A World Environment Organization

Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance?

Frank Biermann, Steffen Bauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351961424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geology & Earth Sciences

In recent years, the debate on the establishment of a new international agency on environmental protection - a 'World Environment Organization' - has gained substantial momentum. Several countries, including France and Germany, as well as a number of leading experts and senior international civil servants have openly supported the creation of such a new international organization. However, a number of critics have also taken the floor and brought forward important objections. This book presents a balanced selection of articles of the leading participants in this debate, including both major supporters and opponents of creating a World Environment Organization. The volume is especially relevant to students and scholars of international relations, environmental policy and international law, as well as to practitioners of diplomacy, international negotiations, and environmental policy making.

Chapter 1

The Debate on a World Environment
Organization: An Introduction

Steffen Bauer and Frank Biermann*

1 Introduction

Many a book has been written about the state of the world environment. This book will not offer yet another assessment of the global environmental crisis and of the ineffective societal response.¹ Instead, this volume will focus on possible reform options for the emerging yet still insufficient system of international environmental governance. In particular, we will discuss one reform proposal that has been around for more than thirty years, but has now received fresh attention: the creation of a ‘world environment organization’ within the system of the United Nations. Would a world environment organization contribute to the solution of the global environmental crisis—or would it rather hinder progress because it would create new problems instead of solving existing ones, or because setting up a new agency would simply require too many resources with no clear benefit?

In addressing this question, the book seeks to contribute to the larger debate on redesigning the current system of international, or global, environmental governance. The concept of global governance has been developed in recent years in light of the emergence of new actors and political mechanisms at the global level, and of the increasing acceptance of only limited sovereignty of states in times of global interdependence.² Global governance, as opposed to traditional interstate politics, has been most pronounced in trade, finance and economic policy, but also environmental policy (Meyer et al. 1997; Mitchell 2002; Young 1994). Yet despite recent achievements in institutionalizing international environmental cooperation, the overall governance architecture, impressive as it may be in some respects, still fails to manage and halt global ecological deterioration. Effective environmental governance hence requires significant improvements of the status quo.

Creating a new world environment organization is but one proposal to address these shortcomings. The debate on a new agency has been underway for more than thirty years. All contributions to this book draw on the findings of these three decades of academic and public discourse, and elaborate the issues further in light of new experiences as well as arguments by those with opposing views. In the next section we summarize the debates and developments upon which the contributions to this volume build.

2 The Evolution of a Debate: Does the World Need a WEO?

In the policy debate about how to improve global environmental governance, the idea of a strong specialized environmental agency under the auspices of the United Nations has seen three peaks in attention from policy-makers and scholars: An initial one in the early 1970s, around the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment; a second one in the mid-1990s, this time coinciding with the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development; and a third one in the context of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.³

Early Proposals

While proposals to create global institutions for environmental politics date back to the late nineteenth century,⁴ it was the US foreign policy strategist George F. Kennan who started the debate on organizational aspects of what later evolved into today’s global environmental governance discourse. To our knowledge, Kennan’s call for ‘an organizational personality’ in international environmental politics (Kennan 1970, 408) was the first of its kind. In his time, Kennan’s vision of an ‘International Environmental Agency’ encompassed only ‘a small group of advanced nations’ rather than a universal caucus that would include ‘a host of smaller and less developed countries which could contribute very little to the solution of the problems at hand’ (Kennan 1970, 410).⁵ Other authors contributing to broaden and specify the early debate included Abram Chayes (1972) and Lawrence David Levien (1972).⁶

The response of the international community to this early debate was to set up the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP was created by the United Nations General Assembly following a decision adopted at the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (UNGA 1972). It is not a specialized UN agency, such as the World Health Organization, but a subsidiary body of the General Assembly reporting through the Economic and Social Council. The administrative costs of UNEP’s headquarters—the Environment Secretariat in Nairobi—are covered by the general UN budget; an additional small ‘Environment Fund’ supported by voluntary government contributions serves to finance specific projects. Originally, governments wanted UNEP to evolve into an ‘environmental conscience’ within the United Nations system that would act as a catalyst triggering environmental projects in other bodies and help to coordinate UN environmental policies. UNEP’s founding resolution of 1972 explicitly speaks of a ‘small secretariat’. UNEP was—and continues to be—a long way from an international organization commensurable with other sectoral bodies, such as the International Labour Organization (Levien 1972, Charnovitz 1993). Nonetheless, the creation of the UNEP secretariat in 1973 fundamentally altered the context of the organizational debate in international environmental politics and effectively halted it at the time.

The Second Peak

The debate about a larger, more powerful agency for global environmental policy was revived in 1989. The Declaration of The Hague, initiated by the governments of The Netherlands, France and Norway, called for an authoritative international body on the atmosphere that was envisioned to include a provision for effective majority rule.⁷ Although with merely 24 signatories not representative of the international community, the declaration effectively helped to trigger a second round of proposals for organized intergovernmental environmental regulation. It included contributions by Geoffrey Palmer (1992), who argued for strong organizational anchoring of international environmental law under UN auspices; Steve Charnovitz (1993), who proposed an international environmental organization to be modelled on the International Labour Organization; and C. Ford Runge (1994) and Daniel C. Esty (1994) who, concerned about the emergence of an ever stronger world trade regime, argued for a world, or ‘global’, environmental organization. This debate was fuelled by continuing doubts regarding the effectiveness of UNEP. A 1997 report by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services heaped heavy criticism on the management and the overall performance of UNEP (UN OIOS 1997). The report argued that UNEP lacked a clear role and that it was not clear to staff or stakeholders what that role should be. Instead, much time and energy had been spent in paring down programmes, which had reduced the time to do environmental work. The report also found that UNEP’s secretariat lacked efficiency and effectiveness. In 1998, Klaus Töpfer, a former chair of the Commission on Sustainable Development, was appointed as UNEP’s Executive Director, and a number of organizational reforms were undertaken (see Elliott, this volume).

This did not, however, end the debate on a world environment organization that could replace UNEP. In the late 1990s, representatives of the UN system themselves became active participants, and some high-profile international civil servants openly supported the creation of a new environmental agency, including the former head of the UN Development Programme, Gustave Speth, as well as the WTO directors Renato Ruggiero and his current successor, Supachai Panitchpakdi. The UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (1997), in his comprehensive programme for renewing the United Nations, also addressed the environmental responsibilities of the UN. In particular he proposed to reform the UN Trusteeship Council in order to safeguard the global commons, taking up an idea that had first been launched by Maurice Strong in 1988.⁸ Furthermore, Annan called on the UN General Assembly to set up a task force, led by Klaus Töpfer, to assess the environmental activities of the United Nations (see UNSG 1998). Following the report of this task force, an Environmental Management Group was created within the UN system, and it was decided that the UNEP Governing Council shall meet regularly at ministerial level. While the direction of this reform is to be welcomed, it remains to be seen whether this incrementalism in strengthening UNEP will deliver the necessary results in the future, or whether more fundamental reforms are needed. Klaus Töpfer himself emphasizes the nexus of developmental and environmental concerns and is thus reluctant to call for a specialized agency that would focus exclusively on the environment. Instead, Töpfer appears to support the creation of a strong World Organization on Sustainable Development.⁹

In the meantime, a number of governments have also come forward with semi-official initiatives for establishing a new global agency. At the 1997 Special Session of the UN General Assembly on environment and development (‘Rio+5’), Brazil, Germany, Singapore and South Africa submitted a joint proposal for a world environment organization. These countries suggested, in the words of Helmut Kohl, then Germany’s chancellor and chief architect of this four-country initiative: ‘Global environmental protection and sustainable development need a clearly-audible voice at the United Nations. Therefore, in the short-term ... it is important that cooperation among the various environmental organizations be significantly improved. In the medium-term this should lead to the creation of a global umbrella organization for environmental issues, with the United Nations Environment Programme as a major pillar’ (Kohl 1997). A similar position evolved in France, exemplified by the speech of Dominique Voynet, then French environment minister, on 6 July 2000 before a subcommittee of the European Parliament. The minister stated that a new organization would need to build on UNEP. Furthermore, both the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization seemed to function as role models for the French initiative, and the World Trade Organization is mentioned as a body to which an environmental agency should serve as a counterweight (Voynet 2000).

The Current Debate

This renewed interest among some governments spurred further academic input to the discourse. Most scholars active in the debate so far published refined versions of their earlier arguments (Charnovitz 2002 and in this volume, Esty and Ivanova 2001 and 2002, Runge 2001). In many countries, increased attention to the question of a world environment organization emerged at the national level. In Germany, for example, supporters and opponents of a new organization have engaged in intensive debates in academic and public policy journals following a discussion paper by Biermann and Simonis (1998).¹⁰ In 2001, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (2001) adopted the case for a world environment organization and advised the federal government to continue to work towards such a new agency.

The broadening of the debate in the late 1990s also resulted in a wide variety of new views about what a world environment organization should or should not do. Bharat Desai (2000) provided an extensive legal analysis and examined prospects for shaping a United Nations Environment Protection Organization that would report to a newly mandated UN Trusteeship Council. Richard G. Tarasofsky (2002) discussed how UNEP and its Global Ministerial Environment Forum could be substantially stre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Global Environmental Governance Series
• About the Authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 The Debate on a World Environment Organization
• PART 1 Global Environmental Governance: Assessing the Need for Reform
• PART 2 The Case for a World Environment Organization
• PART 3 The Case Against a World Environment Organization
• Index