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CIAO DATE: 3/99

Sovereignty, Global Civil Society, and the Social Conferences: NGOs and States at the UN Conferences on Population, Social Development, and Human Settlements *

Ann Marie Clark
Dept. of Political Science
Purdue University

Elisabeth J. Friedman
Dept. of Political Science
Barnard College

Kathryn Hochstetler
Dept. of Political Science
Colorado State University

International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999

DRAFT: Comments welcome. Please do not cite without the authors’ permission.

The United Nations world conferences of the 1990s are notable not only for their consideration of new issues of human welfare at the global level, but for their exhibition of increasing international interaction among states, non-state actors, and intergovernmental institutions. Much of the interaction has been colored by confrontation; some has been marked by cooperation and increasing recognition among states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that they need one another to accomplish their goals. On the face of it, nowhere does this seem to be more true than in the area of social welfare. As NGOs have come into their own in addressing their own interpretations of social problems, states have relied on them for expertise. Meanwhile, NGOs have continued to be critical of the way that power politics influences and limits states’ economic and security decisions. These changes point to a growing incongruity between the empirical evidence of global political actors and relationships, on the one hand, and state-centric models prominent in international relations theory, on the other (Wapner 1995; Keck & Sikkink 1998; Smith, Pagnucco & Lopez 1998).

In previous research, we treated UN conferences on the environment, human rights, and women as empirical “test cases” for the emergence of global civil society. We found that NGOs have participated broadly at such conferences. They share many goals and offer diverse interpretations of important issues that often challenge states’ own interpretations and interests. While the active presence of NGOs supports the potential for a truly global and social civil society to emerge internationally, we found that there were significant obstacles to a fully shared “civil society” at the international level (Clark, Friedman, & Hochstetler 1998b). In further research, we have found that sovereignty issues have been hotly contested on two levels. On one hand, states may protect their sovereignty through procedures limiting the participatory status of NGOs vis-a-vis states at such conferences. On the other, sovereignty claims have emerged at the conferences with regard to substantive issues that states interpret as falling within their sovereign prerogative: economic self-determination; and cultural or religious practices that some states defended as national practices (Clark, Friedman, & Hochstetler 1998a). Military issues also fell into this category, although they simply were not very prominent on the agenda of the UN conferences.

This paper aims to build on and test our earlier exploration of UN conferences by turning to what we are calling the “social conferences,” the other large-scale conferences on social issues: the 1994 Conference on Population and Development, held at Cairo, 5-13 September 1994, the World Summit for Social Development, held at Copenhagen, 12-16 March 1995, and the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), held at Istanbul, June 1996 (see Table). We are also interested to see whether, empirically, states relied on the same sovereignty reference points at Cairo, Copenhagen, and Istanbul as they had at other conferences, and whether they might be increasing or decreasing in prominence over the long term across the 1990s conferences.

In this paper, we also test two theoretical hypotheses that have emerged in the course of our research. The first is the general hypothesis that the more states link conference topics to sovereignty issues, the less ready states are to permit the open contestation and mutual accountability at the UN conferences that one would expect of a global civil society. To gauge the sovereign issues, we assess conference documents, including what states argue about and how they argue. In cases where state sovereignty is clearly asserted, we would expect conference rules to limit procedural NGO roles, and we would expect NGOs to take on a stronger “outsider” role in such a context, positioning themselves as critics and advocates. Conversely, when sovereignty issues are less central, we would expect NGOs to have higher participatory profile at the conferences, perhaps with more cooperation and shared implementation of the kind one might expect where the issue is tagged as one for civil society to solve.

The second hypothesis is that sovereignty might be “sold,” or traded for increased financial aid, on issues which pertain to resource distribution. This seemed to be a feature of the environment issue area that had not been true of human rights or women’s rights in our earlier research (Clark, Friedman, & Hochstetler 1998a).

To offer a brief preview of our findings, we see that even at the social conferences, sovereignty issues continue to shape NGO-state relations. As expected, sovereignty debates do indeed center around economic and cultural referents, in the absence of much debate about traditional security issues at these conferences. NGOs at the UN conferences of the 1990s exhibit an expanded global role, possessing more potential for independent agency and dialogue with states than at any time before. However, NGOs’ agency is also shaped by the procedures and agenda that remain in the hands of states. We also find that money does not “change everything”; on issues of foreign aid discussed at the conferences, recipient states were not willing to have international agreements dictate the percentage of their budget dedicated to social programs. Few donor states were willing to bow to similar recommendations for the percentage of aid they should give for social needs.

Table: Cairo, Copenhagen, Istanbul and the Other Major United Nations Global Conferences of the 1990s 1
Date Title Place
5-9 March 1990 World Conference on Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning Needs Gumption, Thailand
29-30 September 1990 World Summit for Children New York
3-14 June 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development Rio de Janeiro
14-25 June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights Vienna
5-13 September 1994 International Conference on Population and Development Cairo
6-12 March 1995 World Summit for Social Development Copenhagen
4-15 September 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace Beijing
3-14 June 1996 Second UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) Istanbul
13-17 November 1996 World Food Summit Rome

 

The Conferences

The UN conferences of the 1990s have followed a common preparatory process. Each had three to four preparatory conferences (PrepComs, or meetings of the Preparatory Committees) for governmental delegations. In addition, the PrepComs and the conferences themselves have had substantial NGO participation, both for lobbying the official meetings and for parallel non-governmental activity. Overlapping with each conference, NGOs had their own NGO Forum, sometimes at the same site, and sometimes at a slight geographical remove from the official meeting site. The conference preparatory process, and the conferences themselves, thus provided arenas for sustained debate and agenda setting on specific issues, as well as more general discussions of the role of non-governmental actors and other principles of international organization (Fomerand 1996).

Two of the global conferences we look at here had predecessors in previous decades, although the social conferences of the 1990s were more broadly public. Cairo was heir to four international meetings on population, and Habitat II was the child of a 1976 conference in Vancouver. In addition, the UN conferences of the 1990s were interrelated to some degree. While many participants—governments and NGOs—were interested in crafting entirely new global understandings of the issues at hand, they also looked back to previous conferences and ahead to future ones. Not all of the negotiations were about “progress.” In many instances, participants used later conferences to fight battles left unresolved at earlier meetings, or to question consensus by reopening issues that had seemingly been resolved before. This was particularly true of issues related to the universality of human rights, women’s rights, and the status of women.

 

The International Conference on Population and Development

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held at Cairo, was preceded by two expert meetings and two governmental conferences on population; one in each decade since the 1950s. 2 In 1989, ECOSOC resolution 1989/91 called for the ICPD, a third governmental conference on population. Its purposes were to assess the progress made over the last decade on population issues; continue to work on the implementation of prior international agreements; strengthen the international awareness of population issues and their linkage to development; make new recommendations on how to treat population issues in the context of development; and mobilize the necessary resources, especially for the developing world, to fulfill such recommendations (Johnson 1995, 30-1; ECOSOC Res. 1991/93). As was standard practice for every UN world conference of the 1990s, preparatory meetings leading up to Cairo focused on drafting the conference document, the Programme of Action, and related issues. Six expert meetings, several roundtables, three PrepComs, and five regional meetings convened as official preparation for the conference. A parallel NGO Forum was held in Cairo, September 4-12, 1994.

Although the previous population conferences had witnessed serious disagreements, the battle lines over issues were redrawn at Cairo. Previous debates had centered on the nature of the relationship between economic development and population growth at Bucharest (Johnson 1995, 18), and on issues related to the general consensus in favor of efforts to stabilize population at Mexico (Ibid., 21). Those debates were supplanted in the 1990s by debate over the so-called “Cairo Consensus”: the shift from controlling population to emphasizing the need for women’s empowerment and reproductive health and rights. The Cairo Consensus was incorporated in the conference’s Programme of Action, in large part due to the active lobbying of NGOs, but countries took exception to the parts of it they saw as impinging on their sovereignty, whether economic or religious/cultural.

 

Economic Self-Determination as a Sovereignty Issue

In Cairo’s final document, the issue of state sovereignty was seemingly resolved textually, in the first paragraph of its “Principles”: “the implementation of the recommendations contained in the Programme of Action is the sovereign right of each country, consistent with national laws and development priorities, with full respect for the various religious and ethical values and cultural backgrounds of its people, and in conformity with universally recognized international human rights” (A/CONF.171/13). However, this did not prevent the emergence of sometimes fierce debates on central sovereignty referents such as economic distribution and religious or cultural prerogatives.

Unlike many UN conference documents, Cairo’s Programme of Action gave estimates, albeit contested ones, as to how much funding would be necessary to provide the health services and data collection outlined in the document, as well as how much should be provided by donor countries. A plan called the 20/20 proposal was advanced to require aid recipients (developing countries) to increase social expenditure to 20% of their budgets, while donors would designate 20% of their aid for social expenditures. (By comparison, actual levels in 1995 averaged 13% and 7%, respectively [Feeney 1995].) However, governments were not willing to commit to the proposal, backed by NGOs and UN agencies. The Group of 77 (G-77), the coalition of developing countries in the UN, called budget allocation “a sovereign right” (Johnson 1995, 197).

There was some geographical division in discussions over economic issues. From their regional meeting onward, the Latin American and Caribbean countries sought to put an emphasis on the developing countries’ debt burden as an obstacle to funding population programs (Ibid. 35). Overall, the global South and NGOs joined in calling for changes in consumption and production patterns, widely seen as a critique of the profligate (and resource-wasteful) lifestyles of the global North. 3 Australia, Norway and Sweden backed new resources and unqualified figures (Johnson 1995, 42; Shepherd n.d.), but while European countries in particular seemed willing to acknowledge their obligations as donor countries, most were reluctant to make firm financial commitments or agree to structural changes in global development patterns (Johnson 1995, 38, 66).

As a result, there were “no pledges of additional financial support for population and development programmes and no firm agreement on how bilateral and multilateral aid flows [would] be readjusted to meet the objectives of the Programme of Action.” ( Earth Negotiations Bulletin 6:39 [cited below as ENB]). Moreover, there was no substantial challenge to neoliberal adjustment models of development, with “sustained economic growth” linked to “sustainable development” throughout the document (Petchetsky 1995; Hartmann 1995, 153). Without such changes in global economic models, some have argued, the “almost feminist vision of reproductive rights and gender equality” of the Cairo program cannot be realised (Petchestky 1995,1). At Cairo, resources for empowering women, beyond population-related services, were not included in the estimates of costs (Johnson 1995, 195).

 

Cultural Sovereignty Issues

In a similar vein, other countries debated the extent to which “national” value systems were eroded by the emphasis on women’s empowerment and rights throughout the conference. From PrepCom III on, and especially in the month leading up to the conference, the Vatican sought allies among those countries with both Catholic and Islamic majorities or strong religious leadership. The so-called “Unholy Alliance” that was struck united Catholic and Islamic countries in a “fundamentalist bloc” against what they saw in the Programme of Action as potentially acknowledging or promoting the legality of abortion and harming the traditional family structure (McIntosh & Finkle 1995, 246).

This bloc was not monolithic. Brazil, Indonesia, and Malaysia recognized the need to address unsafe abortion as a public health issue, and Islamic countries tended to be more concerned with traditional family roles than abortion per se (Johnson 1995, 108). Although the rhetoric from the Islamic world reached a pitch at which some countries were openly calling for a boycott of the conference, Egypt intervened, with the result that only Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Sudan refused to attend (McIntosh & Finkle 1995, 234). Several government representatives, while supportive of more traditional perspectives on gender relations, objected to the way in which the Vatican, in particular, dragged out the debate on abortion over five days, effectively precluding discussion of other crucial issues (Ibid., 248-9). In the end, language on abortion as a public health issue, and the need to provide safe abortion services where the procedure is legal, was included in the final document (Johnson 1995, Ch. 6; A/CONF.171/13/, section 8.25). Even the Vatican, for the first time in a UN population conference, signed on to the final document.

But the reservations taken to the Programme for Action revealed that cultural or religious prerogatives continued to be at issue for many governments. Led by the Vatican, with its reservations on seven of the sixteen chapters, many countries with a long history of Catholic influence objected to any language that seemed to condone abortion. These included Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Malta, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Peru. Several of them joined with Islamic countries in taking reservations on language that could be construed to support any family structure other than one built on a heterosexual couple, or to sanction extramarital sex by adolescents. This latter group included Afghanistan, Argentina, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Holy See, Honduras, Jordan, Libya, Nicaragua, and Paraguay. In a more general statement, Afghanistan, Brunei Darussalam, Djibouti, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen took reservations on any policies that could be taken to go against Islamic law.

 

NGO Role:

NGOs were present in significant numbers, and even more significant lobbying capacity, throughout the preparations for Cairo. Twelve-hundred people from 500 NGOs, located in both the global North and South, attended the final PrepCom ( ENB 6:30). Eleven-hundred-nineteen NGOs representing 134 countries were accredited to the ICPD, 4 and over 4000 attended the NGO Forum (Alan Guttmacher Institute 1994).

NGOs were very active from the first stages of the conference process. Most prominently, women’s NGOs started to mobilize for the conference in a Women’s Caucus prior to the official process, for the purpose of promoting a women’s rights agenda. They were aided by their significant experience in organizing throughout the UN Decade on women (1975-1985), particularly in working across geographical divides, and spurred on by the evidence they had seen at UNCED of an alliance being forged between population control advocates and environmentalists (McIntosh & Finkle, 237). Thus, in September 1992, 25 international advocates drew up a “Women’s Declaration on Population Policies” and formed the “Women’s Voices ‘94 Alliance” to support it. The International Women’s Health Coalition circulated the statement internationally, and eventually over 2288 individuals and organizations from more than 105 countries endorsed it. (“Women’s Voices ‘94” 1993); Women’s Feature Service 1994) To this document was added the January 1994 Declaration of the Reproductive Health and Justice conference, drafted at what was essentially an NGO PrepCom. Also in 1994, two hundred and fifteen women from 79 countries met for four days in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to hammer out NGO positions on population and development to present to the ICPD and its NGO Forum (International Women’s Health Coalition 1994).

An expansive UN Secretariat gave NGOs broad access to the preparatory process, and NGOs made extensive use of it. (McIntosh & Finkle 1995, 229). “Never before had NGOs been so mobilized, so well-organized and so prepared for the serious and systematic advocacy and lobbying.” ( ENB 6:30). From PrepCom II onward, NGOs not only attended even informal consultations, but were allowed to intervene during closed-door sessions. The ICPD Secretariat supported NGO requests for services, but even more remarkably, incorporated their written statements in draft documents ( ENB 6:11). Throughout the conference process, the Women’s Caucus assessed drafts as they progressed from one stage to the next and circulated their own amendments to governmental representatives (Johnson 1995, 139-140, 142; WEDO Fact Sheet). Differences between women’s and more population-focused NGOs were mediated during PrepCom II (McIntosh & Finkle 1995, 238), and NGO unity was stimulated by the strength of the Vatican opposition. There were also NGOs in support of the Vatican position, but they tended to be in the minority; for example, the Pro-Life Caucus assembled at the NGO Forum had only 15 members, while the Women’s Caucus had 400-500. Moreover, many mainstream religious groups objected to the one-sided media coverage of religious positions at the conference, which did not accurately represent other views (Johnson 1995, 144-5). NGOs were also part of many government delegations (Cowell 1994), and many sympathetic governments, particularly the US, supported their claims in official meetings. 5 The Women’s Caucus was by far the largest at the ICPD, with between 400 and 500 people attending its meetings (Johnson 1995, 145). Its power was demonstrated in the reflection of the “Cairo Consensus” throughout the final document of the conference, which had a clear women’s rights perspective and highlighted the role of NGOs as well as governments in carrying it out.

The initial findings about Cairo are mixed with regard to our original hypotheses. While population issues could be contentious given their references to women’s rights and the opposition of certain countries, led by the Vatican and joined by Catholic and Islamic countries, strong women’s organizing in advance of the conference, coupled with access provided by the Secretariat, meant that NGO positions became significant at Cairo.

NGO monitoring and lobbying roles indeed arose; NGOs seemed to anticipate opposition from governments on women’s issues. However, NGOs received unexpectedly open access to the official conference process from the UN Secretariat, which remained unchallenged by states. This suggests that the UN administration itself, in the form of the Secretariat’s arrangements for NGOs, may have significant impact on the relative status of NGOs in the conference process.

On the issue of resource allocation, states refused on principle to trade control over budget directives for promises of more aid for social programs. This issue would come up again at Copenhagen.

 

The World Summit for Social Development

The World Summit for Social Development, nicknamed “The Social Summit,” had the topic of social development as its general theme. The panel organizers, the Social Summit Secretariat, were located in the UN Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development. Thought on economic development as it relates to UN activities has a long and varied history that reached an important turning point in 1987 with the popularization of the idea of sustainable development, which combines concern for economic development with recognition of the need for environmental responsibility (World Commission on Environment & Development 1987). Social development, the topic of the Copenhagen conference, was a term meant to encompass the human dimension of development. Three issues were central to the summit: eradicating poverty; increasing employment; and social integration. (United Nations ACT Task Force on Basic Social Services for All)

On the poverty issue, the conference stipulated the need for a fuller understanding of poverty, its root causes, and its social implications. The goal of increasing employment meant not only reducing unemployment, but increasing productive employment. Social integration was the term used at the conference to describe a “society for all,” respecting human rights, cultural diversity, inclusion of all social groups, and the fostering of democracy and the rule of law. (United Nations)

The Social Summit’s conference declaration looked back in particular to the Eco-Summit (the UN Conference on the Environment and Development) of 1992, and Cairo’s population conference, and conferees were also well aware that the UN World Conference on Women was coming up in six months. In many ways, the Social Summit seemed to encompass an awareness of its place within the context of other conferences and UN programs, and of the need for a departure from “business as usual” if the problems of poverty were to be solved.

 

Economic Models and Financial Choices

At the Social Summit, as at other conferences, the Bretton Woods institutions and the liberal economic model came in for major criticism, particularly from developing countries. The 20/20 proposal, first advanced at Cairo, to devote at least 20% of national budgets and allocate 20% of international aid to social expenditures, was floated again at Copenhagen. Although it was included in the final conference document, to the disappointment of NGOs the proposal was made voluntary for “interested” governments. Oxfam called the change “sabotage.” Nevertheless, as at Cairo, G-77 countries continued to maintain that such a commitment was compromising their sovereignty by directing use of aid (Black 10 March1995).

The West also wanted any debt forgiveness to be applied to social development, and Europeans suggested that the UN monitor how aid is spent in less developed countries. These ideas met objections from some nations (“Useful Words” 1995). The United States was the only country that entered an official reservation on this issue, to reiterate its statements during the conference that it “cannot agree to increase official development assistance,” due to “domestic funding constraints”(UN 1995a). Many donor countries also resisted being made to give aid in certain ways, but sovereignty was not directly invoked.

 

Cultural/Religious Differences

According to the UN, the Social Summit was the first UN conference to focus specifically on social development. However, the Copenhagen Declaration and Program of Action draw on Rio’s recommendations for sustainable development and on the Cairo conference, and “are complemented by” the statements at Beijing and Istanbul (United Nations).

One news analysis said that the final document of the Social Summit “promised nothing that had not already been agreed” at Rio, Vienna, Cairo, or in the UN general assembly (Black 15 March 1995). Further, “some developing countries tried again”

to roll back previous commitments on women’s reproductive health and labor practices (Ibid.). But the attempts were unsuccessful, and some new understandings were reached. Language that had been agreed upon at Cairo was preserved on family and reproductive rights, despite “heated debates” and efforts of the Vatican and others to retreat from Cairo. (ENB1995, 10:34). Indeed, the reservations to the final document centered predominantly on phrases like “reproductive health” and “family planning,” indicating that reserving governments did not wish to be understood as supporting abortion or, in the case of the Holy See, for example, other forms of contraception or the use of condoms for HIV/AIDS prevention (UN 1995c, ix).

 

NGO Roles

The Social Summit itself was attended by 2300 NGO official representatives from 811 NGOs. In addition, 12,000 NGO representatives attended the parallel “NGO Forum ‘95,” held 3-12 March at Holmen, a former naval base near Copenhagen (UN 1995c, viii). As at Cairo, NGOs were actively involved at the early, middle and late stages of conference activity, participating to the extent possible in the negotiation process over the final document of the conference, criticizing government positions, and putting forth positions of their own.

Although statements at this conference repeatedly emphasized the importance of civil society to the achievement of summit goals, NGOs still had reason to be on their guard against getting shut out of the process. NGOs at PrepComs I and II made statements and participated in discussions together with governments and intergovernmental organizations. In fact, one account of the conference process saw NGOs as instrumental in bringing attention to “three core issues” at PrepCom II: “a broader definition of human development...; the root causes of poverty...; and recognition that the means for implementation must be seriously ‘retooled’” (ENB 1995a).

NGOs began to express concern about preserving openness in the process as governments got down to business on the actual drafting. In an intersessional meeting between PrepComs II and III, it was agreed that NGOs would be able to observe drafting negotiations. At PrepComs III, the working groups regularly briefed NGOs. But at the opening of the summit, while governments were still trying to finish up negotiations over the Final Declaration, Oxfam, Christian Aid and Action Aid, all U.K.-based development NGOs, threatened to pull out of the summit if they were not granted observer access to the sessions. The same report said that Amnesty International had been thrown out of a meeting but allowed back in after protests (Black 8 March 1995). Both the Plenary and the Main Committee (for negotiations on the document drafting) limited NGO access at the summit. Other meetings effectively limited NGO access when they were held in places only accessible to delegates. After the first sessions, organizers promised to issue daily tickets to NGOs for seats at the Plenary and Main Committee for future sessions (ENB 1995b).

In addition to the access issues, which were resolved with less acrimony—and more NGO access—than they had been at some of the earlier world conferences, NGO importance to achieving the goals of the conference was also deemed central by governments and NGOs. The social summit was touted as a summit where the importance of NGOs was widely acknowledged. NGOs were often portrayed by governments as implementation experts, with less acknowledgment of their policy making role. For example, in the final documents, governments use language that includes other societal actors as necessary for the achievement of development goals. “We acknowledge that it is the primary responsibility of states to attain these goals. We also acknowledge that these goals cannot be achieved by States alone,” said Item 27 of Copenhagen’s Programme for Action. The international community, multilateral financial institutions, regional and local actors, and “all actors of civil society” are cited as potential contributors to development. The civil society language was prominent in conference documents (ENB 1995, 10:34). Among other roles, NGOs are cited, with educational institutions and the media, as agents in mobilizing public awareness. (United Nations) (Ch.2, Item 34g). Also, NGOs have a role in improving access to reproductive health care (Ch.2, item 37e). For care of older persons, NGOs’ and government services efforts should be integrated (Ch.2, item 40c). And, in one policy-making call, governments said NGOs’ role in policy formulation and implementation on urban planning to address poverty should be strengthened (Ch.2, item 34g)..

NGOs put forward their own policy recommendations with vigor. They called for governments to take a stronger role in offering social guarantees to their citizens. Accordingly, strengthening national implementation of economic rights, for example, required strong national institutions. NGOs referred to their own role as essential partners in social development. NGOs should serve as monitors of national efforts to implement conference goals (“Quality Benchmark” 1994).

Citizens are central to social development; therefore, governments should eliminate corruption and construct frameworks for including “local, regional, and national civil society” in social development (Ibid.; Women’s Caucus 1995; African NGO Caucus N.D.).

To summarize, our first hypothesis seems to be supported by events at the Social Summit, where issues of economic and cultural sovereignty were the subject of debate and repeated some of the same issues present at Cairo and the earlier conferences. Governments clearly saw the need for NGOs to supplement governments’ own role, but were not willing to grant equal access to the negotiations that defined those roles. Again, however, money could not buy sovereignty on social issues. The 20/20 proposal to make a place for social spending in foreign aid and domestic budgets was resurrected from the Cairo conference, but diluted into a voluntary guideline for “interested governments,” primarily because recipient governments objected to its implications for external control.

 

The UN Conference on Human Settlements

In June, 1996, the United Nations held the last of a series of six major global conferences, the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, in Istanbul, Turkey. (The Fourth World Conference on Women, which we treat in earlier research, had been held in Beijing in September 1995, between Copenhagen and the Conference on Human Settlements. Below, we refer occasionally to the Beijing conference as well as other conferences that preceded Istanbul.) This conference was known as the Habitat II Conference, or the “City Summit.” Like other conferences of the 1990s, the agenda of the Habitat II Conference was considerably broader than that of its predecessor, Habitat I, held in Vancouver in 1976. While Habitat I focused on providing physical shelter for all humans, Habitat II added qualitative considerations to that goal: “We...take this opportunity to endorse the universal goals of ensuring adequate shelter for all and making human settlements safer, healthier, and more liveable, equitable, sustainable, and productive.” 6

Evaluations of Habitat II conclude that it did produce some significant advances, especially in integrating a fuller range of actors into the governmental conference (Tunali 1996, 34; Tosics 1997, 366; Bindé 1997, 218). The same observers note that the Habitat conference was also marked by significant “summit fatigue:” there were fewer participants than expected, the media stayed away, and many of the conference debates recycled controversies from earlier conferences (Bindé 1997, :215; Tosics 1997, 367). In the words of a UNESCO director,

In Istanbul, negotiations on urban problems sometimes took on the guise of an international flea market: all the old controversies of Rio, Cairo, Copenhagen and Beijing were brought out again, and given a further airing, to such an extent that one sometimes had the impression of attending some sort of 20 th century clearance sale (Bindé 1997, 216).

Opponents moved easily into pre-existing divisions, but many of the debates were eventually settled with language and agreements from the previous conferences as well.

 

Economic Sovereignty

Explicit sovereignty claims of any kind emerged only gradually in the Habitat conference process. NGO observers noted after the first PrepComs that “Habitat II is about national issues that can only be addressed at the national level. Because all governments share these problems, this PrepComs was less like a negotiation and more like a collaborative effort to develop appropriate strategies to deal with a common problem” ( ENB 11:1, 1995). By the second PrepComs, however, familiar economic claims began to emerge. The representative of the G-77/China coalition of governments argued at the beginning of the PrepComs that economic globalization and interdependence made developing countries unable to resolve their own habitat issues: “The unjust relationships in terms of trade, debt, and structural adjustment should not be ignored in the context of the conference. The Group of 77 hoped that the Conference would bring about a substantial increase in international cooperation for housing, shelter and development” (“Preparatory Committee” 1995). Post-conference follow-up has emphasized the inadequacy of new resources and the reluctance of developed countries to meet their resource commitments (Bigg and Dodds 1997).

In Istanbul, economic sovereignty claims can be seen in the G-77/China’s efforts to revisit the aim of sustainable development and in their proposed negative portrayal of economic globalization ( ENB 11:37, 1996). The final language on sustainable development in the Istanbul Declaration (Point 3) and throughout the Preamble reflects the Social Summit’s formula that joins “economic development, social development and environmental protection as interdependent and mutually reinforcing components of sustainable development.” The language on globalization follows a similar additive formula, speaking of “opportunities and challenges for the development process, as well as risks and uncertainties” (Istanbul Declaration, Point 5). Similarly, a long debate about whether there was a right to housing was resolved in a way that did not require governments to provide housing for their citizens, but allowed them to commit only to “the full and progressive realization of the right to adequate housing” (Istanbul Declaration, Point 8). The language echoes the UN’s traditional way of treating economic rights as a matter of nation-state capacity and progressive realization. All of this language reflects nation-states’ resistance to setting shared economic priorities for national implementation, whether they are inspired by international political agreements or global economic structures.

 

Cultural Sovereignty

Assertions of sovereignty on cultural and religious issues also developed slowly before exploding near the end of the Istanbul Conference. Delegates had to work around the clock for the last two days to negotiate a package agreement on women’s reproductive health care and the implementation of global human rights agreements ( ENB, 11:37, 1996). The differences in language between the Cairo and Beijing conferences provided a context for these debates, as two different precedents for the Habitat conference. The European Union and the United States pushed for strong universal language on women’s right to reproductive health, and argued for the Beijing language that insists states promote all human rights although it notes national differences in implementation. Most of the G-77/China coalition and the Holy See preferred Cairo’s language, which stresses national economic, religious, and cultural priorities and laws in the implementation of human rights agreements ( ENB 1996,11:38).

The final Habitat Agenda places a version of Beijing’s language in the Preamble, while altering some references to women’s reproductive health. As at Copenhagen, the sections on women were the most-reserved in the final document, with five Arab countries reserving on the paragraph on gender equality, and 11 delegations—the Holy See, Argentina, Guatemala and eight Muslim countries—reserving on a paragraph on reproductive and sexual health. Most of these also took reservations on a paragraph on the family ( ENB 1996, 11:37). In contrast, seven Arab countries took reservations of the clause “living in harmony with nature,” and only five objected to language on foreign occupation.

Interestingly, only Iran took a reservation on the issue of the right to equal inheritance (Ibid.), which was the issue that most closely linked gender and the Habitat agenda. Some states dropped their opposition after language was taken from the Beijing Platform for Action. The United States, European Union, Norway, Australia, and Canada strongly supported the inclusion of this right.

 

NGOs Roles: Advances in “Partnership”

After the tens of thousands of NGOs who had come to Beijing to lobby and network, the Habitat II conference seemed subdued. Only 6000 NGO participants (Strassman 1997:1729) from 1500 organizations attended the parallel NGO Forum; 500 of those organizations were based in Turkey, and the remaining 1000 came from only 60 different countries (“Press Release,” 6 June 1996). Yet NGOs who wanted to participate in and lobby the official governmental conference found many points of access, and unprecedented levels of access.

Two-fifths of the delegates to the conference were from NGOs, 2400 in all, and they interacted freely with 579 delegates from local authorities and 300 parliamentarians, as well as the national delegations of 185 governments (Strassman 1997:1729; Bindé 1997:215). At the Organizational Session in March, 1993, governmental delegates began with the once-innovative NGO Participation Rules from the Rio Conference preparations (GA/RES/47/180, point 6), and extended them further. NGOs could speak in committee debates, sat as members of at least 15 national governmental delegations and were even allowed to seat two representatives on the 15-person Drafting Committee, which wrote the Habitat II documents. Other NGOs were also allowed to sit in on the drafting meetings, and could offer advice to those drafting the text, giving NGOs new and very direct influence on the Habitat II agreements ( ENB 1995, 11:13); see also People Toward Habitat II 1995, no. 2). In another unprecedented step, the UN Secretariat distributed an official conference document to the governmental Working Groups that included proposed amendments by NGOs and local governments. NGOs credited this gesture for some important language changes on women’s and environmental issues ( ENB 1996, 11:25). Nonetheless, a comparison of NGOs’ proposed amendments with the final documents shows that NGOs were usually more successful in retaining existing language than they were in adding new language.

Governments were not uniformly supportive of NGOs’ participation. At the first PrepCom, in 1994, India, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico questioned the role that NGOs should play in national delegations and the conference preparations, but they accepted a compromise which allowed for more NGO participation without requiring it ( ENB 1994, 11:1). At the second PrepCom, Mexico joined with the United States to try to keep NGOs out of the working groups, but again failed ( People toward Habitat II 1995).

In fact, it was at PrepCom II that delegates accepted the Secretariat’s suggestions for a new form of “Partners” in Istanbul. In an effort to formalize the input of participants who were not national governments, the delegates arranged for a series of “Partners Forums” for local and municipal governments (represented by the World Assembly of Cities and Local Authorities), the private sector (World Business Forum), foundations, trade unions, professionals and researchers, national academies of science and engineering, parliamentarians, and NGOs and “CBOs” (community-based organizations) (Wakely 1996, vi). Each of these was to meet in advance of the Istanbul conference and prepare a statement on conference themes. Representatives of each Forum were then to present the statement to Committee 2 of the Istanbul Conference in formal hearings (“Partners Information” 1995).

Gaining space on the official program was an important participatory step, but only a partial one. Committee 2 was a cul-de-sac for the contributions of these Forums: Committee 1 was the one writing the Habitat Agenda for Action. There were no formal links between the two Committees, and, in any case, the hearings were held near the end of the conference process in Istanbul, when it was too late for them to have an impact on the Conference documents. Instead, the statements are published as an Annex to the Agenda, with no official force and commitment (Wakely 1996:vi).

Interestingly, some NGOs felt that the formal participation did not strengthen their capacity to influence governmental proceedings at Istanbul. One commented that “By accepting to be widely recognized as the voice of some abstract ‘civil society,’ the NGOs condemn themselves to express only their lowest common denominator—they reach the degree zero of speech (cited in Bindé 1997:220).” The wide diversity of NGOs present, oriented toward shelter, women’s, environment, and development issues, among others, made it difficult to pick “representatives” to give “representative” positions. Both NGOs and governments questioned the representativeness and accountability of NGOs in the hearings (A/CONF/165/14—Habitat II Report V.B.8.68).

NGOs were also included in governmental plans for monitoring compliance with the conference agreements, with “enabling” being the verb chosen to characterize the relations of governments to non-governmental actors ( Istanbul Declaration, Point 12; Habitat Agenda, Point 44). States created a Commission on Human Settlements, modeled on the Earth Summit’s Commission on Sustainable Development. NGOs and local governments will be included in the post-conference follow-up, although at least some observers speculate this is a strategy for bringing their new resources into an impoverished national governmental process (Bindé 1997, 219). Local governments were particular winners at this conference, finding a much larger role than they had played in the other 1990s conferences, or in the Habitat I conference (Wakely 1997, iii).

In sum, at Istanbul we found unprecedented access for NGOs to the important parts of the conference. This increased access seemed to be a result of government understandings that the issues of the conference were less about guarding sovereign prerogatives against global pronouncements, and more about building cooperation at local levels, where NGO input and resources were needed. That said, however, the same “old” sovereignty issues arose again at Istanbul, with the debate over women’s rights intensified since Beijing. For human settlements, the sovereign “objections” by some states to conference issues developed very slowly, although they did exhibit themselves by the end of the conference. Conversely, community-based organizations (CBOs) were seen as essential to the purposes of Istanbul; NGOs in that frame of reference could seem less threatening, as “CBOs writ large.” Istanbul can be considered a “negative case” in that respect when we compare sovereignty debates at the three conferences. That is, the more low-keyed the sovereignty issues at the conference, especially in the preparatory process, the broader NGO access became.

 

Conclusions

We began to examine the social conferences in light of our previous research on the UN global conferences on the environment, human rights, and women. At those conferences, as we observed in a previous paper, nation-states

repeatedly resisted the introduction of non-state actors and non-state-based conceptions of important global issues. They argued for national control over development processes and for religious and cultural relativism in the standards for treating their citizens, especially women. They argued against international oversight in the form of mechanisms to enforce whatever commitments they might make at these conferences. Finally, states reasserted their own central role in international politics over any interlopers, such as NGOs and other possible representatives of a new mode of global governance (Clark, Friedman & Hochstetler 1998a, 16).

For this study, we predicted in our hypothesis that the participatory status of NGOs, by which we meant their level of inclusion in UN conference proceedings—and thus the strength of the evidence for the emergence of a global civil society—would depend on the relative intensity of states’s claims to sovereignty on the issues pertaining to the conference. While it is difficult to make decisive claims on this score, the hypothesis is been borne out to some degree for the social conferences in comparison with the other UN world conferences. First of all, new permutations of arguments about sovereignty did not arise with reference to population, social development, or human settlement. The sovereign arguments that arose at the conferences referred mainly to rights of women and control over economic decisions. While these topics exhibit new ways of interpreting sovereign claims overall in the 1990s, they were all present at Rio and Vienna. They were the subject of intense debate preparatory to Beijing, and both states and NGOs knew that Cairo, in some ways, was preparation for Beijing. But the same debates were more or less rehashed in different ways at Cairo, Copenhagen, and Istanbul. Secondly, NGO participation and status were not nearly as threatened or contested at the social conferences in comparison with Rio, Vienna, and Beijing, although there was variation among the social conferences. NGOs gained most access and credit in official halls where sovereignty issues were least at stake.

Women’s rights remained the most vigorously contested sovereignty referents across the conferences studied. Because the issues are often considered to involve more “social” than “political” debates, the strong cultural or national defenses of traditional family structures and gender relations more generally may seem surprising at first glance. But their emergence as a central division between countries at these conferences demands serious consideration. It may be that, as some countries realize that they have relatively less leeway in economic development matters, they look to aspects of national life that are under their legal control. Moreover, gender relations are at the core of what most countries consider their national identity. Not only are women often seen as the “bearers of culture,” but the family is conceived of as the building block of society. Thus, threats to alter the gender relations underpinning men and women’s roles in society have the potential, in the view of many countries, to fundamentally change all social structures. Resolution of such differences is complicated even further if certain structures of gender relations are also promoted as fundamental to religious practice, as evidenced by the negotiating positions of some Catholic and Islamic governments at the conferences.

In the matter of resources, we were surprised to find that developing states, for the most part, placed sovereign control above the receipt of resources. While foreign aid was seen as a part of the solution to their economic problems, developing country governments were not willing to give up sovereign rights regarding decisions over how to allocate resources, as we had seen for some environmental protection issues (Clark, Friedman & Hochstetler 1998a). At Rio, the G-77 had made an implicit tradeoff, accepting a global economic model of sustainable development in turn for receiving greater economic assistance for achieving sustainable development (Clark, Friedman, and Hochstetler 1998b). There may be many reasons for this difference. One possible explanation for the difference in sovereign preferences between the aid proposal and proposals for aid designated for the environment is that the 20/20 proposal asked for potential change in priorities by developing country governments, rather than simply offering a resource “add-on.” A second reason may be that, given developed countries’ histories of not coming close to the G-7’s target percentages of foreign aid allocation, developing countries may not have considered the potential trade-off to be a live option. But their rhetoric cited sovereignty.

To conclude, we are reluctant to argue that changes in NGO-state interactions over time from Rio to Istanbul represent any kind of teleological expansion of global civil society of the sort envisioned by some at the end of the Cold War. The relative calm of the social conferences cannot really be seen as an “outcome” of earlier, more contentious conferences. For one thing, NGO participation and accomplishments at Rio began broadly, but were challenged later in the conference processes. That indicated to us that global civil society does matter to states, so much so that states sometimes see its emergence as a threat and will try to quash its growth. However, we would note that over time, NGO participation in world conferences became routine: there was a baseline expectation that organizations nominally part of global civil society would participate early and often in the conference proceedings. Further, NGO agency was not solely circumscribed by states. Particularly in the case of rights-based organizations, including women’s lobbying groups, NGOs did achieve recognition and some kinds of influence through confrontation and not simply by cooperation and trading their resources and expertise. Their accomplishments are a result of struggle. We interpret that as an indicator of the potential for a vigorous global civil society, in which there are procedures for settling disputes and arriving at shared understandings among actors with varied interests and goals—and not just a kind of Oz in which NGOs participate at the whims of states.

 

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Endnotes

*: Paper prepared for presentation at the 40 th Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 16–20 February 1999. Each co-author has contributed equally to the paper.  Back.

Note 1: As listed in UN ACT Task Force 1997.on Basic Social Services for All, Compendium of Social Issues from the United Nations Global Conferences in the 1990s, UN Doc. No. E/3000/1998 (New York: UN Population Fund, December 1997).  Back.

Note 2: Those held in Rome (1954) and Belgrade (1965) were meetings of technical and scientific experts. The first convocation of governments was in Bucharest (1974), with the second in Mexico City (1984).  Back.

Note 3: The first three points of the Rio Declaration stress the consequences of inequitable development and poverty on women and access to basic services (International Women’s Health Coalition 1994). See also Johnson 1995, 145.  Back.

Note 4: A regionwide breakdown of accredited NGOs finds 18% from Sub-Saharan Africa; 11% from the Arab States; 19% from Asia ; 35% from the Americas and the Carribean, and 12% from Europe. India, Egypt, and the United States sent the most, at 6, 7, and 17% of the accreditees, respectively, with many NGOs from the US registering as “international.” (See E/CONF.84/PC/10 and Add. 1-3; A/CONF.171/PC/6 and Add. 1-5; A/CONF.1871/7 and Add. 1.)  Back.

Note 5: Results of this unprecedented access were seen in the draft Programme of Action. Going into the Cairo conference, Chapter Four of the conference document, entitled, “Gender Equality, Equity and Empowerment of Women,” was almost bracket-free, meaning that the language was uncontested. All definitions of reproductive health throughout the document had been introduced by the Women’s Caucus, and an entire chapter devoted to “Partnership with the Non-Governmental Sector”, which covers “local, national and international non-governmental organizations as well as the private sector,” was added ( ENB 6:30).  Back.

Note 6: Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements, Principle 1. All primary documents cited in the section on the Habitat Conference, including the Earth Negotiations Bulletin can be accessed through the following web site: <http://www.undp.org/un/habitat/>.  Back.