The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro over a decade ago represented one of the more significant global attempts to make the link between environment and development issues, in order to deepen understanding of the root causes of environmental degradation. Agenda 21, a key outcome from the Earth Summit, recognized that environmental sustainability cannot be achieved in a world with vast wealth disparities, extreme poverty, and a lack of control over natural resources by local communities.
At the same time, powerful governments, influenced by large corporations, refused to define key terms in the outcomes, terms such as over-consumption or "sound macro-economic policies that promote efficient use of resources," let alone development. Similarly, efforts to expose the links between specific economic policies, poverty and environmental degradation were thwarted. The World Bank’s 1992 World Development Report (WDR), Development and the Environment, contributed to the Rio Summit’s compromises. The 1992 WDR, while emphasizing that environment is a c ross-cutting issue, raised the profile of the concept of an "Environmental Kuznets Curve" which can be translated simply to 'grow now and fix the environment later.'
As well, the 1992 WDR talked about "win-win" solutions, approaches that would lead to both development and environment. For those who wanted to define development largely as growth, these concepts allowed the Rio Summit and its resulting accords to avoid addressing in a substantive way, contradictions between particular approaches to growth and poverty, environmental degradation and inequality.
The compromises within Agenda 21 and the other outcomes, together with the influence of corporations at the Summit itself, led some non-governmental organizations to predict that the Rio Summit would lead to the "globalization of greenwash."
Woefully, the prediction appears to have come true.
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