On a global scale, no priority today rates higher than the conservation of our environmental resource base. In magnitude and urgency, it has only two competitors – the eradication of poverty and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction.

IUCN, the World Conservation Union, is one of the prime guardians of the planet’s environmental resource base. Much of IUCN’s work focuses, quite rightly, on direct conservation research and action in the field.

Yet, IUCN was among the first international organisations to realise that true, long-term conservation of nature cannot be achieved without adopting a process of social and economic development substantially different from the one followed by most nations today. Precisely twenty years ago in collaboration with UNEP and WWF, it published the World Conservation Strategy (WCS). In it was launched the concept of "sustainable development". This term later gained wide political acceptance and became part of the international political jargon as a result of the Brundtland Commission and the Earth Summit at Rio.

The importance of the integrative concepts pioneered by IUCN and the value of its insights to achieving the goals of conservation cannot be over-estimated. Consumption patterns, population growth, technology choice and economic policies were all identified as issues that have profound impacts on these goals. So do value systems, legal frameworks, resource economics and environmental education. And this impact – direct and indirect – can be far greater than the benefits from specific conservation action in the field. Both types of intervention are needed, working in concert to save habitats, species, biogeochemical cycles and other life-support systems.

But insights are one thing and practice another. Over the years, IUCN has certainly continued to preach its faith in the integrative approaches enunciated in the WCS. It has gone further and sporadically supported work on such issues as the ethical basis of conservation action, the management of common property resources, monitoring and evaluation of sustainability, collaborative management and environmental policy. It has also flirted a bit with broader international issues such as trade and environment, climate change and the role of the corporation in environmental management.

Nevertheless, its real contributions in these areas are quite minor. The body concerned with these issues, the Commission on Environmental Economics, Strategies and Policies (CEESP), has been a peripheral player in the affairs of the Union. A good part of the reason for this has been the consistent lack of administrative and financial support given to the commission by the secretariat over the past twenty years, a problem reported by everyone who has chaired it over this period. Neglect of CEESP by the secretariat is quite possibly a symptom of a wider view among IUCN’s members of the relative priorities of the Union. While the social, economic and technological issues may well be important, they are seen to belong more squarely within the domain of other players; the Union itself is expected to focus its activities on direct conservation science and action.

CEESP, on its part, has not always been able to deliver the goods, either. Rarely has it been able to overcome the discontinuity in its mandate and approach occasioned by change of leadership and members every few years (reflected most graphically by its four name changes over the past twenty years). This has prevented it from generating the constituencies and strength it needs to demand and get its fare share of support from the Union. Few of its products, even those of the highest potential value to conservation, reach completion before the teams set up by the commission despair and give up in frustration.

But effective conservation cannot be achieved without integrating the human and social dimensions into conservation action. The Union needs CEESP and CEESP needs the Union.

The key to overcoming this long-standing dysfunctionality in IUCN lies in three simple steps proposed to the Council more than ten years back:

n Clearly defining the role of CEESP, not incestuously within the commission, but on a Union-wide basis, with    the membership and the other commissions specifying what they need and expect from CEESP;

n Maintaining a higher degree of continuity in the mandate and constituencies (and name, whatever it is at the moment) of CEESP by requiring at least one half of its membership and one half of its activities to be included in the successor commission and by providing full-time professional support in the secretariat;

n Ensuring that membership in CEESP is based, as it is in the more effective commissions, on the degree to which the professional, career interests of members converge with the mandate of CEESP.

Implementing these three conditions will require strong, non-negotiable, publicly declared and repeatedly demonstrated commitment from the Council and the Director General, not only to the conditions but also to CEESP itself. Otherwise, it is best to dissolve the Commission and let the Union stick to counting species and saving parks.    q