Nevertheless, the initial success of this water and sanitation initiative demonstrates that the global community can focus on tangible, discrete objectives, develop a time-bound and realistic plan to get there, and mobilize the resources and partners needed to implement it. If there had been a half dozen more initiatives like the water and sanitation target, the mood at the WSSD might have been more upbeat and the conference declared a great success.

Sadly, this wasn't the case. But the lesson still holds: go for the low hanging fruit while continuing to push for the right policy frameworks; success on the ground will generate greater resources and the will to tackle sustainable development at all levels.

Striking a Dissonant Note

Tensions that hobbled the WSSD were evident in the very first days of the sustainable development movement. At the Stockholm conference of 1972, developed countries pressed for global action on the environment as they assessed the pollution and biodiversity loss resulting from unprecedented post-war growth.

But countries without recent economic miracles and consequent environmental problems raised a compelling counterargument. "Poverty is the greatest polluter," said Indira Gandhi, India's Prime Minister at the time.

And so, the development versus environment debate ignited. Some developing world constituencies prioritized growth over environment while many of the richer countries favored the opposite.

Due to this mismatch in emphasis, Stockholm ended on a dissonant note. It did succeed in raising the profile of pressing environmental issues, but the right to develop and its near-term inverse relationship with environmental protection emerged as formidable obstacles to global action.

Eventually a challenge was issued to the dogma that development poses an insurmountable hurdle to global environmental action. It took more than a decade, but in 1987 Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Norwegian Prime Minister, chaired a UN commission charged with exploring this complex relationship. When the Brundtland commission issued its final report (Our Common Future) it invented a buzzword – sustainable development – that changed the way the global community views these intertwined issues.

In the simplest terms, sustainable development means that growth should leave the option and capacity for future generations to be at least as well off as the present one. By taking an inter-generational perspective, sustainable development elegantly converges environmental and development preferences. The buzzword was like a tent – adequately big and pretty to attract and accommodate the major dissenting factions.

A Stunning Debut

In 1992, the world focused its attention on the Rio Earth Summit. By most measures, this debutante party for sustainable development was a tremendous success. Countries, special interest groups, and even businesses, freed from traditional animosities and fears, rallied behind the common banner of sustainable development.

More than 100 heads of state showed up to lend their support. NGOs were a robust presence as groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Oxfam finally found a way to fully embrace and co-operatively pursue a shared vision.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development introduced the previously heretical perspective that businesses could support environmental protection when framed as sustainable development. All of this energy and focus produced Agenda 21, a breathtakingly ambitious blueprint for sustainable development.

Agenda 21 called for processes to develop green plans, regulations, and targets on a country-by-country basis, as well as parallel international mechanisms that harmonize environmental action throughout the world. With a visionary gleam, the bar was set high.

Whither the Visionary Gleam?

But the road from Rio has been filled with detours and disappointments. At the national level, Agenda 21 activities have raised awareness but key indicators have moved sideways or even down.

Anil Chitrakar of Nepal, an environmental Ashoka Fellow involved in implementing Agenda in his country, puts it bluntly: "Prior to 1992, we had no sustainable development plans, no laws to promote sustainable development, no ministries focused on advancing sustainable development, and only a hazy understanding of what sustainable development meant. Today, we have plans, laws, and institutions. But if you were to ask, 'Is the environment any cleaner?,' the answer is 'no.' If you were to ask, 'Has our economy improved?,' the answer is 'maybe,' but this growth hasn't been related to better natural resource management. If you were to ask, 'What does sustainable development mean?', you'd probably get some very different answers."

Agenda 21 lost momentum at the global level soon after the Rio debutante party ended. The stillborn Kyoto Protocol, intended to address global climate change, is a clear example of how practicing sustainable development proved to be much more difficult than talking about it.

The Kyoto Protocol was approved in principle at Rio and the details were finally hammered out five years later. However, when facing compliance costs eye-to-eye, the United States, the world's most prolific polluter, opted out. Now, even if the requisite number of large countries finally ratifies the protocol, it will remain an inadequate response to global climate change.

Simultaneously, other – albeit related – issues crowded out sustainable development on the world stage. Trade liberalization, and later global terrorism, diverted energy and attention away from sustainable development.

Efforts to integrate trade liberalization with sustainable development were rebuffed. In the words of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, "Marrakech (the World Trade Organization's process) trumped Rio."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair may be the only prominent leader to posit a linkage between terrorism and sustainable development, a connection that hasn't resonated widely, but nevertheless holds merit. Official development assistance from OECD countries dropped roughly 30 percent as a share of GDP from 1990-1999. And so, a decade after Rio, key global environmental and development indicators on an aggregate level continued to downtick.

The truth was in the details and, once probed, the details of sustainable development proved to be complex and expensive (and not so sexy and engaging) to implement. Too much had been promised and too little had been accomplished.

"It Could Have Been Worse"

From the start of the preparatory meetings for the WSSD, expectations were calibrated downward. First, the frontier of Agenda 21 would not be pushed forward. Instead, the WSSD would focus on implementation, the major shortcoming of the legacy of Rio.

Second, recognizing Agenda 21's unwieldy scope, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked Johannesburg to address just five components: water and sanitation, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity. Despite these diminished expectations, many feared that even some of the rhetoric from Rio would be rolled back.

At the WSSD itself, the feared backsliding didn't materialize, but forward motion was limited. Perhaps most important, an effort to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation by 2015 – a significant expansion over the water-focused Millennium Development Goal – found its way into the final implementation plan, backed by a couple billion dollars worth of funding pledges.

However, similar goals for energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity, were diluted, leaving them more like reaffirmations of past rhetoric than time-bound implementation targets.

There was ample reason for disappointment in Johannesburg. The official debates lacked the flash and sizzle of past summits. The implementation plan, billed as the centerpiece of the official UN proceedings, fell short of even the modest expectations emerging from the preparatory meetings.

Civil society rarely spoke with a unified voice and seemed internally quarrelsome. Some left questioning whether engaging this process had been worth the time and expense. "Rio minus ten" quipped one Colombian Ashoka Fellow who attended the Summit.

But altogether, "it could have been worse" was the general sentiment as 22,000-plus participants filed out of Johannesburg in early September. The focus on the nuts and bolts of implementation created a perception that progress was much slower, but it promised a brighter future.

Cause for Hope: Implementation and Fragmentation

Johannesburg represents a pivotal moment for sustainable development. Two trends that emerged from the WSSD – fragmentation and a focus on implementation – may signal the start of more effective responses to the challenges of sustainable development.

The focus implementation in the absence of desired policy frameworks was tied to a second emerging trend: fragmentation. Instead of focusing on set-piece treaties, as happened in Rio and Stockholm, fragmentation led to smaller, on-the-ground initiatives that tackled discrete issues.

The WSSD's top achievement, the water and sanitation project, is the key example. But there are hundreds of other smaller yet promising stories, including a series of partnerships.

For example, a partnership between NGOs and city governments in the Netherlands and South Africa will lead to the export and refurbishing of tens of thousands of used bikes. A Niger Delta fund that joins a state government in Nigeria with a US-based NGO will disperse oil industry royalties to each resident. And the Indonesian and French governments will implement a set of mini-hydropower projects in rural Indonesia as a cleaner, less environmentally obtrusive form of energy.

This more dynamic and results-oriented environment may spell the end of massive global summit meetings. Instead, it plays to the agility and opportunism of social entrepreneurs and other actors who will necessarily enter what World Resources Institute President Jonathan Lash calls the "jazzier dance" of partnerships.

Fragmentation was also very evident within the contingent of civil society representatives at the WSSD. Many new voices were represented that may have, at first glance, merely added chaos to an already cacophonous event. But this diversity signals the arrival of more robust strategies for sustainable development as plans are poked and prodded from different perspectives.

The Road Ahead From Johannesburg

The WSSD marked a coming of age for sustainable development as implementation moves ahead on a track parallel to the lurching policy debates, and fragmentation spurs more on-the-ground initiatives and empowers new voices. By doing and subsequently learning, people will deepen their understanding of sustainable development: the trade-offs, the resources and partnerships needed, the strategies that work and those that don't. More mature and robust ways to move forward are likely to follow.

Actors like social entrepreneurs are sure to thrive in this new environment. In this edition of Changemaker's Journal, two Ashoka Fellows, Mark Swilling and Ravi Agarwal, share their experiences with sustainable development. Both are social entrepreneurs who are exemplars of the trends of implementation and fragmentation

Swilling is combining graduate school training for a new and truly international class of sustainable development professionals with grassroots development projects including a South African ecovillage that combines land reform for disenfranchised farmers with sustainable agriculture. Agarwal is improving international agreements on waste and toxics and, on a parallel track, organizing informal sector trash collectors in India to minimize environmental and health hazards.

Moving forward from Johannesburg, the biggest challenge is ensuring that the water and sanitation initiative stays on track and that other projects of similar scale and import are tackled with similar focus, energy, and resources. Building this level of global commitment may be difficult as other issues continue to crowd the world's agenda.

But tangible results from the water and sanitation project and other early implementation efforts may make the relationship between sustainable development and issues like trade liberalization and global terrorism more visible. If these connections become more apparent, resources and effort focused on sustainable development will increase. If these connections don't become widely accepted, sustainable development may languish as a second tier global priority.