Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 10 • Number 4 • 5th March 2010

UN Inches toward Creation of a ‘World Environment Organisation’

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Environment ministers and UN officials gathering at a major summit in Bali have officially launched a process that could lead to the establishment of a ‘World Environment Organisation’, a multilateral institution for global environmental governance that some say could be modelled after the WTO.

“A coherent and effective international environmental governance architecture can provide a foundation for human well-being for generations to come,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told those attending the meeting. “I urge you to be bold and creative in putting forward new ideas.”

More than one thousand participants descended on the tiny Indonesian island for the five-day gathering, which also comprised the ‘simultaneous extraordinary’ conferences of the parties of the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions, which govern hazardous waste, industrial chemicals, and persistent organic pollutants, respectively.

But the main action on global environmental governance took place during the General Council meeting of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as well as in the concurrent gathering of environment ministers from around the world.

High on the ministers’ agenda was the question of how to streamline international action on the environment. The current system of addressing environmental problems at the multilateral level “has become complex and fragmented,” the ministers acknowledged in their final declaration, adding that the system is “sometimes not as effective and efficient as it should be.”

“The status quo … is no longer an option,” UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner told Reuters. “Within the broader reform options, the [World Environment Organisation] concept is one of them.”

“Governments established a high-level ministerial group to continue this process with greater focus and also urgency. That group will convene within a few months,” Steiner added.

High-level group to mull structure of potential WEO

How such an institution might be structured has not been determined, although Steiner has suggested that it could be modelled on the WTO. It is not yet clear, however, whether a World Environment Organisation would have the power to sanction its members or, like the WTO, allow its members to sanction each other under certain circumstances.

Such questions will soon be broached by a ‘consultative group’ of ministers or high-level representatives, which will present a final report of its deliberations to UNEP’s next General Council, to be held in February 2011. Outcomes of their discussions will also be forwarded to the UN General Assembly, the multilateral body’s full membership.

Looking further ahead, officials have set their sights on securing a breakthrough at a major environmental summit to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. The meeting, which is being called Rio +20, is to take place two decades after the 1992 summit in the Brazilian metropolis that is widely credited for generating much of the momentum for the modern environmental movement.

The ministers’ declaration, dubbed the Nusa Dua Declaration after the coastal resort town where the meeting was held, also touched on climate change, biodiversity and ecosystems, sustainable development and the green economy.

Reform: a long time coming

Many officials and academics have long argued that UNEP, which now serves as the core of the global environmental governance system, is too weak to adequately address the world’s myriad environmental problems. The organisation, which was founded in 1972, was set up as a UN programme, not a department - a classification that would have afforded it broader influence and increased access to funding. As a programme, however, the institution was intended to establish environmental norms and serve as a catalyst for action on the environment; it was not intended to carry out projects on the ground.

Recently, however, the 38-year-old organisation has come under increased fire for not being up to the task of managing governments’ responses to everything from climate change and biodiversity loss to drinking water pollution and hazardous waste management. In a typical jibe, Peter Hass, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, called UNEP “weak, underfunded, overloaded, and remote” in an article in the Journal of European Public Policy in 2004.

With the need for reform taken as a given, the environmental academic community has long been embroiled in a debate over what form a World Environment Organisation might take. Proposed options range from a more robust version of UNEP to a WTO-style body that would have broad rule-making authority and the power to adjudicate disputes among nations.

But not everyone agrees that a new multilateral institution is the best way to improve international governance on environmental matters. Adil Najam, a professor of Global Public Policy at Boston University, wrote in 2002 that the environmental community is misdirecting its energies in debating possible structures for a new supra-national organisation.

“All such schemes share a strong supposition that the ‘problem’ of global environmental governance can be reduced to, and resolved by, playing around with the design of global environmental organisations,” Najam wrote, adding that such a discourse “fails to ask fundamental questions about why environmental degradation happens, or why global cooperation founders.”

More information

The ministers’ Nusa Dua Declaration can be accessed here: http://bit.ly/cyTIPn

A detailed report of the Bali meeting provided by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin is available here: http://www.iisd.ca/vol16/enb1684e.html

ICTSD reporting; “UN meeting moots WTO-style environment agency,” REUTERS, 26 February 2010.