National Councils for Sustainable Development: what they were and what replaced them

National Councils for Sustainable Development (NCSDs) were multi-stakeholder bodies that many governments set up after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Agenda 21, the summit’s action plan, asked countries to bring government, business, science and civil society to one table to plan how a nation would grow without exhausting its land, water and air. Roughly seventy such councils existed by the late 1990s, from Costa Rica and the Philippines to Finland and Ghana.

What a council actually did

Most councils had no legal power. Their value lay in convening: ministries that rarely spoke to each other met with farmers’ associations, chambers of commerce, universities and indigenous groups. Typical outputs were national sustainable development strategies, position papers for United Nations meetings and country reports on progress under Agenda 21. The councils also fed the annual sessions of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), which reviewed one cluster of Agenda 21 chapters each year.

The global network

From the mid-1990s the Earth Council, founded by Maurice Strong after Rio, ran a global network that linked the councils. It published country reports (a well-known series was compiled in 1999), organised regional meetings for Africa and the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, the Americas and Europe, and coordinated input to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, often called Rio+10. When funding for the Earth Council dried up in the early 2000s, the network lost its secretariat and many councils were merged into ministries or quietly dissolved.

Where the idea lives on

The councils’ core idea survived the institutions. In 2013 the UN replaced the Commission on Sustainable Development with the High-level Political Forum, and since 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have given every country the same seventeen targets to report on. The instrument that replaced the old country reports is the Voluntary National Review, which more than 180 countries have presented at least once. Several countries still keep an NCSD-style body: Germany’s Council for Sustainable Development (RNE), Finland’s National Commission on Sustainable Development and the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development all trace their roots to the Rio process.

This site is an independent reference on sustainable development treaties and institutions. It is not affiliated with the former NCSD network or the Earth Council, and it does not hold their archives.