From Words to Actions to Results: Sea Changes in Sustainable Development

Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. I spend most of my time in Washington, and at international events working with other government representatives. It's a refreshing change to be somewhere where government representatives are in the minority.

You, and the companies you represent, are playing a critical role in advancing sustainable development. Business Roundtable members are making positive contributions in all sectors of society, up and down the supply chain, and throughout the world. Your focus on social value, economic growth, and environmental value – the triple bottom line – is setting the right tone. Sustainable development is about joint pursuit of economic development, social development, and environmental protection.

It's also nice to have the opportunity to be in Silicon Valley, a center of America 's innovative spirit. Innovation has been a vital catalyst for sustainable development and has played a particularly important role in the United States. Americans have a special willingness to experiment and to bring new concepts to the light of day. For every product and idea that succeeds many more have had their share of growing pains and setbacks. As a culture, we view these setbacks as a step on the road to success and encourage entrepreneurs to try and try again.

How many of you know what the name WD-40 stands for? It's “Water Displacement Perfected on the 40 th Try.” The mixture of exploration, aspiration, and persistence that led to the invention of WD-40 is a vital component of a culture of innovation. It's a spirit that many of us are bringing to our efforts on sustainable development, and those innovations are making a difference. What I'd like to do this morning is share with you some thoughts and examples of innovation on how we in government are approaching sustainable development and where I hope we're headed.

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the State Department last year, she challenged each of us who work for her to use America 's diplomatic power to partner with foreign citizens to help them better their own lives. In introducing this concept of “transformational diplomacy,” she called for “a diplomacy that not only reports on the world … but seeks to change the world itself.”

The past several years have brought some fundamental transformations – “sea changes” to borrow BRT's phrase – in international discussions on sustainable development. After several years of developing broad blueprints to address the world's challenges, we have entered a new period in which we're focusing on turning those blueprints into action.

The private sector has played a critical role in ushering in this new implementation era and, I believe, has an even more critical role to play in the coming years. The S.E.E. Change Initiative is helping America 's leading companies to take action on sustainable development and report on their efforts. When you look at the facts and figures, there have been positive developments in recent years. In Southern Asia, for example, the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day dropped nearly 25% between 1990 and 2001. In Eastern Asia, that drop was nearly 50%, according to the UN.

Still, worldwide, more than one billion people live on less than $1 per day and 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 per day. As you know, we face a number of other sustainable development challenges as well:

• 38.6 million people live with HIV/AIDS;
• 6% of Sub-Saharan African adults are HIV positive
• 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water
• 2.3 billion people lack access to sanitation
• 2 billion people lack access to modern energy services
• An area the size of Mississippi is deforested every year
• 75% of the world's fisheries are fully exploited, over-exploited, or depleted

The key question is, how do we respond to these challenges? How do we help countries move forward to invest in their people, provide the enabling environment for economic growth, and rule justly and democratically? As you know, the United Nations has convened a number of major conferences to discuss these challenges. At the risk of over-generalizing, many of these meetings followed a similar pattern. Typically we start by defining and articulating the challenges before us. Reports are produced, articles are written, and speeches are made. Unanimously, we confirm that the challenges are pressing and require action.

The next step is often a negotiation to produce a consensus declaration or an “action plan” to address the challenges. Two examples are from 1992 -- Agenda 21: The United Nations Programme of Action from Rio – and 2002's Johannesburg Plan of Implementation . But they are just examples. During this same period, there were countless other intergovernmental negotiations, declarations, and calls to action.

At the end of the day, some good things are in these documents. In the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, for example, the language on the importance of domestic good governance is some of the strongest language on that topic that you'll find in a UN document.

However, the conclusion of work on these documents often coincided with the conclusion of the conferences themselves. Conferences that wanted to produce results often could point only to documents -- not actions, leaving little time, if any to ask, “What's next?” and even less time to try to do something.

Sea Change I: Words are Good, Actions are Better

The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg introduced a fundamental change. For the first time in a UN Summit, the package of outcomes included not only consensus texts but also a series of action-oriented voluntary initiatives. These so-called “partnerships for sustainable development” comprised a wide range of collaborative initiatives aimed at addressing the challenges before us.

All told, governments, NGOs, and businesses announced more than 200 multistakeholder partnerships at the Johannesburg Summit, covering a wide range of issues. Some involved a few smaller organizations, while others involved several of the world's largest organizations. Some involved tens of thousands of dollars, while others involved hundreds of millions of dollars.

The U.S. government launched or joined nearly 20 partnerships in Johannesburg and we have launched many more since. Through USAID's Global Development Alliance, the U.S. government has built over 400 public-private alliances since 2001, combining $1.4 billion of U.S. government resources with over $4.6 billion in resources from partners.

The introduction of this “partnerships paradigm” provided a space for us to begin answering the “what's next?” question. While partnerships are not the only means of implementing sustainable development, they are a key tool in our arsenal. By endorsing partnerships as an outcome, the international community sent a simple message: “ Words are good, actions are better .”

A lasting impact of this new focus is that partnerships provide a way for the private sector and other stakeholders to get engaged. The private sector has seized this opportunity. At this past May's meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, I was particularly pleased to see the winners of the World Business Awards in support of the Millennium Development Goals, a program jointly sponsored by the International Chamber of Commerce, the United Nations Development Program, and the International Business Leaders Forum. The companies represented through this initiative sent a clear message that the private sector is playing a key role in advancing sustainable development worldwide.

Sea Change II: Actions are Better, but Results are What Matter

This emphasis on actions is important, but actions alone are not enough. This point came to a head for me two years ago as we discussed the follow-up to the initiatives we launched at the Johannesburg Summit. In the first year after Johannesburg, we announced that we were on target to spend approximately $350 million in the first year of our Water for the Poor Initiative, roughly one third of the nearly $1 billion dollar commitment we made in Johannesburg. In 2004, the second year of the program, we reported that we were slightly ahead of pace to spend $1 billion.

It was at that point – during a briefing on what the U.S. was doing to implement its Johannesburg commitments – that someone raised their hand and asked: “What are you getting for that money?” This issue – measuring and reporting results – not how much you've spent, but what you've bought is really the next frontier in our international efforts to implement sustainable development.

In fact, within the U.S. Government, this focus on results is a guiding principle for a major effort that Secretary Rice has launched to reform our provision of foreign assistance so that it supports our transformational diplomacy goals. We are looking at both the short-term outputs of projects and the long-term outcomes. We are focusing on operational planning – what are we trying to accomplish – all with the goal of moving countries forward.

This emerging focus on results is the second sea change that I referred to earlier. If the message in 2002 was “words are good, actions are better,” the message in 2006 is “ actions are better, but results are what matter .”

Practically, what this means is that we are moving from reporting dollars spent to results achieved. In the case of the Water for the Poor Initiative, for example, we are now able to say not only that we obligated more than $1.7 billion over a three year period but also that, as a result of our efforts, more than 24 million people received improved access to safe drinking water and over 26 million have received access to improved sanitation.

We are identifying results-oriented metrics for other efforts as well. In the case of HIV/AIDS, for example, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has supported care for 3 million people, including 1.2 million orphans and vulnerable children. And, on energy, through U.S. Government support for the Global Village Energy Partnership and other programs, 15.7 million people have received increased access to modern energy services.

Why Results Matter

Why do results matter? First, when we focus on actions and results, we are having a fundamentally different conversation than we used to have. In many ways, this is a cultural shift for many of us working on environment and development. It requires that instead of focusing on “getting through,” an international meeting, we focus on what we are “bringing to” an international meeting. What have we accomplished. It requires that we measure our success by a new bottom line – not words on a page, but results on the ground.

This brings me to the second reason to focus on action and results. When we identify practical solutions, we also begin to focus on scaling up and replicating those efforts that work. We focus on building the national and local-level legal and policy frameworks that enable adoption of successful approaches. In a word it's pragmatism – focusing on what works.

It is important that we are seeing groups find ways to reward those organizations that have delivered on-the-ground results. For example, the Financial Times and the International Finance Corporation now sponsor Sustainable Banking Awards, and in 2006 Citigroup was honored for its work in Mexico to catalyze as many as 60,000 micro-finance loans to female entrepreneurs in Mexico.

What's Next

So what's next? As I mentioned, governments, the U.S. included, have much more work to do in measuring and reporting on the results of our sustainable development activities. Toward that end, the U.S. government launched a website – www.SDP.gov – in 2004 as a mechanism for us to regularly report on the progress of the 20-plus partnerships we launched at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. We have since expanded the website to include other partnerships as well.

We have also registered many of our partnerships on the UN's partnerships database, which provides another mechanism for transparency-based accountability. The UN's database has grown from 209 partnerships in to over 320 partnerships since 2002. For the United States, one next step is to sharpen our focus on reporting results. A few weeks ago, we began adding a new feature to some of our fact sheets on SDP.gov: a box highlighting “Featured Results.”

For example, our fact sheet for the Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles now highlights that, with the assistance of this partnership and the World Bank, all 49 Sub-Saharan African countries stopped refining and importing leaded gasoline by the end of 2005, positively affecting 733 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This may seem like a small step, merely adding a new element to a fact sheet. But it actually is a significant change. By focusing in on a few “cornerstone metrics” – one or two key results that we will report on publicly and regularly – we are forced to keep in mind what all of these efforts mean and what we are seeking to accomplish. And perhaps, most importantly, we encourage others to adopt a similar focus on results.

This focus on results has already produced a number of challenges. Let me give you some examples. If we are going to highlight a few cornerstone metrics, for example, which ones do we choose? How do we measure and report on qualitative interventions like capacity building and legislative reform? If a project has ten partners, does each partner take partial credit or is total credit given to the initiative? How do we encourage a common understanding on terminology such as “access to modern energy services” or “provision of clean water” so that when we report on the number of people we have hooked up, it means something similar to what my colleagues in the Dutch government or at Coca Cola have in mind. We have started to engage with a number of key actors on this question – the World Bank, major donors, business – not to launch a negotiation over metrics but rather to have a dialogue on what works.

I have had the opportunity to talk to non-governmental organizations, businesses and government representatives and one thing is clear. Your companies have already developed many useful metrics and indicators. We need to hear from you. Your experience in this field is incredibly valuable and we would welcome your input as we try to improve our ability to measure and report.

I'd like to challenge you to really highlight the efforts you are each undertaking through the S.E.E. Change Initiative. Continue to tell us what your “Featured Results” are. And, when you find yourself on the international sustainable development meetings circuit, put those results front and center. I hope that in the future meetings that I attend where government representatives are slightly more plentiful, we will hear about S.E.E. Change and the results it has produced. That is one of the best ways to reinforce the message that words are good, actions are better, but results are what really matter.

Thank you very much.