary effort by Brazil to lead the conference to a resolution despite an economic downturn and strong political headwinds.
The naysayers also overlook the vast participation, pledges and funding to promote sustainability brought to Rio by non-governmental and public-sector players. The UN reckons those pledges amount to half a trillion dollars. Given the scale of global challenges, more might be needed, but this is a significant starting point.
As in Los Cabos, business turned out in larger numbers than at any previous UN gathering. Did we get everything we wanted? Far from it. Here is our scorecard on the results:
First, what gets measured gets managed, and we were pleased that UN members agreed to develop better metrics and indicators to gauge progress toward a greener economy. But companies still want a commitment to use trade as a “carrot” rather than a “stick,” to keep markets open and encourage developing countries to realize the positive side of moving to more sustainable models of development.
Second, business requires predictability in order to plan and invest for the future. While the final outcome document in Rio recognized the need to square economic and environmental policies, and the importance of R&D, it was skewed to environmental, rather than economic, approaches. The Rio+20 process clearly would have benefited from greater participation from economic, commerce and trade ministries.
Finally, we were disappointed that the Rio+20 outcomes almost completely ignore the need for business to be involved in the process of building a greener economy. In the declaration’s section on jobs and employment, the private sector is mentioned exactly once. Still, industry groups were involved as observers in Rio, held four days of business meetings parallel with the negotiations, and recognized companies that are working successfully to help implement the Millennium Development Goals.
In sum, we could have used a little more of that “Los Cabos” spirit in the halls at Rio Centro, the enormous conference center where Rio+20 took place. While we are confident that the private sector can play an important role going forward, we need a seat at the table. So far we are still waiting.
If we truly want to re-launch growth and lay the groundwork for a better, more sustainable world for our children, the private sector needs to play a major role. Overall, the G20 and Rio+20 summits underscored the importance of having a manageable process and reasonable expectations going into major summits. We would say that Los Cabos passed that test, while Rio didn’t even finish it.
Robinson and Kennedy are, respectively, president and CEO and vice president for environment and energy with the United States Council for International Business (www.uscib.org), which represents U.S. industry views on global matters.
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