Maureen O’Neil

Equity — The Lasting Message from Rio

By Maureen O’Neil

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) — the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 — reaffirmed the plain truth that human well-being and healthy ecosystems are inextricably linked. The Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, along with the Statement of Forest Principles, focus on equity and popular participation as essential elements in balancing human development with environmental protection. The Rio Declaration properly put human beings “at the centre of concerns for sustainable development.”

UNCED’s concern with equity was emphasized throughout its proceedings. The Declaration itself asserted “the goal of establishing a new and equitable global partnership,” and declared as a matter of principle: “The special situation and needs of developing countries, particularly the least developed and those most environmentally vulnerable, shall be given special priority.” This was the lasting message from Rio — the obligation to place equity at the core of any definition of sustainable development. In the past 10 years, we’ve learned that development is not sustainable if it is not equitable, and certainly not equitable if not sustainable.

These same truths have informed the International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) own approaches. Now more than ever, the Centre collaborates in development research that is both multidisciplinary and policy-relevant. Our programs, by design and execution, reach across specialties to discover and exploit new knowledge and applications. They are all intended to answer questions that challenge societies in their quest to achieve sustainable and equitable development.

SOCIAL INNOVATION, KEY TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, scheduled for this month in Johannesburg, will undoubtedly raise more questions on how best to conserve the globe’s resources for current and future generations. Achieving true social and equitable development remains a huge challenge: it requires new knowledge and applications, new ideas and polices, and new perspectives and relationships. This application of new knowledge, drawing on new ideas, can be summed up in one phrase: social innovation.

Social innovation provides the context for hundreds of research projects supported by IDRC and carried out by our partners around the world. Social innovation encompasses far more than technical ingenuity: it includes policy innovations — new ways of informing public thought, eliciting public preferences, and making public choices.

Social innovation means engaging people in the processes of defining how public policy is developed — gathering those affected by any decision, especially the disadvantaged and marginalized, into the conversation. It is in this process of informed debate that research finds its particular role. If development is to prove both sustainable and equitable, then research must attend to the specific circumstances of poor people, in their own communities. Relevant knowledge, good governance and social innovation for development imposes two imperatives. First, it calls for timely, pertinent and reliable knowledge. Second, it requires creating and maintaining good governance. Where governance is transparent, participatory and responsible, it is more likely to generate productive, fair and enduring policy.

Satisfying these dual imperatives — relevant knowledge and good governing processes — will challenge even the settled, wealthy democracies. Rich countries, no less than poor, need to find ways of informing citizens about the choices they face, ways of resolving discord, ways of changing how people understand the impact of their choices on our physical environment.

IDRC’s supported research projects provide many examples from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East of technological innovation, new forms of institutions and partnerships, and social, political, and attitudinal change — social innovation. They demonstrate how such innovations as strengthening local capacity for economic analysis of environmental problems can inform policy; how considering the health of the environment and of populations together can improve both; how looking to the relationships between communities and their ecosystems and fostering shared management can benefit people, protect resources, and manage conflicts over their use.

These examples demonstrate how social innovation can advance sustainable and equitable development. And if this research is usually conceived in part to explain the environmental and human implications of policy and action, fundamentally, it represents attempts to develop methods of governing that are better informed, fairer, more open and more effective.

Whether the result is incremental changes in practice or large-scale changes in policy, social innovation can help people to achieve, as the Rio Declaration stated, “a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” That is a purpose as urgent and compelling now as it was 10 years ago.

Maureen O’Neil is president of the International Development Research Centre.