Governing Sustainable Development: Partnerships, Protests and Power at the World Summit

Multilateral UN summits from Stockholm to Copenhagen have set the pace and direction for the global governance of sustainable development. The 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was a key moment in the evolution of sustainable development as a discourse and summitry as a technology of government. It firmly established multi-stakeholder partnerships, carbon-trading and communication strategies as primary techniques for dealing with environmental crises. It was also a significant event in terms of South African domestic politics, witnessing some of the largest protests since the end of Apartheid.

Carl Death draws on Foucauldian governmentality literature to argue that the Johannesburg Summit was a key site for the refashioning of sustainable development as advanced liberal government; for the emergence of an exemplary logic of rule; and for the mutually interdependent relationship between ‘mega-events’ (summits, world cups, Olympic games) and ‘mega-protests’ understood as Foucauldian counter-conducts.

Analysing detailed and original research on the WSSD, Death argues that summits work to make politically sustainable a global order which is manifestly unsustainable. Paradoxically however, they also provide opportunities for the status quo to be protested and resisted. This work will be of great interest to scholars of development studies, global governance and environmental politics.

Carl Death teaches environmental politics and African politics in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University. His chief area of research is the governance and contestation of sustainable development in Southern Africa, and he has spent time conducting research at the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Dublin City University in recent years.