UNITED NATIONS -- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told negotiators here today to get moving in his most aggressive public remarks to date about next month's sustainable development conference in Brazil.

Ban spoke in reaction to a failure at the United Nations over the past few months to settle on a focused agenda for the meeting, which starts June 20 and is meant to commemorate the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 20 years ago.

The summit, called Rio+20, has been framed as a broad attempt to advance sustainable development by promoting green economies, especially in the developing world. But negotiators here have been unable to broker an official "outcome document" to shape the agenda.

Last month, talks over the outcome document broke off, leading to previously unplanned negotiations this week and next to give it another go. The sense of disarray has become palpable here with less than a month until 130 heads of state and 50,000 participants descend on Rio.

This morning, Ban took up the situation and addressed the feeling that the pre-Rio process has become a case study of too many cooks brewing the same stew, with many U.N. member nations looking to advance an overwhelming number of individual ideas over the past few months.

"We cannot let a microscopic examination of text blind us from the big picture," Ban said during a U.N. General Assembly debate on Rio. "The current pace of negotiations is sending all the wrong signals."

His office also announced plans to release a "streamlined" agenda document later today. That document is expected to come directly from Rio+20 Secretary-General Sha Zukang, who has said the current iteration of the outcome document -- which had ballooned from 19 pages to more than 200 pages -- was a "far cry from the 'focused political document' called for by the General Assembly" ClimateWire, May 8).

The document has been described internally as still too large and containing too much repetition to pave the way for success in Rio.

Kim Sook, permanent representative of South Korea and a key figure in the preparations, has said the streamlined version of the text will be prepared by the co-chairs of the conference. This appears to mean they will decide themselves what is on the Rio agenda and possibly dismiss many of the proposals in the 200-page version.

Among the ideas on the table have been calling for the elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies, elevation of the U.N. Environment Programme to a World Environment Organization, doing away with gross domestic product as the key measure of national economic growth, encouraging a doubling of renewable energy and technology transfer, and a number of sustainable development goals and finance measures.

'Governments can do very little'

Those close to the process have been critical of Brazil in particular for not engaging as a host nation perhaps should. A European diplomat close to the talks who asked not to be named said earlier this month that Brazil was "notoriously absent" from the talks until recently.

Today, Brazilian Ambassador Luiz Figueiredo Machado called Rio a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" but also offered a glimpse into the discord that has emerged behind closed doors. He said each member nation "will find its path to sustainable development" through its own sovereign priorities and then appeared to downplay the importance of U.N.-brokered directives.

"Governments can do very little," he said. "Society is the main actor."

Figueiredo added that "the participation of civil society" in Rio will be essential to its success. This line of argument appears to mirror that of some activists who have lately said Rio is a chance to depart from the model of recent U.N. climate change conferences to focus on private industry and more than 600 planned side events.

"Nothing will be achieved if we do not inspire civil society," Figueiredo said.

Seasoned observers at the United Nations today were openly expressing their concern.

"We're at a very complicated moment with just a few weeks to go" until Rio, Jeffery Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, said during a presentation to the General Assembly.

To Sachs, "the single most important outcome" in Rio would be adoption of sustainable development goals in the post-2015 period as "the core organizing principle" in the years to come. He argued against trying to define too many of the technical details that would help nations achieve such goals, saying that work would follow in the years to come.

"If we do that, the summit will be historic," he said. "We don't need to solve all the details of sustainable development."

He added: "We cannot make a legally binding, detailed treaty in all of these areas four weeks from now. We cannot solve the problems of the world economy four weeks from now. All we can do is make a framework."