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Permalink Reply by Enitsa M. Gabrovska on June 27, 2012 at 4:54pm

In my opinion the lack of enthousiasm on the side of governments was very much pre-determined by the fact that the final text of the document was already decided before the conference even started! And Brazil said it would try to not open the text for changes. So politically it would have been extremely difficult to question one part or another. I think if you are meeting to decide on something that has already been decided and questioning it would cause diplomatic rumble, then it is very likely you would keep quiet.

Too bad... a lot of money spent for governments meeting somewhere where actually civil society and the private sector are 10 times more productive!

For alternatives, I am putting my hopes on the private sector. But I'm no expert :).

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Permalink Reply by Duarte Valente on June 30, 2012 at 5:16pm

No doubts that the expectations were much higher than the actual outcomes, which were more or less predetermined. Many reasons can be appointed for why this was a failure. Despite a huge interest from the people in seeing concrete measures as a result, the industry sector is still very uninterested in seeing such a "radical" (in their view at least) change as the one demanded. So, Governments prefer not to go against their economic engines, as expected.

By all means, this is not the end of a global SD movement. (R)Evolutions were never made by Governments and this is another case. It's up to us to do it through by demanding ecological products (driving the private sector to rethink their approach as well), by starting local initiatives and help in global movements.

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