The United Nations and the Environment
Ashok Khosla

Three short decades ago, the concept of environment was virtually unknown in any national government – and unheard of in inter-governmental fora. Today, it is right up there with global trade and peace-keeping as an issue that dominates international dialogue. Credit for this revolution goes largely to the dozens of global conferences organised by the United Nations – and particularly to the institutional outcome of the first of these – the United Nations Environment Programme. (The ultimate credit probably goes, in turn, to the vast number of civil society organisations, NGOs and other groups that created the demand for these conferences and institutions in the first place.)

UNEP, set up in 1972, soon after the Stockholm Conference, was designed to be different from any earlier agency. Its overall mission was a systemic one: to promote processes of development that are in harmony with the imperatives of nature. Its objective was to get other UN agencies, governments and civil society actors internalise the environment into their decision processes. Its primary mode of operation was to reorient the thinking and activities of these actors through catalytic inputs of knowledge and money. And, partly in recognition of the nexus between poverty and environmental degradation, it was the first major UN body to be headquartered in a Third World capital, Nairobi.

UNEP quickly succeeded in mobilising governments all over the world to set up the machineries they needed to protect their environmental resources and to negotiate agreements on these at the international level. In less than ten years, it was able to show solid results by establishing global and regional programmes for environmental monitoring, information exchange and co-operative action to protect fragile ecosystems such as the regional seas. Within another ten, it effectively mobilised negotiations on international conventions aimed at protecting the global environment: the Montreal Protocol, the Basel Convention, the Biodiversity Convention and the Climate Change Convention. The successes of UNEP compare favourably with those of any UN agency.

Yet UNEP appears to have lost control of many of the processes it so successfully set in motion. It is now surrounded by a host of progeny, each with its own mandate, its own conceptual walls, its own bureaucracy, its own location – generally as far away from the others as possible – and as a result, its own institutional ego and survival instinct. With each successive global conference, a new, permanent organisation has been created to carve out yet another part of UNEP’s original mandate. Each global environmental convention has led to the setting up of its own secretariat. The Earth Summit at Rio resulted in the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) whose secretariat is in New York. And the Global Environment Facility, closely associated with the World Bank is in Washington.

Ironically, CSD which purports to champion the concerns of the South is domiciled in New York and UNEP which has increasingly to project the environmental concerns of the North continues to be in Nairobi.

Instead of strengthening the ability of the UN family to devise holistic and integral solutions to what are inherently systemic and inter-related problems, we continue further to fragment our institutional capacity to respond. As a consequence, the goal of sustainable development recedes into the distance, enveloped by a mist of institutional territoriality, knowledge gaps and growing costs.

The responsibility for this state of affairs lies, of course, largely with governments and with the inter-governmental fora at which such decisions are made. Shortsighted national self-interest and political expediency have led to the setting up of separate agencies on issues that are inextricably linked and can only be dealt with together. And their programme priorities have been set by those who contribute the most financial support to them, not necessarily according to the overall gravity of the issues.

When Earth Summit 3 meets, as is now proposed for 2002, civil society will once again acquire a major responsibility, this time to persuade governments to rationalise the UN structures and inter-governmental processes in the field of sustainable development. To achieve any useful results, we must start work now. 

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