Carl Death - Governing Sustainable Development: Partnerships, Protests and Power at the World Summit

Multilateral UN summits from Stockholm to Copenhagen have set the pace and direction for the global governance of sustainable development. The 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was a key moment in the evolution of sustainable development as a discourse and summitry as a technology of government. It firmly established multi-stakeholder partnerships, carbon-trading and communication strategies as primary techniques for dealing with environmental crises. It was also a significant event in terms of South African domestic politics, witnessing some of the largest protests since the end of apartheid.

Carl Death draws on Foucauldian governmentality literature to argue that the Johannesburg Summit was a key site for the refashioning of sustainable development as advanced liberal government; for the emergence of an exemplary logic of rule; and for the mutually interdependent relationship between mega-events (summits, world cups, Olympic games) and mega-protests understood as Foucauldian counter-conducts.

Analysing detailed and original research on the WSSD, Death argues that summits work to make politically sustainable a global order which is manifestly unsustainable. Paradoxically however, they also provide opportunities for the status quo to be protested and resisted. This work will be of great interest to scholars of development studies, global governance and environmental politics.

Carl Death teaches environmental politics and African politics in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University. His chief area of research is the governance and contestation of sustainable development in Southern Africa, and he has spent time conducting research at the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Dublin City University in recent years.

Edited by: Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and
Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Exeter

As Michel Foucault has famously stated, knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. In this spirit The EdkinsVaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post-disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IRs traditional geopolitical imaginary.

The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics.

Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines, and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.

Partnerships, protests and power at the World Summit

First published 2010
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

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2009 Carl Death

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Death, Carl.
Governing sustainable development : partnerships, protests, and power at
the world summit / Carl Death.
p. cm. (Interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sustainable development International cooperation. 2. World Summit
on Sustainable Development (2002 : Johannesburg, South Africa) I. Title.
HC79.E5D4158 2010
338.9'27dc22 2010002135

ISBN 0-203-84741-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 978-0-415-56926-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-84741-1 (ebk)

This text has evolved considerably since the project was first conceived, and has benefited from a number of conversations, conferences, and incisive feedback from colleagues, friends, reviewers, audiences and interviewees. It is impossible to list or thank them all, and of course none of them bear any responsibility for any errors. A particular debt is owed to Rita Abrahamsen for her support, supervision, encouragement, criticisms, patience and time. Colleagues and students in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, have made invaluable contributions to the substance of the research as well as providing enjoyable environments in which to write. The research on which the book is based was made possible through the award of a UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 1+3 quota award [PTA031200400008], including fieldwork trips to South Africa and New York. The support and facilities provided by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, during 20062007 were most gratefully appreciated, as were all my interviewees generosity with their time and opinions. Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Craig Fowlie, Nicola Parkin and Routledge were instrumental in turning this research into a book. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the love and support of my family and, most of all, Aoileann.

Permission has been granted to re-print the following cartoons from Zapiro: Hopes for the World Summit (. Copyright of these cartoons remains with Zapiro and permission is required for any re-use of these cartoons in any format.

Permission has been granted to re-print the cartoon All aboard for 2002 by Alistair Findlay (, p. 150). Copyright of this cartoon remains with the cartoonist and permission is required for its re-use in any format.