Making Sustainable Development Work: Governance, Finance, and Public-Private Cooperation

What I want to do is to elevate the vision and highlight how we all need to work together during the next year, as we build toward the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to create the brilliant tapestry of what sustainable development is in practice. I fear that the sustainable development dialogue in the coming year may simply be a policy-wonk's exercise about every possible point of discussion and experience over the last few years. The dialogue should focus on the important tools of sustainable development: good governance and financing for development. Those are the mechanisms that are necessary for sustainable development to occur. Equally important, however, as we move forward in this next year of discussion and in the years to follow, we must pursue a vision of sustainable development that puts the benefit of those tools into context.

Now, what is the vision of sustainable development? Let’s start with what it is not. It is not the age-old debate over the "precautionary principle." Sustainable development is not the effort to define sustainable development. To use an old tried phrase: we know what sustainable development is when we see it. The exercise of sustainable development is not about academic projects seeking to define sustainable development.

Sustainable development is about what we have achieved here in the United States of America, especially in the last 30 years, built on a foundation of a statute that articulated for the first time, the core principles of sustainable development that we live with today.

In 1970, the Congress passed, and a Republican president signed into law, the National Environmental Policy Act, which shows that 30 years ago, our nation set in place an environmental policy that had the three pillars of sustainable development.

We established a policy that set the blueprint for the very important environmental laws that followed, that set in place the vision for the rich variety of inspired practices that went beyond the laws, and tackled issues in a very creative way.

Our task ahead is what I call the "Supermarket Task." We go into clean, healthy, protected food supermarkets. As we walk down the aisles we say, "Wow, I want some of that, I want that cereal product, and I want some of that." What we need to do, collectively, as we go forward with sustainable development is to paint the pictures -- pictures that say, "I want that."

Let me give you just a couple of examples from my experience. I worked closely with a company that had the opportunity to go into another country that had the kind of growing, enabling environment for a long-term investment, so they decided to build a factory for the long-term.

Because the economic environment was right, because the security environment was right, they were willing to make the private investment to make this a factory that was going to be, in their vision, producing for the next 80 years. So, when they did that, they were able to say, well you know what, we're going to use the most advanced building technologies. We're going to make our process as much gravity fed as possible.

There are usually a lot of trucks moving around and there are lots of motors and conveyors and high-energy consuming activity. What they said is, "We're going to build this along a slope and we're going to make this a gravity fed process. We're going to use all of the health and safety practices that we have in the United States, and we're going to apply them here because we've got standardized operating procedures and we're just going to apply them in this factory."

It's standard in U.S. factories that we have a health unit. Now, the idea of a health unit was like a miracle for these workers, and the availability of the health unit led to a tremendous competition for jobs.

Now, the "I want that" factor of this situation is not the factory. It's everybody looking around, it's the local city politicians, it's the local state-governing politicians and the federal politicians saying to other local businesses: "Wait, they built that, I want that. Why aren't you doing that?"

We also have other examples of opportunity. We like to do partnerships and we like to do things efficiently here in America, so we created industrial parks. Industrial parks, typically, are willing to pay for water treatment. You might not do it only for your own factory, but you can get together about six or seven or eight factories to build a water treatment plant.

The beauty of that is, when they get together and create that water plant, then you've got the locality saying, "Well, can I use it too?" In the same way, they may get together on energy generation. So, it's that kind of private sector vision and that kind of private sector commitment that can create the partnerships with local governments, but done in a way that makes old-fashioned American business sense.

Really, it's amortizing those otherwise very expensive environmental protection measures, health and safety measures, amortizing them into the future. When you can amortize them into the future, they are very inexpensive. When you have to build them in, after the fact, it can be enormously expensive.

Now, we've also learned hard lessons here in the United States. The legacy of our prior lack of vision partly stems from a lack of knowledge on the part of government and industrialists. We’ve overcome that today. Our mission, as we reach out to the world on sustainable development, is not to let them revisit the very costly legacy that we had to deal with. We need to own up to the fact that it was a costly and devastating legacy. We would not be as advanced as we are but for the failures of our past. We should be willing to reach out and share our ability to help other countries avoid that.

In my travels around the world, I’ve often seen this basic point in practice: The real money is in private sector investment. The real money is in these long-term commitments. In any political environment, you've got to follow the money. So, we have export credit practices that we're trying to promote to make sure that the environmental aspects of financing are considered. We are working aggressively on this issue -- and interestingly, most of the rest of the world is not.

We also have very effective aid programs that try to incorporate environmental, health, and safety concerns into the planning processes for those projects. But I think one of the visions we need to recognize as we move forward with the idea of sustainable development, especially as articulated in the last 10 years, is that it has been about projects, when in fact, sustainable development needs to be a way of life.

And so, for every great aid project, we should be having 10 private sector projects in which the environmental aspects of that activity and in which the health, safety, and social aspects of that activity are incorporated into the planning, right up front, recognizing the benefits of long-term investments in environmental integrity and in the quality of life that we can provide to workers.

So, if I want to leave you with a core point, it is that: We need to create those pictures.

These practices are being applied worldwide, and we need to get out the trumpet and say what we couldn't say 20 years ago: There is a positive, quiet revolution going on -- our ability to export sound economic practices, coupled with very sound environmental practices, coupled with very sound health and safety practices.

We need to trumpet that vision. At the end of the day, the foundation for poverty alleviation is a legally and economically stable environment, such as the one that we enjoy here in the United States, even in the face of terror.

In America today, we are going beyond the struggle to meet basic health needs. We are talking about a quality of life that we want the rest of world to enjoy. It is that picture that we need to create for the world. We look forward to spreading sustainable development. I'm hopeful that a year from now, as we go forward with the discussion about good governance and finance, we have a lot of people saying, "I want that." That's what makes sustainable development truly sustainable. I encourage you all to join with me and to join with the administration as we pursue that path. Thank you.