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The two chapters that follow provide some unavoidable organizational history, necessary if one is to understand the Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS). The first chapter discusses the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), where it all started, and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the executor of the Stockholm legacy and the parent organization of GEMS; the second chapter examines the beginnings and nature of GEMS itself.
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THE 1972 STOCKHOLM CONFERENCE
The Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment was a pioneering venture. Its novelty came primarily from the nature of the subject matter on its agenda. It spanned disciplines and jurisdictions. It could not be readily fitted within the framework of the organizations used by governments either to run their domestic affairs or to conduct international relations. Furthermore, the knowledge and appreciation of environmental issues was still rudimentary. Indeed, this was an area where international consciousness had been raised before the subject became a domestic concern in most countries. This was in contrast to other more traditional subjects dealt with by international conferences where, in devising their positions and strategies, governments could draw on their own practice, the existing domestic structures, well-defined interests, and an institutional memory. As a result, governments had to seek advice and guidance on how to approach this still uncharted terrain. They found it in the relatively narrow circle of those in the vanguard of environmental consciousness, namely, the scientists, academics and a few non-governmental organizations (NGOs).1 Also, they found it in the secretariats of the Conference itself and of the specialized agencies of the UN system, which, as a result, enjoyed a significant degree of initiative and were the principal shapers of the proposals and consensus that eventually materialized.
At that time, many formulations of problems were still tentative and not widely accepted. Scientific knowledge and explanations were incomplete and often controversial. Moreover, there was a good deal of substantive and institutional uncertainty as to how to proceed and how to link environmental objectives with everyday decision-making and action, especially in the economic sphere.
The Stockholm Conference brought to the surface a number of underlying controversies. It yielded given formulations and decisions that have played an important role in shaping the perception of environmental issues and national and international responses in the period that followed.
1 A refreshing and unusual aspect of the Conference was the presence of enthusiastic and vocal non-governmental organizations and grass-roots movements. Also, among the delegates the usual government representatives and diplomats from the traditional UN circuit were not dominant. In fact, the heterogeneous mix of delegatesā backgrounds and profiles reflected the lack of an institutional niche for environment in the domestic set-up of most governments.
One of the difficult challenges faced by the Conference was how to define the conceptual and policy framework to be used in orienting environmental action. Inevitably, this issue was greatly affected by the underlying North-South tensions. Another hard question concerned the institutional design. A few remarks are devoted to each of these topics in the pages that follow.
Recasting the frame of reference
The national and international responses to environmental problems, as well as the various conceptual and institutional frameworks devised to deal with them, have been significantly influenced and shaped by the real and/or perceived conflict between environment objectives and what were considered as the more pressing social and economic goals and priorities of society.
Thus, before and during the Stockholm Conference, the developing countriesā suspicion and in many cases lack of experience of environment issues affected the proceedings and the outcomes.
A good deal of the continuing controversy shrouding environment issues internationally can be attributed to the manner in which these early debates evolved and to the terms in which the issues were conceptualized. At the risk of oversimplifying, this setting will be summed up in the next few paragraphs.
Contemporary concern for the environment started to become vocal in the 1960s in the highly industrialized countries. In the mind of the common citizen, as well as of the decision-maker, the principal cause of this concern was the pollution of the atmosphere and of water which was beginning to affect visibly and immediately the quality of life. The new found interest in the environment extended also to the protection and conservation of nature, a concern spurred by the rapid and extensive penetration into the countryside of economic activities, human settlements, and transportation networks, and the resulting degradation of nature.
During this early period, the developing countries were hardly aware of or worried about environmental pollution. Domestically, for most of them, pollution represented an issue still beyond the horizon. Indeed, many considered pollution as something unavoidable, and even to be welcomed as a by-product of progress and of the economic and industrial development to which they were aspiring. They felt that on the global scale it was the responsibility of the developed countries, which were at high levels of economic development and had the necessary resources at their disposal, to control and prevent environmental pollution that was mostly of their own making, as well as to remedy the damage already done. As far as they were concerned and in view of their pressing social and development needs, the developing countries felt that worrying about pollution was a luxury which they could ill afford. If they were to act, they considered, they should be granted generous financial support by the international community, in addition to what they were already receiving in development assistance flows.
Regarding the protection and conservation of nature, the feeling in many developing countries was that the challenge for them was not so much one of preserving, protecting, and rehabilitating nature, as rather, and primarily, one of conquering and mastering it. They were aware of the vulnerability of their renewable natural resource base and of the need to exploit and manage it with care. They were annoyed, however, by the arguments of some non-governmental groups and scientists from the North who, among other things, called for strict conservation measures in the South, showing little sensitivity for their development objectives. It should not be surprising, then, that in the minds of many people in the Third World āconservationā came to be regarded as āanti-developmentā.
The budding environmental alarm of the late 1960s also extended to the exhaustion of some key natural resources. Some biologists and neo-Malthusian economists and demographers, in particular, were quick to point out the implications of rapid population growth and limited natural resources. As is often the case, panaceas were proposed. Two of these caught the attention of decision-makers and of the public, i.e., limiting population growth and limiting economic growth by adopting the zero-growth or steady-state development model for national economies.
Such ideas were not viewed favourably by the developing countries, especially as they came from the North which accounted for the lionās share of the global demand on the renewable and non-renewable natural resource base, and whose affluence, consumption and lifestyles were responsible for squandering energy and natural resources. They were seen as conflicting with their development aspirations and aimed at perpetuating their status of dependence and economic underdevelopment.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that when the preparatory process for the UNCHE was launched in 1968, the developing countries were not among its enthusiastic supporters or keenest participants. Their reserve grew as the initial preparations proceeded. Given the very heavy emphasis being placed on pollution and environmental assessment and, in general, on environmental issues as seen through the eyes of the North, many came to perceive the Conference as an affair of the industrialized countries. In fact, public figures from some developing countries began to voice doubts that their governments would take part.
In order to secure greater interest and participation by the developing countries, and in the light of what had been learned during the initial preparatory process, the Secretary General of the Conference made a fresh attempt to define the conceptual framework. For this purpose he convened a panel of experts at Founex, in Switzerland, to clarify and define the relationship between development and environment. This was one of the milestones in the history of environment as an issue on the international agenda. It marked the beginning of a protracted effort to secure the interest and participation of the developing countries, to overcome the limitations of the initial North-based formulae, and to seek more universally appealing definitions of the environmental problƩmatique linked to the principal concerns of development. The Founex report affected the orientation of the Conference and, ultimately, the direction and scope of international environmental action in the post-Conference period.2
2 The Founex report and selected background documents were reproduced in a volume entitled Development and Environment, Mouton, Paris and The Hague, 1972.
The panel attempted to clarify the interest and concerns of the developing countries with regard to the environment. It also laid the foundations for an integrated understanding of and approach to issues at stake. It formulated a comprehensive definition of the environment, arguing that environmental concerns are part and parcel of the development process. The experts considered that environment was not simply the biophysical sphere, it was also socio-economic structures; the two formed an interdependent and inextricable web. The debate on the environment was not concerned only with pollution and conservation, nor was the damage to the environment attributable solely to the process of development. In many cases, the damage was due to the very same socio-economic forces and causes that were at the root of poverty, underdevelopment, and inequity, and could be overcome only through the process of development, economic growth, and social change.
Thus formulated, environmental issues became more appealing and interesting to the developing countries. The conceptual framework proposed by the Founex panel also represented a more comprehensive definition of the complex relationships between environment and development, and the acknowledgement of the wide diversity of interests and environmental concerns in the global constituency to which UNCHE had to cater.
It implied an open-ended, functionally diffuse, development-oriented, and relatively politicized course. This was a rather different substantive and organizational proposition from the more specialized, technical, primarily environmental assessment approach, which was the favoured option of most developed countries.
The institutional question
At the Stockholm Conference, the question of follow-up institutional arrangements loomed large. The dominant view was that the subject matter of the environment ā by its very nature multidisciplinary and trans-sectoral and defined to encompass the majority of development concerns on the international agenda ā was so broad that it would not be sufficient to establish a single, specialized institution with functionally delimited jurisdictions and clearly marked fields of action. Theoretically, such an institution for the environment was possible. However, it was considered that it would be costly, large, and unwieldy, and would duplicate the mandates of other organizations within the UN family.
Two factors influenced the institutional approach adopted at UNCHE. First, the main UN specialized agencies felt that there was no need to create a separate UN body for the environment. Each having already staked out a claim to environmental aspects within its own field of concern, the agencies argued that collectively they could do a satisfactory job and that coordination should be resorted to. They lobbied against the idea of a new institution. In this they were given support by their constituencies, namely the respective national ministries, which had much the same views and were engaged in similar jurisdictional and institutional arguments on the home front. Second, in most governments there was no strong voice advocating the establishment of a major international agency for the environment. The reasons were the very uncertainty as to what was an optimal institutional approach and the fact that the environmental issue itself was rather low on the list of governmentsā priorities and did not have the backing of well-established domestic institutions to press its claims and champion its cause in the international arena.
In the absence of a clear-cut view and of policy motives and pressures for creating an organization endowed with a substantive operational mandate and the capabilities needed to cope with the task, an institutional compromise was chosen.3 It was innovative to a degree, promised to deliver results, and corresponded to the substantive definitions and the conceptual framework that had crystallized in the preparations for the Conference; yet it did not disturb the institutional status quo in the UN system.
Its basic features could be summarized as follows:
ā¢ The new global organization would be a coordinating and stimulating body, encompassing various sectors and disciplines. It would energize and ensure an integrated and coordinated programme for the environment within the UN system, as well as within its member organizations, which would be directly responsible for executing its various components.
ā¢ Its secretariat would be small and would not be endowed with operational, substantive, research, or executive capabilities. By definition, these were to be provided by the specialized agencies and other bodies within the UN system in their fields of expertise and competence.
ā¢ In order to enable the secretariat to perform its functions and respond to the requirements of the broad mandate, the organization was to be equipped with a fund, adequately financed by voluntary government contributions.
The institutional blueprint provided the new organization with the breadth and scope of action required by its subject matter; this in itself was unusual in the UN system, which is vertically divided into the sectoral domains of various organizations. It held out a hope of harnessing all the components of the UN in a joint and coordinated environment programme. To reaffirm this intent, the new body was made into an organ of the General Assembly, with the title of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Moreover, the post of the Executive Director was established at the level of Under Secretary-General (rather than Assistant Secretary-General, as had been proposed), The Executive Director was to be directly elected by the General Assembly upon nomination by the Secretary-General, rather than appointed by the Secretary-General and ratified by the General Assembly. This was supposed to confer higher status and a more independent political base to the Executive Director.
The coordinating but non-operational mandate, however, contained the risk of impotence and frustration. This was compounded by the proviso of a āsmallā secretariat, which represented an important concession to the specialized agencies. They felt that anything āsmallā was less likely to interfere in their work, could not duplicate their activities, and could not undertake environment-related actions on its own.
3 Following the recommendations of the Stockholm Conference, the UN General Assembly took a formal decision on the institutional and financial arrangements. See GA resolutions 2997 (XXVII) and 3004 (XXVII). For the institutional paper on which the Conference based its decision, see āInternational Organizational Implications of Action Proposalsā, UN doc. A/CONF.48/11. Also see docs. A/CONF.48/ll/Add.l and A/CONF....
