How can civil society organisations impact Rio+20 process?

Felix Dodds

For years he has been instrumental in developing new modes of stakeholder engagement with the United Nations, particularly within the field of sustainable development.

What are the origins of Stakeholder Forum?

The Stakeholder Forum was established in 1987 by UNEP and the U.K. government. It was originally UNEP national committee and became the Stakeholder Forum in 2000, in the run after Rio+10.

What are you doing in preparation for Rio+20?

We have done a lot. We host the first meeting for Rio+20 in November 2008. The Brazilian Government attained resolution calling for summit and ten days later we held stakeholder- government meeting in San Sebastian in Spain. That kicked off the engagement in the summit process.

By January 2009 we set up Earth Summit 2012 website. We did a lot of informal dinners with governments to get them on board in favor of Rio conference in the early part of 2009 and then we have been running many workshops and conferences for Rio+20. At the UNDPI conference in Bonn in September last year, 1500 stakeholders came together to put a text on Rio+20 for the Zero Draft.

What is the influence of the Stakeholder Forum on the Rio+20 process?

We work on lots of different areas. As an organisation we coordinated stakeholder papers on governance. Out of those we paid a number of suggestions that governments have now accepted: the ombudsman for Future Generations, the Sustainable Development Council, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Sustainable Development. Three big institutional framework issues came from there. We run a coalition for a Conventional Corporate Sustainability.

Finally, on the Green Economy, we have a Green Economy Coalition which is known as a Global Transition 2012 and there we put a number of ideas that the governments have picked up.

Do civil society organisations have influence on the Rio+20 process?

I think yes. There are a lot of ideas that have been picked up. For instance Sustainable Development Goals, is an idea that came from the civil society.

What advice could you give to civil society organisations who want to influence  the Rio+20 process?

If you want to impact on the process, you have to come to the meetings. And the reality is that to have a big impact, you have to be in NY permanently, between now and probably the end of May. You have to go and talk to the governments and missions around the workshops: the workshop on governance on 14th February, the meeting on Green Economy on 17 and 18 of March. And all the way between that we are going to the missions and talking to them and trying to persuade them that our ideas are vital.

And if it is not possible?

Then the impact will be smaller.

How else can you influence the process?

It depends what you want to do. There are different strategies. Not everybody wants to impact on the text. So if you want to create knowledge about your issues and your organisation, then you can do that with side events and going through events in Rio where you have huge number of people. You can also link with other processes. Our Facebook page has 3000 people on it, so you can link into that and build platforms of interests.

Interview: Marta Dabrowska

Interview took place during Rio+20 Dutch National Platform meeting on 2nd January 2012 in the Hague.