Feature
Simon says .... do this
by Carson Scott
Former MP Simon Upton’s Paris job with the OECD gives him the clout to make a difference on the world stage of sustainable development.
When Simon Upton was a government minister in New Zealand, international engagements – no matter what his portfolio – were the least satisfactory part of the job.
“A lot of them were living death – they were dry, formal, prescriptive, bureaucratic exchanges and a complete waste of time,” says Upton, on his first outing with the New Zealand media since becoming chairman of the Round Table on Sustainable Development at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2001. “Because of the large number of interactions involved, they always retreated into being least-common-denominator exchanges.”
Although they were always presented as being grand affairs, the real work was done in bilaterals. “People go off into broom cupboards together and have little conversations, whereas my feeling always was that if these encounters were (a) not so massive, and (b) the politicians who were attending were taken seriously and the meetings were properly prepared, you could add some real value.”
Upton began as a chairman of the round table in 1998, going to biannual meetings in Paris. “In 2001, they asked me if I’d like to run it fulltime.” He had been in Parliament 19 years – the former Rhodes Scholar was first elected at just 23 – and thought it was time for a change.
In international committees, he says, “often the over-ambition of things done at a global level, in terms of the words, is amazing. We’ve spawned this vast negotiating field of action and generated acres of negotiating texts and huge conferences and treaties, which aren’t necessarily being implemented.
“It’s getting this international agenda down to a doable, practical size which interests me. We’re saying: ‘If you want to make progress, what would you do? Where do you get your maximum leverage? What would make the biggest difference?’
“What the round table does is very specific. It’s not about getting into big encounters. These are small meetings, with 30 to 40 people. We ask: ‘What is the issue at the bottom of this that’s making it difficult to progress?’”
Upton’s proudest achievement so far with the round table is a fisheries taskforce involving New Zealand, set up after the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. “We looked at the agenda coming out of Johannesburg – 168 paragraphs – and said: ‘You’re never going to tackle these issues by having mega-conferences where people utter platitudes. If you were to try to move something forward usefully, what would it be?’ One of the issues that came out of it was illegal fishing on the high seas.
“What happens on the high seas is beyond the jurisdiction of any single country. It involves international law issues. Trying to police it involves international enforcement issues. Trying to monitor the trade in that stuff involves international trade issues. It impacts on the global environment – the global commons, in effect – because under international law, every country has an equal right to the resources of the high seas.
“A group of ministers, including Pete Hodgson, who was Fisheries Minister then, formed a taskforce that will generate not another report, but a list of items that their countries say: ‘We can commit to doing these things now and we’ll try to encourage others as well, without waiting for some great multilateral global machinery to turn yet again.’
“Everyone agrees that you need to amend the law of the sea. Well, best of British – in 25 years you might have something negotiated. America hasn’t even ratified the existing law of the sea, though we’re told it’s going to – shortly. To get the agreement of everyone to amend that – to make it stick – is a long-term project. If you want to make a difference now, it’s not the thing you’d advocate. You’d advocate something of a much more practical nature.
“Most ministers don’t get the time in their schedules to sit down for 24 hours and follow one issue in considerable detail and get around the table all the key affected parties who’ve got knowledge of the subject. I try to give those who attend these meetings an opportunity to do something that the system doesn’t let them do.”
Ministers cannot send a bureaucrat to represent them at round table meetings. If they won’t come themselves, their country is not represented at the table – a rule that only sticks because there’s nothing at stake.
“That changes the dynamics of it completely. Often, you go to international meetings and half the people sitting at the table are not the political representatives. They’ve sent the ambassador or someone along because they’re too busy. What I’m doing is trying to improve the quality of exchange.
“September 11 happened the year I arrived and I thought: that’s just great – everyone’s eye will be on a different ball now. But, in fact, the interest has been just as high. There’s an understanding that if you want a stable, peaceful world, but development is going nowhere, you’ll almost certainly have environmental degradation. And even if you’ve got development, if you’ve got environmental degradation, that’ll set up pressures which will pose risks of their own.”
Upton won’t enter into any exchange on the rise of National under Don Brash, despite praising Bill English via his weblog “upton-on-line” (www.arcadia.co.nz).
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