Leadership built from the bottom up

The Kimberly Process has been an unexpected success. This has prompted some to wonder if the elements of that success can be extracted and transplanted into similar processes dealing with other products whose exploitation is carried out either illegally to finance civil war or in an opaque manner to hide corruption within government circles.

There are, inevitably, two opposing views in the debate, each with compelling arguments. For those who believe the KP experience cannot simply be replicated, it is clear that the Kimberly scheme was a one-off, designed exclusively for a unique product with a uniquely structured (some might say anachronistic) industry.

There cannot be a one-size-fits-all scheme. It took the specific efforts of those closely involved in the industry to design something fit for purpose: simply lifting the provisions and replicating them in another industry would prove disasterous. It has to be built from the bottom up. However there may be some basic building blocks identified within the KP that could be applied to processes designed to help regulate other products.

The first of these is a common objective. Looking back over the history of the KP since 1999, it is hard to remember that there was a shared objective between the three main protagonists in the debate: civil society, which was the first to sound the alarm over conflict diamonds; industry, which initially tried to deny the issue was a problem it had to address; and governments, which were viewed with suspicion by the other two and several of which instinctively shied away from attempting to impose any form of regulation on industry in general.

Yet the thread that bound all three together was a desire to protect and nurture the industry. The sector needed to clean up its act and avoid a consumer backlash similar to that which had all but ended the fur industry. Civil society needed a hook on which to hang renewed interest and support from sponsors, demonstrating that something could indeed be done about the illegal exploitation of natural resources.

Governments saw an opportunity to either use the process to promote their new-found ethical foreign policy or as a test bed for minimum regulation that could trigger substantive reform within industry.

Once the main constituents had been identified and brought together, the next principle was equal status at the negotiating table and progress only through consensus. This may seem a sure-fire way to produce stalemate, yet when combined with the sort of common cause reached via the separate paths described above, it actually helps ensure a growing confidence between the participants.

Support from the wider international community was obviously essential to the KP, but only in certain, carefully controlled ways. There was a real danger that the United Nations might take over the KP. That would have proved the beginning of the end for the fledgling process, since the 191 member states of the UN would have brought extensive baggage to the negotiating table that would have ensured an interminable debate as they haggled over pet projects unrelated to the Kimberly Process but employed as bargaining chips.

Restricting the negotiation to the one third of the UN membership that had any role in the diamond industry helped focus the discussion. Yet it was essential that the KP kept in close touch with the UN and received its encouragement and blessing at regular intervals. Legitimising the mandate and underpinning progress via resolutions of the General Assembly and Security Council were essential elements of success.

Although the Kimberley Process does not offer a blueprint for other industries, it does provide some general guiding principles. Aligning the interests of key stakeholders, including government, industry and civil society, can deliver real results.

Clive Wright is First Secretary (Transport Policy) Global Issues Group at the British Embassy in Washington DC.