UNEP, set up in 1972, 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 to internalise the environment into their decision processes.

Its primary mode of operation was to reorient the thinking and activities of these actors through small, non-permanent but critical and high-leverage (termed "catalytic") inputs of knowledge and money. And, partly in recognition of the nexus between poverty and environmental degradation, and as a commitment to give these issues highest priority, it was the first major UN body to be headquartered in a Third World capital, Nairobi.

Despite its relatively small secretariat, 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, its efforts and those of its partners led to raising the number of countries with environment ministries by twenty-fold. At the same time, it established a wide range of 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 years, it effectively mobilised and brought to closure 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 other UN agency.

Yet, at the end of its third decade, UNEP appears to have become peripheral to 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 instinct for survival.

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 two: the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and adoption of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), closely associated with the World Bank, as the funding mechanism. All the while, UNEP’s own mandate and budget continue to decline.

UNEP, the "environmental conscience of the world" and the agency ordained by governments to deal with threats to the planet’s life support systems appears itself to be under threat.

Why? Is the organisation’s performance unusually poor? Or could it be inadequate for the tasks assigned to it? Or, worse, is it becoming incon-venient for the global powers that be?

One thing is clear: nothing much like this can happen unless the governments that set the international agenda and drive the negotiating process will it. And their motivations and methods take many forms.

Has UNEP underperformed? Yes, but UNEP is manifestly no more or no less inefficient than any other international organisation. Throughout its existence, UNEP has had to work within extremely tight budgets (sanctioned by the governments that primarily finance it), far smaller than some national and international NGOs working in the field of nature conservation. Yet – despite its many achievements — it has been constantly criticised for inadequate impact (by the same governments). Certainly, the new entities set up to bypass UNEP cannot claim or even promise any better results.

Could UNEP have delivered on the hopes that the international community had placed on it after Stockholm? Perhaps not, but it was never given a chance to find out. Its mandate was quickly circumscribed in a manner that prevented it from taking many imaginative initiatives that could have made a difference.

Is UNEP a problem for those who dominate the international negotiating table? Almost definitely, yes. Some of the nascent initiatives of UNEP – such as those on consumption patterns and production systems – were ridiculed and quickly killed.

Many of the successes of UNEP were seen by some powerful governments as threats to their national interest. Narrowly conceived self-interest and political expediency have led to the withdrawal of support or the setting up of separate agencies even though the issues 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 seriousness of the issues.

In the name of achieving quick results and minimising costs, the donor governments insist on defining environmental problems in narrow and mechanistic terms and on artificially squeezing them into "single-issue" approaches. Never mind that any simplistic solution which ignores the complex linkages inherent in environment and development is doomed to failure: this method also facilitates splitting of agencies, a standard and effective strategy of divide and rule.

The constellation of UN agencies with environment-related mandates is now fragmented all over the globe — Bonn, Geneva, Montreal, Nairobi, New York, Osaka, Paris. And not always with any great logic: CSD, which purports to champion the concerns of the South is domiciled in New York and UNEP, which has to increasingly deal with the environmental concerns of the North continues to be in Nairobi. Those nations who can afford specialised and well-staffed delegations for each topic will obviously have considerable negotiating advantages over those who cannot.

As a consequence, the goal of sustainable development recedes into the distance, enveloped by a mist of institutional territoriality, knowledge gaps and growing transactional costs.

While the sustainable development agenda has largely been written by the industrialised countries, very few of them are willing to follow it in their own policies. Northern scientists discovered the threats to the global environment – first to the stratospheric ozone shield, then to the world’s climate systems, and then to the survival of our gene pool.

Despite the fact that all these have been caused almost entirely by actions in their own countries over the past two centuries, their governments have persuaded the rest of the world that it is now everyone’s responsibility to do something urgently to mitigate these problems. Treaties have been signed and promises made that money and technology will be made available to countries in the South to help them design more sustainable development strategies.

Where are we so many years after the various agreements were signed? Basically, nowhere. The only positive outcome seems to be the decline in use of ozone depleting substances. Biodiversity loss continues apace and carbon emissions continue to rise.

Worst of all, industrialised countries have not been able to slow down their energy consumption or carbon dioxide emissions. Now, they are trying to pass the onus on to others through artifices such as tradeable permits, joint implementation, and even outright demands for the larger countries like China and India to reduce their carbon emissions. JI, CDM and the rest of the UN alphabet soup may well be sensible devices to improve energy efficiency at least cost, but they cannot be substitutes for domestic action to cut carbon emissions in the developed countries themselves.

Less than 1 per cent of the agreed international price tag to implement the Rio Agenda 21 has actually found its way into the GEF. And even that amount is controlled so rigidly that it can only be used for the two basic focal areas of climate change and biodiversity conservation. There is basically no international money available for the implementation of Agenda 21, the sole instrument from Rio that deals directly with the immediate concerns of the half of humanity, which is poor.

It is difficult to imagine how everyone’s basic needs will be met and our environmental resources can be regenerated without fundamental changes in our consumption patterns, in our production systems and in our strategies to achieve a fairer world order.

But who, if not UNEP, is going to bell the consumption cat? After all, it is the dominant life styles and production systems that are causing these global problems in the first place. Under the present rules of the game, it is quite unacceptable to question these at the international level. Could we continue to assume that we can go on raping and pillaging the earth as we – or at least some of us – have over the past two hundred years, and smear her with all our wastes and garbage, without any possible damage to her productivity and health?

And which international agency, if not UNEP, can evolve genuine solutions to the twin problems of poverty and population growth – the creation of sustainable livelihoods and genuine empowerment of people through entirely different forms of governance, technology and environmental care?

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 on this campaign now. q