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The battle lines are drawn between multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations at the upcoming Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development.
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development-the Rio Earth Summit of 1992-was to be the moment in which states would cooperate for the protection of the global environment. More heads of state than had ever come together to discuss any issue would meet to sign conventions on global climate change and biological IF diversity, to forge principles on environment and development and sustainable forestry, and to chart a course for a sustainable future. With its emphasis on development, the Earth Summit was supposed to heal the 20-year rift between Northern and Southern countries and to dispel the notion that Northern environmental concern was a ruse to slow Southern progress.
Yet this confluence of state power was not satisfying to the environmental activists who had hoped that states would finally contend with the role of multinational corporations in the devastation of the environment. They left Rio with the feeling that they had been cheated. Multinationals, they argued, had much more access and influence at the conference than these corporations should have had. Corporate preferences were clearly articulated in conference conventions, declarations of principles, and Agenda 21.1 Multinational corporations, they claimed, had successfully precluded stronger statements about the need to make serious changes for the environment while promoting free trade.
Thanks to these companies, lamented the activists, there was no action on the regulation of multinational corporations across borders. The UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, which had been working on a code of conduct for multinationals, was relieved of its independent status just before the Earth Summit, and the critical report that it had prepared for Agenda 21 was not accepted by the Earth Summit Secretariat in time for inclusion.2
Changing Course
Instead, the secretary general of the Earth Summit, Maurice Strong, invited a Swiss businessman, Stephen Schmidheiny, to be his principal advisor for business and industry.3 Schmidheiny accepted the offer and gathered together about 50 executives to create the Business Council for Sustainable Development. Participating executives represented Dow Chemical, DuPont, 3M, Mitsubishi, and Chevron, among others. In preparation for the Earth Summit, the council prepared a manifesto: Changing Course.
In Changing Course, the...