Disrupting Global Governance: Protest at Environmental Conferences From

Disrupting global governance: Protest at environmental conferences from

1972 to 2012

Carl Death (Politics, Manchester) [email protected]

Paper presented at PSA Conference 16 April 2014, Manchester. Please do not cite or circulate.

Abstract

Non-state protest and disruption is a permanent feature of global governance, yet their form changes over time. This article tells the story of non-state protest at environmental conferences from Stockholm in 1972 to Rio de Janeiro in 2012, and in so doing also develops a conceptual framework for assessing the types of power relation at work in forms of disruptive protest. Disruption has many faces and facets, and manifests in power relations that can be described as productive, institutional, compulsory and structural, following

Barnett and Duvall’s typology. In 1972 non-state protest was marginalized and counter- cultural; disruption took institutionalized forms in 1992; was raucous but ultimately policed in 2002; and then almost disappeared from view in 2012.

Introduction

Protest by social movement activists is a fundamental part of the process of global governance. Indeed, the history of multilateral regimes, from trade to sustainable development and climate change, is at least partly constituted through the dynamic tension between activist pressure and diplomatic or bureaucratic ‘insiders’. 1 This article tells a familiar story – the evolution of global environmental governance through the

1 intergovernmental conferences from Stockholm in 1972 to Rio de Janeiro in 2012 – from an unfamiliar perspective: shifting modes and repertoires of disruptive protest. In so doing, it also develops a conceptual framework for assessing the types of power relation at work in forms of disruptive protest. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s conceptualisation of power relations in terms of compulsory, institutional, structural and productive power is utilised in a schematic and heuristic way to begin to understand and explain forms of disruptive protest at major international conferences. 2 As such this article provides both the first historical and comparative review of disruptive protests at the four major environmental conferences over the last forty years, as well as proposing an analytical framework for a more systematic conceptualisation of the power of disruptive protest within global governance.

The focus is on forms of disruptive, non-state protest. The term ‘non-state’ has been used purposively, rather than civil society or resistance movements. The article is concerned with the actions of groups and individuals who are not formal delegates representing states, but it does not assume they are necessarily either ‘civil’ (as in civil society) or ‘resisting’ (as in resistance movements). Disruptive protest is used to refer to public actions conveying opposition to a particular position or policy, and seeking to unsettle, derail, re-align or otherwise challenge the process of global governance. 3 Sidney Tarrow’s account of the importance and appeal of protest performances is key: ‘they disrupt the routines of life in ways that protestors hope will disarm, dismay and disrupt opponents. Disruption is the common coin of contentious politics and is the source of innovations that make social movements creative and sometimes dangerous’.4

Many studies of social movements have concluded that disruption of the status quo is their most potent weapon in seeking change. 5 Disruption is not always violent, and does not have

2 to be physical. It can be creative, subversive, symbolic and imaginative. 6 It can work through existing institutional structures, or it can work to shift structural relations between actors and institutions. But disruption always raises the costs of business as usual and complicates the smooth processes of governance. Sometimes it stimulates the exclusion, de-legitimisation, marginalisation or criminalisation of disruptive actors. On occasions, however, it requires participants in governance and global publics to reconsider the core values and end goals of particular regimes or institutions, and this can initiate or accelerate reforms of power relations. Testimonies to the power of disruption can be drawn from the suffragettes, civil rights activists, anti-apartheid movements and the trade unions. 7 Yet the forms and consequences of disruptive protest are highly variegated, and the category requires disaggregation in order to better conceptualise and understand the power of disruption.

In this article a schematic conceptualisation is proposed to understand the types of disruptive protest at four major environmental conferences. As an ‘opening gambit’ in an emerging research agenda, it has the advantage of clarity and symmetry. 8 It draws upon Barnett and

Duvall’s four types of power in global governance, and identifies each of these with a broad- brush-stroked account of forms of non-state protest at the UN Conference on the Human

Environment in Stockholm in 1972; the UN Conference on Environment and Development in

Rio de Janeiro in 1992; the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in

2002; and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development again in Rio in 2012.

Of course, such conferences are not necessarily the most important sites and forms of global governance, and disruptive protest also takes place outside and away from these conferences.

Yet these conferences are a useful place to start, because of their prominence (to state and non-state actors), their role in agenda-setting and framing, and their ‘landmark’ status in the

3 history of environmental governance. 9 Furthermore, it is also important to note that the following analysis is only one possible account of very rich and diverse and heterogeneous manifestations of non-state participation and protest at these conferences. Substantial research exists on the history and sociology of non-state activism at each of them, although there is a lack of comparative or ‘big picture’ analyses. The following sections attempt to provide such an overview, and there is a necessarily reductive interpretation of each conference. Explanations of the differences between the manifestations of non-state disruptive protest rely upon the repertoires, framing, and broader context (international and domestic) of the protests and the conferences. 10 The many realities of these protests were of course far more complex than the picture allows here, but the aim is provide a provocative re- telling of the story of the development of global environmental governance. This is a story which can help crystallise key categories and relationships, and thereby illuminate a conceptual approach to understanding the role of disruptive protest in global governance more generally.

Power, protest and the disruption of global governance

Not long after Bill McKibben proclaimed the ‘End of Nature’, Chatterjee and Finger argued that the 1992 Rio Earth Summit signalled ‘The end of protest?’ 11 Similarly dubious predictions in the early 2000s concerned the ‘death of environmentalism’ 12 and the ‘end of mega-conferences’. 13 This was a misreading of the trajectory of protest from 1972 through

1992 to 2002, and the 1990s and 2000s were characterised by an increased wave of social movement protests at major conferences and summits, of which the Seattle anti-WTO protest in 1999 was only the most famous. Diverse repertoires of disruptive protest were mobilised by activists at major summits and conferences including the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, the

2005 Gleneagles G8 summit, and the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. Disruptive

4 protest does not exhaust the ways in which non-state actors participate in global governance or international summits – and studies of such participation highlight a diverse range of modes of engagement including lobbying, expert input, reporting and information provision, advocacy, representation, and education 14 – but disruptive protest tends to dominate much media reporting of such events. Despite this, there is a tendency to homogenise this disruption in both popular and academic discussion, and a more nuanced and disaggregated discussion of its power is required.

In order to achieve this, the typology proposed by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall for the types of power in global governance – compulsory, institutional, structural and productive power relations – is useful. Compulsory power refers to ‘relations of interaction of direct control by one actor over another’; institutional power is ‘the control actors exercise indirectly over others through diffuse relations of interaction’; structural power is ‘the constitution of subjects’ capacities in direct structural relation to one another’; and productive power is ‘the socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signification’. 15 Moreover, they note there are two types of relation here: relations of interaction between previously constituted social actors (compulsory and institutional), and

‘relations of constitution of actors as particular kinds of social beings’ (structural and productive). 16 They also differentiate these forms of power as direct and immediate

(compulsory and structural) and indirect and diffuse (institutional and productive). Whereas this framework has tended to be applied to forms of governance and top-down power, it can also be mobilised as a useful way to categorise and conceptualise the power of disruptive protest.

There has been a tendency to associate non-state actors with the category of productive power relations: shaping norms and transforming value systems. This is particularly evident in environmental politics. 17 But Barnett and Duvall’s typology specifically treats productive power as a relation of constitution: the enactment and performance of particular types of subjectivity. This category therefore refers to the production of activists and protestors as agents in world politics, rather than the forms of power they mobilise in pursuit of their goals.

Barnett and Duvall note that, despite the tendency to associate compulsory power with states and state actors, non-state actors also employ compulsory power: ‘[t]ransnational activists, civil society organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations have demonstrated the ability to use rhetorical and symbolic tools, as well as shaming tactics, to get states, multinational corporations, and others to comply with the values and norms that they advance’. 18

The following sections accordingly view disruptive protest at each of the four major environmental conferences as emblematic of a particular type of power relation. They are discussed sequentially because activists and participants acted in the light of the history and experiences of previous conferences. But the purpose of surveying the conferences in this way is as much to illustrate the value of Barnett and Duvall’s typology for the comprehension of disruptive protest as it is to provide a history of protest at global environmental conferences.

Productive disruption: The UN Conference on the Human Environment (5-16 June

1972, Stockholm, Sweden)

The Stockholm conference was the first international conference on environmental issues, attended by representatives of 113 states and around 400 NGOs, and its very existence was in

6 some ways the product of a decade of protest from the burgeoning environmental movement. 19 In hindsight it is now seen as a crucial agenda-setting conference which, despite the many difficulties of the broader Cold War context, did produce a number of notable outcomes including a set of principles, an Action Plan, an Environment Fund, and the UN

Environment Programme (UNEP). 20 There was little direct disruption, and one commentator noted that whilst ‘small armies of environmental activists, pacifists and miscellaneous malcontents were expected to lay siege to the proceedings’, in the event the conference went smoothly and peacefully. 21 The most helpful way to conceptualise the power of disruptive protest in Stockholm, therefore, is as the productive and discursive disruption of the emergence of environmentalism as an issue for global political concern.

Repertoires and framing: the counter-cultural alternative

Most accounts of the conference suggest that non-state protest in Stockholm was limited and marginal; on the other hand it was also innovative. As it was the first major environmental conference there were few precedents or established traditions to follow, and so protest repertoires were borrowed from the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and early

1970s. Although there were a number of marches before the conference, during the intergovernmental meeting most attention was on the official delegates, with a fringe of alternative events, campsites, discussion groups and gatherings. Few of these attracted much media interest. Parallel events included the Environment Forum (which was sponsored and funded by the Swedish Government), the Dai Dong conference (predominately scientific in tone), the People’s Forum (a more radical leftist grouping), the Pow Wow group (promoting alternative technologies), and what was described as ‘an environmental analogue to

Woodstock – a group of American counter-culturists on the Hog Farm outside Stockholm’.22

The general atmosphere was characterised by a sense of enthusiasm (that the environment was being discussed at all, at an international conference) and frustration with the pace of negotiations and the political and diplomatic wrangling. Morgan reflected that ‘[i]nstead of the fractious hordes feared, the protesters came in orderly handfuls, wearing their idealism like a badge’. 23 Non-state participants included scientists, business representatives, journalists, lobbyists and many others. The influence of the counter-cultural European and

North American movements of the 1960s and 1970s was strong, leading to predictable dismissal from more mainstream commentators who followed Durkheim’s view of protest as produced by dislocated anomie and sustained by ‘crowd psychology’. 24 Famously, Wade

Rowland characterised the crowd as ‘a colourful collection of Woodstock grads, former

Merry Pranksters and other assorted acid-heads, eco-freaks, save-the-whalers, doomsday mystics, poets and hangers-on’. 25

This framing of protest tended to divide the Dai Dong event from the more radical, leftist groupings. The former was ‘a small group of scientists who were becoming desperately concerned about population growth, pollution and rapidly increasing use of natural resources’, whereas the latter ‘was a much larger gathering of people from what we would now call civil society, or environmental campaign groups, who used the now familiar smorgasbord of marches, song, demonstrations and dialogue to press issues from pollution control to civil rights to vegetarianism’. 26 Whether framed as interested onlookers or marginal ‘wackos’, however, they were all secondary to the main event: the negotiations.

The context: all attention on the negotiations

The conference took place in a charged Cold War context, with the USSR and Eastern bloc boycotting the event in protest at the exclusion of East Germany. It was China’s first

8 international conference since entering the UN, and Beijing took the opportunity to stridently criticise the USA over the escalation of the war in Vietnam – a note also struck by many other parties including Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and many non-state participants. 27 These tensions fed into the negotiations, and it was here that many of the most important issues and agendas in international environmental politics were first framed and debated. Pressure was applied to Japan over whaling, with many states echoing the broader environmental movement in its assertion of a norm of ecological responsibility and conservation. 28 The responsibility of states for pollution that spread beyond their borders was asserted. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (one of only two heads of state present) famously argued that ‘poverty is the worst form of pollution’, encapsulating a discursive framing which would see Northern environmentalism facing up against the Southern commitment to development, and which would remain a prominent theme for the next forty years. 29

The power of protest: shaping the discourse from afar

These discursive interventions – the assertion of environmental responsibilities beyond borders, and the challenge of reconciling environmental sustainability with poverty reduction

– were the most important consequences of the discursive disruption initiated by the environmentalists of the 1960s. They were manifested at Stockholm, rather than a consequence of the Stockholm conference itself, or its protests. As such the 1972 conference is an excellent example of productive power: it provides evidence for the emergence of new norms and discourses, and it brought new actors and constituencies into being.

The forms of disruption directly employed by protestors at Stockholm were also largely symbolic and representational. One example was the practice of ‘bearing witness’. The power

9 of bearing witness derives from strength of commitment rather than formal authority, and it aims to change world-views and values.30 At the conference it was evident in the attempts of non-state protestors to make the environmental and social costs of conflict and development visible. This included the presence of veterans of Vietnam and the Minamata disaster.31 This logic of protest is part of a much longer-term struggle by the environmental movement to highlight the down-sides of modern industrial development. Stockholm was therefore a product of the emerging environmental movement and the discursive disruption they had produced, and the repertoires of protest developed at the conference would shape the next forty years of global environmental governance.

Institutionalised protest: The UN Conference on Environment and Development (3-14

June 1992, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

In the twenty years following Stockholm the landscape of global environmental governance changed dramatically, as did the shape and character of the environmental movement. The

Rio ‘Earth Summit’ was a landmark event for both; it was also the largest ever international summit to date. If Stockholm initiated the intergovernmental process on environmental issues, Rio provided evidence that this process had captured international attention at the highest levels. In contrast to Stockholm twenty years previously, where only two heads of government attended, in Rio 120 heads of government were present and they produced a significant set of outputs including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the

Convention on Biodiversity, a statement of principles of forests, the Rio Declaration, and

Agenda 21 . Institutions such as the Commission for Sustainable Development and the Global

Environment Fund were also created or strengthened, and the conference contributed directly to the signing of the Convention to Combat Desertification in 1994.

The presence and visibility of civil society groups at Rio was also very different. 32 The major site of the parallel civil society conference was the Global Forum, held under canvas in the sweltering heat of Flamengo Park, where 17,400 participants representing 7,156 nongovernmental organizations from 165 countries were registered. There were 406 separate special interest conferences arranged under the Global Forum auspices. In the intergovernmental negotiations in the RioCentro there were 4,020 nongovernmental organizations accredited, and 650 of them sent 1,300 representatives. Between 7,000 and

9,000 news reporters were accredited to cover the summit. 33 For the majority of non-state participants, direct disruption of the event was not the aim; rather indirect and diffuse influence, and the disruption of particular agendas and policies, was the preferred approach.

Repertoires and framing: disruption through diplomacy

Many of those protestors who had been on the fringes of the Stockholm conference were now senior officials within newly created government environmental bodies or intergovernmental organisations, or heads of non-governmental organisations. The memory of the parallel conferences and festivities of Stockholm clearly informed the repertoires of protest in Rio, but the atmosphere in 1992 amongst non-state attendees was more hard-headed and focussed.

Amongst the major environmental NGOs demonstrations were planned in collaboration with media strategists and sympathetic allies inside the negotiations in order to exert maximum leverage. For the many organisations at a major conference for the first time the opportunities provided for networking and strategizing were exhilarating.

There was a diversity of forms of protest during the Rio Conference – borrowing repertoires from previous conferences and the wider environmental movement, but also improvising and performing new repertoires. Chatterjee and Finger describe a range ‘from theatre and dance

11 to commercial events, New Age celebrations, and celebrity appearances; from sectorial alternative negotiations to a protest against the World Bank; from exhibits to a backwards march to the Rio Centro to symbolize NGOs’ opinions of the progress made in Rio’. 34 The focus of much of the Global Forum activity during the conference was the drafting of over 30 alternative ‘Green Treaties’. In contrast to the text produced by Dai Dong in 1972, however, the Rio process led to a multitude of treaties which were largely negotiated and drafted during the conference itself. The treaties were scheduled to be formally signed by participating NGOs on June 13 and then presented to the heads of government. Reporters observed that the ‘effort to produce the treaties has exhausted conference organizers and participants and drained them of time and energy to attend to much else – such as the mass rallies favoured by some Brazilian and Latin American groups’. 35 The Global Forum was also plagued by organisational problems and funding issues – indeed Chatterjee and Finger note it was ‘probably best described as a circus or a colossal mess’. 36

The alternative treaties were indicative of the primary repertoire of protest in Rio, which was the press release or media statement by high profile spokespeople for major environment and development organisations. These were usually public interventions into specific aspects of the negotiations – such as the targets for the UNFCCC, the Bush regime’s failure to sign the biodiversity convention, or the governance and funding of new institutions such as the GEF – that mirrored intense political lobbying and activism behind the scenes in the corridors of the

RioCentro. 37

Overall, the non-state instances of protest at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 were broadly characterised by heated (but still peaceful) interventions into the negotiations and the intergovernmental diplomacy. Non-state participants saw their role as pressurising, lobbying and

12 informing the negotiators. Tactics used were primarily press statements, alternative texts, or highly visible actions – but these involved relatively small groups of people, not massed crowds. 38 Where mass actions took place these were often portrayed in the media as rather good natured affairs, with coverage frequently focussing on celebrities and the

‘carnivalesque’. 39 The mass marches – one with up to 50,000 people – passed largely unmentioned by the media. The tone of the meeting was very much that for many activists – from all over the world – Rio 1992 was a euphoric experience that allowed them to forge new transnational connections and networks and gain their first exposure to international diplomacy. 40

The context: optimism and institution-building

One reason for the very different character of the conference, and the non-state protest, in Rio as compared to Stockholm was the very different geopolitical context in 1992. The end of the

Cold War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall were recent memories, as was the freeing of

Nelson Mandela, and there was a wave of democratisations across Africa and the Third

World (including the consolidation of democracy in Brazil after decades of military rule, and a transition away from apartheid in South Africa) which seemed to presage an era of ‘people power’. The enthusiasm and optimism that characterised President Bush’s vision of a ‘New

World Order’ seemed to be encapsulated by the Rio Earth Summit. There was also more at stake in the substance of the negotiations, with keys texts and agreements up for discussion.

The domestic context for protest was also very different. Rio in the early 1990s was more tense and edgy than Stockholm, and this required the protestors develop an assertiveness and determination. There was a particular sense amongst many Brazilian progressive activists that the newly created spaces of democratic freedoms had to be fought for and maintained,

13 especially given the disappointment that the end of military rule been followed by a conservative election victory in 1989. 41 Protestors also found that journalists were present in unprecedented numbers for an environmental conference, and non-state protest had a media cachet and credibility it had lacked in 1972.

The power of protest: institutional influence from inside and outside

Compared to Stockholm, activists were far more experienced and involved with the substance of the negotiations. Many were both inside and outside, and many protests were designed to leverage or pressure the negotiators. Senior NGOs had unprecedented access and legitimacy within the corridors, and often found themselves formally or informally part of state delegations. According to some reports, UK diplomats stepped out of a negotiation to ask

Oxfam and ActionAid representatives what should be in the text on women and indigenous groups. 42 The array of institutional outcomes from Rio – the legal conventions, organisations like the Global Environment Fund and the Commission on Sustainable Development, an array of non-state initiatives and partnerships – bore the indelible imprint of non-state participants and lobbyists, and as such the disruption here was of particular stances and policies within the negotiations. This is an excellent example of what Barnett and Duvall term institutional power: where an actor, ‘working through the rules and procedures that define those institutions, guides, steers, and constrains the actions (or nonactions) and conditions of existence of others’. 43

Disruption at its most direct: The World Summit on Sustainable Development (26

August – 4 September 2002, Johannesburg, South Africa)

For many of those who had taken part in Rio in 1992, from both governments and civil society, the rest of the 1990s was a decade of disappointments and frustratingly slow

14 progress. 44 The enthusiasm and optimism of the early 1990s faded fast – and an anti- environmental backlash could even be discerned. However, with memories of the Rio festivities still relatively fresh, the prospect of another world summit to reinvigorate commitment to sustainable development was widely embraced. 45 The location of the conference in South Africa, the poster-child of the democratisations of the 1990s, added a further frisson to the event, and the hosts billed themselves as ‘the negotiating capital of the world’; ‘South Africa is the one place there is hope that sustainable development is possible

... maybe Mandela walks into the room and everything changes’. 46

The 2002 summit was the largest political meeting in human history, attended by over 190 countries, 100 world leaders, and 22,000 other participants. Yet it failed to produce anything like the legacy of Rio. There were no new headline grabbing targets or timeframes, or significant new pledges of funding. Instead the conference promoted multi-stakeholder voluntary ‘type II partnerships’ as mechanisms for implementing sustainable development, winning significant buy-in from the corporate sector but considerable criticisms from some

NGOs and activists. 47 Moreover, non-state protest at the summit was more charged, confrontational and directly disruptive than at any previous conference. This was despite the fact that lowered expectations meant that there was a sharp drop in NGO participation from

1992: 20,000 were accredited in Rio, whereas only 8,000 were accredited in Johannesburg.

Non-state participants were based at the Global People’s Forum at Nasrec, in the south of the city, and a range of other events were organised. More critical gatherings took place at the

People’s Earth Summit, the South-South biopiracy Summit, an environmental justice meeting, and a Landless Peoples’ Camp.

Repertoires and framing: marches and denunciations

The character of non-state participation and protest in Johannesburg felt very different to previous conferences in Stockholm and Rio. Whilst this should not be over-stated – many familiar repertoires were evident including the media stunt, the parallel conference, and the alternative text – the prominence of marches and angry demonstrations was unprecedented.

Overall, the disruption here was more angry and confrontational than in either Stockholm or

Rio. 48 There were repeated clashes between protestors and police, and rival mass marches.

In stark contrast to the other conferences examined here the repertoires of protest in

Johannesburg relied far more on the rhetoric of struggle and the implicit or actual threat of violence. For Vula Mthimkhulu, writing in the civil society newspaper Global Fire , the

Summit presented an opportunity to ‘popularise the struggle against forces of evil’ and ‘the genuine enemies masquerading as comrades during the Summit’. 49 There were placards condemning the ‘W$$D’ and reading ‘Bomb Sandton’ and ‘Shut down the Summit’ and there was talk of occupying and blockading the M1 motorway into Johannesburg. 50 Even attempts to defuse the tension – such as an overtly peaceful candle-lit freedom of expression march two days before the summit opened – were stopped by police using stun grenades.

Such events tended to overshadow more familiar symbolic, theatrical and creative protests.

Such repertoires were of course still present, however, even if they did not attract the same press attention. On 23 August, for example, a coalition of local and international NGOs including Friends of the Earth, CorpWatch, and GroundWork held a ‘Green Oscars’ ceremony awarding prizes to corporations and governments such as BP, Nestle and the US for their greenwash and bluewash. 51 Yet even the familiar Greenpeace actions were more direct and confrontational than in previous or subsequent conferences. On 24 August

Greenpeace activists scaled the nuclear power plant at Koeberg north of Cape Town to hang a

16 large anti-nuclear banner from the roof, prompting an angry response from the security forces and disrupting the smoothly orchestrated and rehearsed run-up to the arrival of the heads-of- state.

The context: tension domestically and internationally

Internationally, the optimism of the early 1990s had been replaced by an increasingly insecure world in the early 2000s. The date of the Johannesburg Summit had to be moved to avoid the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, and diplomats were more concerned with adapting to an unstable unipolar world than they were with reinvigorating environmental commitments. US President George W. Bush was absent from the conference, and a tense international atmosphere in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan was not conducive to successful negotiations. The many non-state participants in Johannesburg who did continue to lobby inside as well as protest outside sought mainly to prevent the erosion of the Rio agreements. In general, faith in multilateralism was at a low ebb.

The Johannesburg Summit also took place in a far more charged domestic context than any of the other major environmental conferences. The increasingly neoliberal macro-economic orientation of the ANC government in South Africa had produced growing opposition on issues like the slow pace of land reform, evictions and service cut-offs, and a pro-corporate outlook which seemed to consign poor and marginalised communities to abysmal environmental conditions at the same time as protest was increasingly criminalised. The acrimonious break-down of the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban in

2001 and a tide of service-delivery demonstrations culminated in the largest anti-government protests since the end of apartheid in South Africa during the Johannesburg Summit in

August 2002. 52

Media reporting, activist rhetoric and stark ANC and police warnings all fuelled the confrontational atmosphere. Massed social movements marching on 31 August were described in the South African press as ‘[w]ar veterans from Zimbabwe, ultra-leftists, disgruntled former soldiers, right-wingers, international anarchists, Palestinian and Israeli campaigners and hackers’ 53 – quite different to the Stockholm ‘hippies’ or Rio’s ‘colourful carnival’. Policing was accordingly vigorous, and was frequently accused of infringing protestors’ freedom of speech. 54

The power of protest: sound and fury

As a result environmental activists – both transnational and local – were frustrated and angry in Johannesburg in 2002. Expectations were low, and there was little sense of much to be won inside the negotiations. The protests were dominated by a tone of exclusion: it was often the marginalised and the very poor who were protesting, and they were provoked further by intolerant and sometimes repressive policing. The calls to smash the summit and the expressions of power in numbers on the streets were a reflection of the attraction of direct and compulsory forms of power. 55 Yet their ability to physically disrupt the summit was never really in question. Non-state protestors were fundamentally split over whether they really wanted to condemn the conference – including traditionally progresive allies such as UN, the

ANC government in South Africa, and the idea of sustainable development itself – in a way in which protests against the WTO in Seattle, or the G8 in Genoa, were not. The closest the protesters got to physical disruption was the cacophony of jeering and booing that greeted US

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the plenary. 56 In all other cases the police and security forces were more than capable of containing the minority of protestors who were seriously intent on derailing the conference.

It would be an over-simplification to reduce the modality of protest in South Africa to (failed) compulsory power. As in Rio there were many non-state participants who sought to exercise institutional influence and shape debates around corporate responsibility and accountability, targets on sanitation and the regulation of fisheries, and the status of the public-private partnerships. 57 Yet there was simply not the same degree of significance attached to the

Johannesburg negotiations, and accordingly it was the marches on the street condemning ‘the

W$$D’ that attracted most attention.

Shifting the locus of disruption: The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (20-22

June 2012, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Forty years after Stockholm, and twenty years after the first Earth Summit, the UN returned to Brazil to hold the ‘Rio+20’ Conference on Sustainable Development. Rather than an increasing trend of attention to and action on environmental issues, however, in one sense this return was a turn full circle. After the high-level summits of 1992 and 2002, 2012 was a lower-profile event. The formal summit lasted only three days, and many heads of government stayed away. One review of the conference concluded that ‘[s]ome of the world’s leading thinkers within the global sustainable development constituency attended side events but had no intention of engaging with the inter-governmental process’. 58 The decade since

2002 had seen environmental attention move away from sustainable development towards climate change, and an attempt to rekindle interest in the negotiations with the concept of the

‘green economy’ failed to ignite political or broader public interest. The conference produced a bland final text (which, having been almost entirely agreed before the high-level conference began, failed to even add the frisson of active negotiation to the process), and no new agreements, institutions, ideas or commitments.

As a result expectations for Rio+20 were muted and there was little anticipation of significant non-state participation or protest. Civil society groups were based at the parallel Peoples’

Summit in the Flamengo Park, which – as twenty years previously – comprised a number of initiatives and groupings including the Free Land Camp (an alternative space for the indigenous peoples of Brazil). Even when significant protests did take place they were largely ignored by the media and by delegates. As such the disruptive power of protests at Rio+20 was negligible.

One interpretation of this is that the structure of global environmental governance has changed significantly since 1972 and 1992: inter-governmental negotiations are no longer the most important site, and the attention of movements and the media has passed elsewhere. The environmental movement itself has also changed structurally over the past forty years, with the growth of networks, the professionalization of activism, and the increasing importance of southern movements and struggles. In terms of Barnett and Duvall’s typology of protest, the peripheral role of disruptive protest in 2012 seems to reflect the shifting structural power relations in preceding decades: the marginalisation of summitry and inter-governmental diplomacy, and the diversification of the environmental movement.

Repertoires and framing: the return to Rio?

After the tension of Johannesburg, the return to Rio in 2012 was marked by the familiar repertoires of 1992. There was a large parallel summit, mass marches, theatrical media stunts and inside-outside lobbying. The ever-increasing sophistication and polish of the larger

NGOs created more media-friendly events and online activism, and a proliferation of new non-state actors armed with advanced communication technology ensured a diversity of

20 protests. Anyone with a phone and an internet connection could stage a demonstration and post a press release. In the days preceding the conference Rio was the scene of a number of marches and protests, including a march of rural and urban women against the green economy and the commodification of nature. Overall, however, there was relatively little broader media interest in the conference, and hence little coverage for the protests which did take place. The Guardian (UK), for example, reported itself to ‘be the only major outlet that has set up a webpage devoted to coverage of the summit’. 59

The two main acts of protest which did attract some media attention were the mass march on

20 June and a small group ‘tearing up’ the text inside the conference centre on the following day. Both were portrayed by the media as symbolic, humorous and attention-seeking, rather than threatening. The march, for example, despite being at least as big (and maybe twice the size) of the march in Johannesburg in 2002 carried none of the same overtones of resistance and potential violence. Instead, much was made of the ‘carnivalesque’ character of the marchers, their diversity, costumes (or lack of costumes: many reports focussed on ‘naked protestors’), and theatricality.

The youth/NGO/indigenous protest inside the convention centre – in direct contrast to the forced expulsion of youth activists in 1992 – did not attract much serious attention from official delegates or conference security. It briefly enlivened media eager for a story, but seemed rather unsure of its own goals. Eventually it policed itself and vacated the venue. For

Bill McKibben the conference ‘came spontaneously alive for a few hours this afternoon, when a youth-led demonstration turned into an Occupy-style sit-down that in turn agreed to a mass walkout’. 60 If delegates noticed, it was only because there was nothing left for them to negotiate.

The context: all the action was elsewhere

UNCSD took place during a worldwide economic slump following the financial crisis of

2008, and little interest in stronger environmental regulation. 61 A revealing hint about the status of the Rio+20 conference occurred in the build-up when the date of the event was moved to avoid clashing with Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in the UK. This proved not enough to secure significant high-level attendance – the attention of political leaders was elsewhere, on the continuing fall-out of the financial crisis and deepening economic recession in Europe. Crucially, there was also little sense that pressing issues would be decided in Rio, or that there was much on the table worth debating. The crushing effect of the largely disappointing successive climate conferences in Copenhagen (2009), Cancun (2010) and

Durban (2011), together with the lack of conspicuous progress toward sustainable development since Johannesburg (or even Rio in 1992) had diminished what remained of significant diplomatic or popular enthusiasm for big environmental summits.

On the other hand, the decade since 2002 had seen the ever-faster rise of the ‘new powers’ –

China, Brazil and India in particular. Under President Lula Brazil had made widely-lauded strides in combating poverty and in protecting natural resources like the Amazon. 62 As such the tension and edge to protests in 1992, under a conservative president and a newly democratic country, was no longer present. One might have expected more confrontational protests in 2012 as frustrations continued to build and global austerity bit hard, and amongst indigenous campaigners against the Belo Monte dam there was considerable anger. But this was rarely picked up on by the media, and it failed to significantly register with the official delegates. The organisers had lowered expectations for the conference, and an open and permissive attitude to protest, combined with a patent lack of substance inside the

22 negotiations, meant that the (quite diverse and large) protests were mainly good natured and under-reported by the media. The contrast with the size and energy of the Brazilian protests in 2013 against the Confederations Cup and the FIFA World Cup 2014 was remarkable, in hindsight.

For many non-state organisations and protestors more interesting developments were occurring elsewhere. The Copenhagen debacle had been followed by an alternative conference: the ‘World Peoples Conference on Climate Change’ in Cochabamba in April

2010, at which the Bolivarian Latin American states had begun to promote more radical green discourses. A decade of World Social Forums had encouraged activists to attend more vibrant spaces of deliberation, rather than attending world summits to be ignored or beaten by the police. Movements like Occupy, Los Indignados, and the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ were more exciting sites for disruptive politics than a UN conference at Rio+20.

The power of protest: producing new spaces elsewhere

As such, in some ways the decade between 2002 and 2012 can be regarded – as in the 1960s

– as one in which the rules of the game and the locus of politics were once again shifting. In this case, however, the drivers seem to be structural shifts in global politics rather than changing norms and values. One of the results was that the form of disruption in evidence here is one of evasion and exit. The environmental protestors who had gone to Stockholm,

Rio and Johannesburg had become increasingly involved with broader networks of global justice, with local struggles against specific developments, and with creating or occupying new spaces and forums. Some of these new sites – such as the World Social Forum – were themselves a product of the parallel summits and peoples forums which had been organised in 1972, 1992 and 2002. The climate justice movement had displaced the sustainable

23 development process for much of the 2000s – although the disappointments of Copenhagen in 2009 had pushed many activists even further away from the big environmental conferences.

Yet again, it is important not to overemphasise this. Some protestors did attend Rio+20. For some groups – particularly Brazilian and indigenous groups seeking to disrupt the Belo

Monte dam – it was a crucial and significant occasion, although ultimately fruitless.

However, what is striking about the most recent incarnation of civil society protest at a major

UN summit was the lack of media attention it received. There was little of obvious political significance happening inside the negotiations, and the protests surrounding them were more playful, ironic and creative than threatening. 63 Accordingly the whole event had a rather low profile – and little sense of political content – in contrast to the proceeding conferences in

Johannesburg, Rio and Stockholm. 64

Conclusion

Michael Schechter concludes his review of UN conferences with the reflection that ‘[w]hile the globe’s ecological threats are perhaps even greater now than they were in the 1970s, most agree they would be even worse than they are had there been no UN global conferences’. 65

The very existence of these conferences is in no small part a result of the protests and activism of the environmental movement; in turn the UN, its agencies and summits have acted as a kind of ‘coral reef’ around which the environmental movement has grown since the

1970s. 66 The role of disruptive protest is central to the story of these conferences, but whilst the media frequently focus on the most visible forms of dissent it is important to appreciate the diverse forms and types of power relation that disruptive politics can take.

This article has argued that four different types of power relation at work in disruptive protest can be illustrated through the four main environmental conferences. The Stockholm conference and the non-state presence was the product of the discursive emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s. The 1992 Rio conference was characterised by institutional pressure and advocacy by a range of well-networked activists and groups – a form of disruption and intervention that targets specific policies and opponents, but which works within set institutional structures. In Johannesburg in 2002 some protestors sought to actively and directly disrupt the summit – both physically and symbolically – and were met with vigorous policing in response. In Rio in 2012 the form that disruptive protest took was evasion and exit: with the exception of Brazilian indigenous groups, most attention seemed elsewhere. If there is a UN conference on the environment in 2022 it is likely that disruptive protest will form part of its summit theatre, and understanding the power of such disruption is crucial for studies of global governance.

Notes 1 Bice Maiguashca, ‘Governance and Resistance in World Politics’, Review of International Studies , 29 (1), (2003), pp. 3-28; R. O’Brien, A. M. Goetz, J. A. Scholte, and M. Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge; CUP, 2000). 2 M. Barnett and R. Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, International Organization , 59 (1) (2005): 39-75. 3 K. O’Neill, ‘Transnational Protest: States, Circuses, and Conflicts at the Frontline of Global Politics’, International Studies Review , 6 (2) (2004), pp. 233-251. 4 S. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics , 3 rd Edition (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), p. 99. 5 D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald (eds) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 13-5. 6 G. St John, ‘Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnalivalized Politics in the Present’, Social Movement Studies , 7 (2) (2008), pp. 167-190. 7 I. Clark, International legitimacy and world society (Oxford: OUP, 2007); M. E. Keck and K. Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 8 AUTHOR 9 P. M. Haas, ‘UN Conferences and Constructivist Governance of the Environment’, Global Governance , 8 (1) (2002), pp. 73-91. 10 McAdam, J. D. et al, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements ; Tarrow, Power in Movement . 11 P. Chatterjee and M. Finger, The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 101. 12 M. Wissenburg and Y. Levy (eds) Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism? (London: Routledge, 2004).

13 M. G. Schechter, United Nations Global Conferences (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 11. 14 M. B. Betsill and E. Corell, NGO Diplomacy: The Influence of Nongovernmental Organizations in International Environmental Negotiations (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). 15 Barnett and Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, p. 43. 16 Ibid, p. 45. 17 C. Epstein, The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 2008); M. Finnemore and K. Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organization , 52 (4) (2005), pp. 887-917; P. Wapner, ‘Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics’, World Politics , 47 (3) (1995), pp. 311-340. 18 Barnett and Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, p. 60. 19 J. McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); T. Princen and M. Finger (eds) Environmental NGOs in World Politics: Linking the Local and the Global (London: Routledge, 1994). 20 Haas, ‘UN Conferences and Constructivist Governance of the Environment’, p. 79. 21 E. P. Morgan, ‘Stockholm: The clean (but impossible) dream’, Foreign Policy , 8 (1972), pp. 149-50. 22 N. J. Faramelli, ‘Toying with the environment and the poor: A report on the Stockholm environmental conferences’, Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review , 2 (3) (1972), p. 469; see also McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise , chapter 5. 23 Morgan, ‘Stockholm’, p. 150. 24 Tarrow, Power in Movement . 25 W. Rowland, The Plot to Save the World (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1973), p. 1. 26 R. Black, ‘Stockholm: Birth of the Green Generation’, BBC News (UK), 4 June 2012; see also McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise , p. 100. 27 Morgan, ‘Stockholm’. 28 Epstein, The Power of Words in International Relations . 29 Haas, ‘UN Conferences and Constructivist Governance of the Environment’. 30 Wapner, ‘Politics Beyond the State’, pp. 320-2. 31 Black, ‘Stockholm’; see also Faramelli, ‘Toying with the environment and the poor’, pp. 469-70. 32 A. van Rooy, ‘The Frontiers of Influence: NGO Lobbying at the 1974 World Food Conference, The 1992 Earth Summit and Beyond’, World Development , 25 (1) (1997), pp. 93-114. 33 P. E. Little, ‘Ritual, Power and Ethnography at the Rio Earth Summit’, Critique of Anthropology , 15 (3) (1995), p. 282. 34 Chatterjee and Finger, The Earth Brokers , p. 98. 35 R. Isberto, ‘Earth Summit: “Green Treaties” Slowly Being Finalized’, Inter Press Service , 9 June 1992. 36 Chatterjee and Finger, The Earth Brokers , p. 98. 37 van Rooy, ‘The Frontiers of Influence’, pp. 98-9. 38 Chatterjee and Finger, The Earth Brokers , p. 101. 39 Little, ‘Ritual, Power and Ethnography at the Rio Earth Summit’; see also O’Neill, ‘Transnational Protest’. 40 A. Alonso and A. Favareto, ‘From one summit to another: The changing landscape of Brazilian environmental movement’, Journal of Environment and Development , 21 (1) (2012), pp. 28-31. 41 Ibid, p. 29. 42 van Rooy, ‘The Frontiers of Influence’, p. 99. 43 Barnett and Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, p. 51. 44 P. S. Chasek and R. Sherman, Ten Days in Johannesburg: A Negotiation of Hope , Pretoria: DEAT and UNDP, 2004). 45 Haas, ‘UN Conferences and Constructivist Governance of the Environment’. 46 AUTHOR. See also Chasek and Sherman, Ten Days in Johannesburg . 47 N. Middleton and P. O’Keefe, Rio Plus Ten: Politics, Poverty and the Environment (London: Pluto, 2003). 48 Chasek and Sherman, Ten Days in Johannesburg . 49 AUTHOR. 50 Ibid. 51 See http://www.groundwork.org.za/WSSD/GreenwashProg_lores.PDF (accessed 14 January 2014). 52 S. K. Ndung’u (ed.) The Right to Dissent: Freedom of Expression, Assembly and Demonstration in South Africa (Johannesburg: Freedom of Expression Institute, 2003). 53 AUTHOR. 54 Ndung’u (ed.) The Right to Dissent . 55 Barnett and Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’. 56 AUTHOR. 57 Chasek and Sherman, Ten Days in Johannesburg .

58 J. van Alstine, S. Afionis and P. Doran, ‘The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20): A sign of the times or “ecology as spectacle”?’ Environmental Politics , 22 (2) (2013), pp. 333-338. 59 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jun/22/rio-20-summit-final-day-live-blog , accessed 24 March 2013. 60 B. McKibben, ‘Lame it on Rio: Youth stage Earth Summit walkout’, 21 June 2012. Available at http://grist.org/politics/lame-it-on-rio-youth-stage-earth-summit-walkout/ (accessed 25 March 2013). 61 van Alstine et al, ‘The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20)’, p. 336. 62 Alonso and Favareto, ‘From one summit to another’; van Alstine et al, ‘The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20)’, p. 337. 63 Alonso and Favareto, ‘From one summit to another’, p. 30. 64 van Alstine et al, ‘The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20)’. 65 Schechter, United Nations Global Conferences , p. 195. 66 Tarrow, Power in Movement , p. 246.