What Has The United Nations Environment Programme Achieved?

Since the 19th century, there were initiatives, although on a small range, related to preservation and control of lakes, rivers, and some kind of animals. Examples: Commission of rivers (Donau and Rhein) since congress of Vienna. This commission had established a prototype of the nowadays International Organizations, explaining better, they were simply organisms whose assignment was more instrumental rather than to promote a shift on the actions of the governments, or a burdensome task that would transcend the sphere of government’s in-fluency (domestic order vs. International order)......


These tasks of international organizations only begin to extend, to expand, mostly in the area of environmental issues, on 70’s decade. in the decade of the 70’s and 60’s there was a substantial increase in the number of NGO’s, on various agendas, that could interfere in the United Nations arena in order to pursue these environmental policies. On the perspective of the public opinion, a wide array of books were published on this topic that obviously echoed in the International Arena: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Garret’s essay “tragedy of the commons”.

This explains why the first International Convention on Enviromental issue was held in 1972. It was in Stockholm where a substantial number of actors (Including scientists, NGO’s, professional groups and industries) were present to discuss the issue of global environment.

 The results of this conference were manifold: advances in the agenda to permanently set this issue on next discussions; acceptance of the States on the importance of this issue.

 Back at that time, Countries didn’t even have a ministery or a secretary concerned on environmental issues, however, with the initiative of this conference everything started to change, so, domestic politics started to endorse a great amount of time and resources on this issue. 

But not for all of them, the developing and least developed countries were unwilling to abide by these new cirscumstances, since they viewed environmental issues as an ambush of the developed countries to limit their power of economic growth (Dilemma Economic Growth Vs. Environmental impacts).

The clash between the two groups (Developed vs. Developing countries) was divided by two main arguments: First, on the developed side, the population was increasing and, if this problem couldn’t be addressed, this increase could cause the scarcity of resources including 

environmental process (typical Neo-Malthusian argument); second, on the other side of the arena, the developing countries advocated that the guilty was on the richcountries whose voraciously mass-consumption model was putting in jeopardy environmental resources.

As consequence, the Dilemma of the economic development vs. enviromental protection needed to be addressed in order to achieve common ground between developed and developing countries. For that reason, the concept of Sustainable Development was first used. 

In 1983, at the Brudtland Commission, whose report “Our Common Future” introduced the concept Sustainable Development, for the first time, undersocring that developing countries could achieve development through the same path followed by developed countries.

 This Commission evolved many participants, including, NGO’s, scientists, and International Organizations like World Bank (whose tasks had suffered several changes, now focusing on the development of the least developed countries, providing credit with low interest rates).

November 21, 2018