The World Summit on Sustainable Development took place in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2002. In this book, the authors look at the agenda established since the original Rio conference in 1992 and cover the events of the intervening years: global warming and the unfolding arguments over climate change, energy, water and sanitation, patents and many other issues. They examine what progress, if any, has been made.

Offering a critical analysis of the links between neoliberal economics and transnational organisations, the authors expose the poverty of so-called international protocols and resolutions which claim to offer solutions.

They show how, in virtually every case, these resolutions remain part of the problem of continuing poverty and environmental degradation in the non-Western world.