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This article analyzes the outcomes of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg, South Africa from late August to early September 2002. Convened ten years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, the WSSD was an attempt to move forward with sustainable development efforts by setting implementation strategies, answering questions of accountability, and forming partnerships that go beyond traditional boundaries. The Summit succeeded in achieving some of its goals, such as setting a time-bound sanitation target and recognizing the rights of communities in natural resource management. Yet it also bad its share of failures, including the failure to address climate change and to reform global environmental governance. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the extent and diversity of civil society engagement in the process set forth the challenge of overcoming divisions among governments, within civil society, and between governments and civil society to find a path to common solutions.
From August 26 to September 4, 2002, eighty-two heads of state and government, thirty vice presidents and deputy prime ministers, seventy-four ministers, royalty and other senior officials, and thousands more official representatives came together with observers from civil society, academia, the scientific community, local communities, and the private sector at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).1 In addition to the more than 20,000 participants in the official summit, thousands of others from all over the world participated in parallel events-summits in their own right-organized to coincide with the WSSD.2
Together, the many summits of Johannesburg tell different narratives: of a world community confronted with immense poverty and serious environmental problems, struggling to find common solutions in pursuit of sustainable development; of governments divided by competing visions of development and globalization, and paralyzed by lack of political will; and of civil society, including indigenous peoples and local communities, asserting their right to participate meaningfully in environmental and development decisions, increasingly holding governments accountable for the consequences of such decisions, and implementing sustainable development on the ground, with or without official sanction.
Despite low expectations, the WSSD achieved a series of successes. It also had its share of failures, including the possibility that many of the gains in the official process could...