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Commissioner Lamy's speech on "Sustainable Impact Assessment: Towards sustainable development"

Your Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me to start by thanking all of you for taking part in this seminar and making a contribution to what I am sure will be a valuable event.

I should also like to extend special thanks to the United Nations Environment Programme, under whose patronage we are meeting, and the International Labour Office, which has actively supported this initiative.

These gestures of support are doubly important to us.

First, because it is important to have the support of key actors in global governance and sustainable development.

Second, because this is a thorny subject which stirs up strong emotions and remains very controversial, as I myself have found out in discussions with the public.

So, before going any further, let me explain how innovatory and ambitious this seminar is.

It offers us an opportunity to set up an effective international network of experts working in the field. And the number of countries represented here today show how international it is. We want to capitalise on your knowledge and experience and on the range of views on offer.

It enables us to bring together and consult a wide range of actors, from NGOs to multinationals, not to mention trade unions, consultants and experts from both the developed and developing worlds.

We hope to maximise the impact of this seminar by disseminating its conclusions widely and we shall also take account of them in our future work. The care we have taken over the reporting of the debate by bringing in independent professional rapporteurs is one gauge of this. The presence tomorrow of Pierre Defraigne, deputy Director-General, is a second.

The holding of this seminar was prompted by a deeply-felt need, namely to tackle the difficulties inherent in sustainability impact assessment. Indeed, it was awareness of these difficulties that led me to launch this programme just a few weeks before the setback in Seattle.

There were three grounds for this decision.

• The EU was in the process of opening its markets, not as an end in itself, but as a way of stimulating global economic growth and underpinning global political stability.
  
  
• The EU had attached a sustainable development criterion to its policy objectives in an effort to ensure that economic development reduced inequality without damaging the environment.
  
  
• I felt the need for better governance in the area of trade policy and greater dialogue between policy-makers and civil society as a whole, from NGOs to private-interest lobbies.
  
  
• These three strands need to be woven together: trade policy, the true engine of economic development, has to be made compatible with the management of natural resources, the quality of the environment and social development, and how this is done must be discussed with civil society. SIA studies were conceived as a key component of the machinery that would enable us to do this.
  
  
• I would like to end my outline of the general situation by making a few remarks on the double constraint on trade policy.
  
  
• I want to take the time to do this because some of our trade partners and members of civil society accuse us of using this double constraint as a pretext for protecting our market or camouflaging a secret agenda. So, in the interests of dispelling any ambiguity, allow me to explain our approach.
  
  
• The Treaties require the EU to place sustainable development at the centre of its objectives and integrate it into the formulation of its policies. European citizens have asked us to do this because they are worried about the environmental and social impact of EU policies, globally as well as in Europe. European citizens want to be reassured that what we are doing will help to improve the state of the world sustainably. They are concerned about the impact of industrial and agricultural restructuring on vulnerable social groups, about equality between women and men, about the Amazonian and boreal forests, and about fish stocks off Mauritania.
  
  
• These concerns reflect a collective preference that is rooted in our history, our culture and our environment, in all senses of the term.
  
  
• That is one aspect. Another European collective preference is for good governance, governance that reflects multipolar balances and a decision-making process based on negotiation.
  
  
• These collective preferences place restraints on our negotiating positions (seeing the environment as integral to trade issues, reducing inequalities) and on our objectives (the desire to find sustainable balances, the negotiation of win-win agreements). Let me give you an example. When we extend our SIA studies to all the countries where there is a potential impact, some of these countries see it as an "intrusion", whereas we are simply trying to ensure that our negotiators are as well-informed as possible so that they can take account of these collective preferences when adopting a position.
  
  
• The SIA programme that brings us here today has been designed as a vehicle for these collective European preferences. Its objective is to improve governance and ensure that sustainable development is taken into account.
  
  
• Having clarified what the general approach of sustainability impact assessment is, I should like to return to the background to the setting-up of this programme.
  
  
• A deliberate decision was taken in 1999 to set up the SIA programme in response to the enormous methodological problems at the time. Indeed, there was no methodology: the most advanced attempts were confined to environmental impact studies that usually concerned a single geographical entity such as a country.
  
  
• The Commission, starting off alone, found itself at the vanguard of European initiatives in this field. The use of SIA in all European policies is a very recent development (2002).
  
  
• It is not by chance that SIA was first applied in trade policy.
  
  
• One, because, as I said earlier, trade policy is clearly linked to sustainable development.
  
  
• Two, because trade negotiations are increasingly a forum for the confrontation of national and regional collective preferences.

I see SIAs as a way of rationally analysing the impact of trade policy and catalysing the fruits of our exchanges with partners and civil society.

Once launched, the programme grew rapidly: it now accounts for 10% of DG Trade's annual budget, an average of €1 000 000 a year.

It covers all the major trade negotiations, whether they be bilateral (Chile, the MEDA countries), regional (Mercosur, the ACP Group, the Gulf Cooperation Council) or multilateral (WTO).

These studies are carried out by external consultants with the main aim of identifying the economic, environmental and social impact of the agreements under negotiation, regardless of geography. They should also propose flanking measures to mitigate the adverse effects and amplify the benefits of any agreement.

The only conditions we impose on our consultants is that they make a rigorous analysis, take a balanced approach to problems and work transparently.

In addition to impact studies as such, we have set up machinery for consultation and dialogue in order to enhance the credibility of the analysis, take on board a range of views and ensure a constant improvement in the quality of the methodology and the findings. I am sure that a number of you present today are regular collaborators and have done a great deal to improve SIAs through your comments and constructive criticism.

Now that we have a methodological framework that is the product of studies and of our exchanges with civil society, we should take stock of the programme and identify future tasks. I should like to start by outlining the progress made in integrating some of these principles and methodology into our work. We have already laid some of the foundations of SIA theory.

These are:

• a transparent and open process conducted by consultants and involving members of European civil society and - what is more difficult - civil society outside Europe;
  
  
• a clear and rigorous methodology, which must be accessible to anyone wishing to use it and which stands out as a model among the methods available;
  
  
• the automatic application of SIAs to all significant future trade negotiations;
  
  
• the use of networking, whereby consortia of experts from different backgrounds (consultants, academics, NGOs) work and communicate with each other across the world.

Other, more recent givens result from the publication of the early results (in particular studies on agriculture and the EU-Chile Agreement). They include:

• a procedure whereby the findings of studies are incorporated into an official Commission position setting out both the official follow-up to an SIA's findings and their impact on the Commission's policy-making. The range of possible positions is obviously very broad: a finding might cause us to stiffen a position or shift the emphasis, a negative finding might give rise to aid and cooperation programmes, and an unclear finding might lead to further research.
  
  
• the principle of monitoring the implementation of agreements and flanking measures and tracking the impact on sustainable development by means of ex-post studies.

These givens must not, however, blind us to the practical problems and difficulties:

• There are methodological problems posed by the difficulties of modelling the sector under regulation (services, competition, investment), the lack of data or the inconsistency of data. These problems detract from the credibility of results and leave us in the dark until there has been significant progress in the matter of research and development.
  
  
• Consultations and networking can pose problems: wanting to consult is one thing, actually setting up operational systems to gather information quickly from the relevant experts is quite another matter. This seems to be a widespread problem, since even the most organised NGOs have difficulty following our work and delivering their observations on time.
  
  
• Credibility in the eyes of our trading partners is also a problem, since they do not always understand what we are doing and suspect us of protectionism.
  
  
• Lastly - and I hope it is no more than a teething problem - the decision-making tool has yet to be applied to the comprehensive analysis and monitoring of a real operation, since the first usable findings have only recently been published.

These difficulties bring me to the last point of my speech, which concerns this seminar's objectives and my hopes for the next two days' discussions:

I must disappoint those of you who thought this workshop had been organised simply to enable the Commission to parade its experience in the assessment of its trade policy. Rather than providing answers, I am going to formulate the many questions currently raised by the SIAs.

The first question I would like to pose concerns how the SIAs are to be made truly operational. We have to avoid an excessively technocratic approach to method. We need to find ways of tackling some of the methodological difficulties (lack of data, modelling limitations) while effectively involving experts from our trading partners (especially the developing countries), from international institutions, from the private sector (especially in the domain of corporate social responsibility) and, of course, from NGOs.

My second question concerns how SIAs can be effectively fed into international negotiations. SIAs could usefully be connected to the sphere of trade negotiations and inform discussions outside the European Commission. In this way they could help countries reach positions at negotiations, clarify the issues and put these issues on the international agenda. We need to consider the limits of such an extension, just as we need to consider the benefits and the potential dangers.

The third question is how best to create synergies between institutional action and private-sector initiatives in the context of SIAs.

What is important in the sphere of sustainable development is that institutional measures should be backed up and echoed by voluntary measures and private partnerships (between corporations or between corporations and NGOs) or public-private partnerships. The implementation of SIAs, the use of their findings and institutional support schemes must pursue such synergies. We need to consider how we are to identify such synergies and apply them effectively.

The fourth question is how best to disseminate the findings and maximise their use and incorporation into trade policy.

We now have the experience of the EU-Chile report, which has been the subject of internal and external meetings, has been published on the web, is being translated and is the subject of a preliminary position paper. Whether that is enough remains to be seen. We need to find ways to make these final reports count, to get business to feed SIAs' findings into their corporate social responsibility measures.

I will wrap up with one last question, that of how we are to ensure effective implementation of practical measures to support developing countries identified by SIAs (the famous "flanking measures"). Involving developing countries in the studies is obviously a first step. But beyond that, we have to identify factors determining the success or failure of SIAs so that they can play a constructive part in identifying and implementing priority aid measures.

Well, I have done my bit. You know my fears, my ambitions, my questions. Now it is for you to suggest constructive and realistic answers that will take me forward. As I have told you, I will be following closely the results of these two days.

Before the seminar gets under way, I would be happy to answer any questions aimed at clarifying the issue.

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• EU Presidency Statement - Environment and Sustainable Development (16/10/2003)