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The United Nations' Institutional Response to Stockholm: a Case Study in the International Politics of Institutional Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Brian Johnson
Affiliation:
Brian Johnson is a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of International Organization, University of Sussex, Brighton, England.
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Extract

The imminence of the first intergovernmental conference on the whole human environment has provided a focus for discussion of the new environmental tasks that may fall to international institutions. In fact this is now a major question for intergovernmental decision. Governments must decide in the coming months what part they want the world organization, with all its political and administrative tensions and frustrations, to play in mastering a crisis in the management of the entire human household.

Type
Part 3. International Institutions: Their Present and Potential Roles
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1972

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References

1 Meetings convened in 1971 to discuss institutional implications of action proposals envisaged for the Stockholm conference in clude: International Organization and the Human Environment, cosponsored by the Institute on Man and Science and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, held at Rensselaer-ville, New York, May 21–23, 1971; The Crisis of the Human Environment and International Action, sponsored by the International Studies Program, University of Toronto, held at Toronto, Canada, May 25–27, 1971; Sixth Conference on the United Nations of the Next Decade, sponsored by the Stanley Foundation, held at Sinaia, Romania, June 20–26, 1971; First International Environmental Workshop, cosponsored by the International Institute for Environmental Affairs and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, held at Aspen, Colorado, June 20-August 6, 1971; Panel of Experts on International Organizational Implications, convened by the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held at Geneva, Switzerland, July 8–9, 1971; International Legal and Institutional Responses to the Problems of the Global Environment, cosponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the American Society of International Law, held at Harriman, New York, September 25-October 1, 1971; and The UN System and the Human Environment, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of International Organization, University of Sussex, held at Brighton, England, November 1–4, 1971.

2 Nongovernmental international organizations concerned with the environment are at least as numerous. Out standing among these are the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), which has established a Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). At least twenty specialized international scientific organizations are concerned with advancement of research related to preservation of the environment. Many of them are affiliated with the ICSU.

3 See UN Document E/5003 (“Report of a Group of Experts to the Secretary-General”).

4 See, for example, the April 1971 Newsletter of the Conservation Foundation, Washington, devoted to preparations for the Stockholm conference. See also U.S. Congress, Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and Environment of the Committee on Commerce, Hearings on S 3575, 91st. Cong., 2nd sess.

5 Kennan, George F., “To Prevent a World Wasteland: A Proposal,Foreign Affairs, 04 1970 (Vol. 48, No. 3), p. 408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See, for example, Kennan, , Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 407408.Google Scholar

7 For example, at an international conference convened by the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington in January 1971 on Goals and Strategy for Environmental Quality Improvement in the 1970s.

8 At the present time the Commission of the European Community is gearing itself to negotiate nontariff barriers (explicitly standards of health, safety, etc.) among the ten members of an enlarged community in addition to progressing toward objectives of new systems of fiscal standardization, trade preferences etc. Before GATT negotiations on environmental aspects of trade came to fruition, the ten members of the enlarged community would almost certainly be acting as a unit. Agreement between such a group, the United States government acting on guidelines approved by the Congress, and the developing country membership would seem to be a flat impossibility unless radically different attitudes toward environmental threats become manifest.

9 Unpublished paper by the Atlantic Council of the United States, June 1971.

11 Kennan, , Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 410411.Google Scholar

12 Verbal statement at the international critique panel of the First International Environmental Workshop, Aspen, Colorado, July 1971, by Thomas Malone, chairman of the ICSU, who visited Moscow together with other American scientists and advisers to Senator Frank Church, David Rockefeller, Charles Yost, and General James Gavin, who led this unofficial group in July 1971.

13 Walker, Peter, in “The Way We Live Now,” The Times (London), 06 22, 1971, p. 1.Google Scholar

14 See, for example, a report by Sterling, Claire in the Sunday Times (London), 02 21, 1971, p. 21.Google Scholar

15 The author has used, for his sample of developing country opinion, the work of a panel of experts on development and environment which he attended at Founex, Switzerland, June 4–12, 1971, and also the view of third-world representatives who participated in the First Environmental Workshop at Aspen, Colorado (June-August 1971).

16 “Development and Environment” (UN Document GE. 71–13319), p. 21.

17 Ibid., p. 22.

18 Ibid., p. 23.

19 It has been stressed at these and other meetings that ecological caution in the course of investment is not by any means always a negative matter of restraining or avoiding action. One example of environmentally creative development is the farming for both conservation and food purposes of rare species of game animals in East Africa.

20 “Development and Environment,” p. 25. (Author's italics.)

21 The ineffectiveness of the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and the Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC) in this area have been widely acknowledged. See, for example, A Study of the Capacity of the United Nations Development System (Jackson report) (UN Document DP/5) (2 vols.; Geneva: United Nations, 1969).Google Scholar

22 The budget of the UN Fund for Population Activities, which in the year of its establishment (1969) stood at only $1.5 million, rose to $15 million in 1970 and to $25 million in 1971; in 1972 the fund is expected to receive $35 million to $40 million in voluntary contributions.

23 “Monitoring” has become a key word in Stockholm conference jargon. When used in the context of the conference, it does not connote the policing or surveillance of compliance with regulations or standards “Monitoring” is here taken to mean the collection of “base-line” environmental data and information on changes in the quality of media which, directly or indirectly, may significantly affect the health or well-being of man.

24 UN Document A/8545.