In early June, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) marked 30 years of its engagement with the private sector. It did so with a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where the Fourth Preparatory Committee Meeting for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was taking place. Addressing 100 senior government officials, tourism and other business-sector executives, Jacqueline Aloisi de Larderel, UNEP's Assistant Executive Director, outlined the findings of 22 industry-sector reports prepared by UNEP, in partnership with 29 industry associations, to assess progress by business towards sustainable development since the Rio Earth Summit, ten years ago. 20 The sectors studied included accounting, advertising, chemicals, construction, engineering, food and drink, information and communications technology, oil and gas, and tourism.

Mrs Aloisi de Larderel said that 'the reports found a growing gap between the efforts of business and industry to reduce their impact on the environment and the worsening state of the planet'. She continued that 'this gap is due to the fact that in most industry sectors only a small number of companies are actively integrating social and environmental factors into business decisions, and because improvements are being overtaken by economic growth and increasing consumption of goods and services, which rely on natural resources and systems'. The implication was that governments and intergovernmental agencies would need to play a stronger role in regulating the market for sustainable development.

That a collaboration between a UN agency and business could lead to a critical assessment of business contribution to sustainable development may, at first, surprise those who are concerned with corporate influence at the UN. However, looking at the sectoral reports themselves, they do not actually make the arguments that UNEP suggests in the press release. 21 Instead, most reports profile the industries' perceptions of the key social and environmental issues they face, present a range of positive examples of companies addressing those issues, and encourage more voluntary efforts from industry, such as codes, certifications and reporting.

On closer reading, the reports represent a view of sustainable development that can be accommodated within a deregulating, export-led economic growth paradigm. This concerned one commentator on the report, Professor Rob Gray, director of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research at the University of Glasgow. 'I would have liked to have seen more recognition that there are conflicts between good business practice and social, environmental and sustainability issues,' he wrote. 'If the new agenda can be driven entirely by what makes good business sense then the only reason we have not made more progress is because business people are stupid or otherwise distracted. This is not an entirely plausible explanation. There are issues of a social, environmental and sustainability nature for which no business case can exist—I would like us all to recognise this more often and more explicitly.'

The issue of climate change is illustrative. The report on tourism sidesteps issues of pollution in transportation, referring to the separate report on aviation and including a footnote praising the aviation industry. 22 That aviation report, written by the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG) does not deal effectively with the key issue for aviation: the growth in air transport and associated emissions of greenhouse gases. 23 Although the report notes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated in 1999 that the sector is responsible for 3.5% of human-induced climate change, it uses largely irrelevant statistics to downplay the relative impact of air transport. Why compare the carbon emissions of a person flying 6,000 miles in a full aircraft and someone driving that distance alone in a car; by train, bus or boat would be more realistic. In any case, the main options presented as ways of addressing carbon emissions are technological, by improving efficiency and reducing emissions, and operational, by looking at how aircraft are handled. The possibility of offsetting carbon emissions through carbon sequestration is mentioned, but only voluntary action is recommended. There are no critical voices in this report, which might have highlighted the need to end the tax-exempt status of airline fuel, and bring the sector directly under the national requirements of the Kyoto Protocol.

The report argues that the role of aviation in supporting developing countries means that we need to consider trade-offs between social, environmental and economic aspects of sustainable development. Some would question whether air transport is so essential to the sustainable development of poorer countries. For exam-ple, Xavier Font of Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, who compiled a CD-ROM of research reports to support UNEP's work, notes that many studies show that over 60% of the money spent by tourists in developing countries actually 'leaks' back to other, usually developed, countries. Even so, the principle of trading off social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainable development is not absolute, but relative to certain limits. If climate change is becoming global enemy number one, and air transportation the largest-growing contributor to this, then stopping the growth of air transport and mapping out development strategies based on other forms of mobility must be on the agenda.

However, the report was written by an organisation committed to growing air transport. Hence ATAG's emphasis on 'partnership solutions ... built on common goals, empathy, open feedback, flexibility, as well as the ability to compromise and to share rewards' 24 can be questioned, as they could not willingly agree to curtail the growth in air transport. Therefore, we may ask: 'Who is being uncompromising?' By lending its name to this report, UNEP may help exclude certain voices and entrench a growth imperative in aviation.

Here we see that terms such as 'partnership' and 'consensus' might serve both progressive and regressive ends, and context is key. The sectoral reports use these terms heavily, which is not unusual for the sustainable development and corporate citizenship literature today. So, as these terms are increasingly used, we must ask: is it because they are pertinent in the particular context or merely because they are 'trendy' or, worse, because they serve the interests of those who use them?

The sectoral reports were accompanied by an overview, Ten Years after Rio: The UNEP Assessment. 25 It is in this document that UNEP's Executive Director Klaus Töpfer warns that 'the downside of good examples ... is that they may obscure the broader picture'. Nevertheless, the report is heavily focused on voluntary approaches to corporate responsibility, and its recommendations concerning these are more developed than those about other mechanisms and policies. The report identifies 'key gaps and stakeholder concerns' with various voluntary approaches. They argue:

• Few voluntary initiatives are directly linked with government policy and regulatory framework in a way that would complement the strengths and weaknesses of both.



• Many sectors still have not developed such codes of best practice to guide their members.



• Many often remain just good intentions, with little effective implementation, monitoring and verification programmes to ensure their effectiveness and credibility.



• No effective sanctions can be applied to those not adhering to the voluntary initiative. Even the best voluntary initiatives can be publicly harmed by 'free-riders'—companies that do not effectively apply the industry's voluntary standards.



• Many voluntary initiatives focus on the environmental aspects of sustainable development only.

The report did not list any similar 'key gaps and stakeholder concerns' for either its sections on multi-stakeholder dialogue or inter-sectoral partnerships, which illustrates how these concepts have risen to a level where they are seen as inherently good ideas.

UNEP suggests that there could be a mutually reinforcing relationship between voluntary and regulatory approaches. Therefore they call on business to adopt, effectively implement and monitor sector-wide voluntary initiatives that are 'in support of and beyond regulatory requirements' and on governments to 'seek ways to integrate voluntary initiatives into their policy and regulatory framework'. The editors emphasise the role of governments in combining regulatory, economic and voluntary instruments, in spurring social and technological innovation, and in ensuring that laggard or negligent companies do not benefit at the expense of those investing in best practices. Therefore the report asks business to 'follow the examples of proactive companies and associations in shifting from reactive, obstructionist modes to more co-operative partnership approaches to meet global, national, regional and local environmental governance needs and sustainability goals'. However, it says very little about the role of business in lobbying government to avoid social and environmental regulation, or to negotiate those bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements that some argue are antithetical to sustainable development goals. 26

The report suggests that work on the social dimension of sustainable development 'is still in its infancy', which is a view held by many environmental specialists who have only begun to work on social issues and know little of industrial relations and human rights. (The UN's International Labour Organisation and High Commission of Human Rights have been around far longer than UNEP.) The lack of understanding of the social dimension to sustainable development is illustrated by a spartan section on human rights where, oddly, the voluntary workplace standard SA8000 and the stakeholder management standard AA1000 are both mentioned.

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