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UN conferences: Media events or genuine diplomacy?
... Through the process leading up to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), byname Earth Summit, environmental organizations began intense internal capacity building efforts to gain more sophisticated understanding of the international policymaking process (Conca & Ken, 1995). Some of the innovations at the time-most notably, parallel NGOs fora held alongside UN conferences-are now a routine element of intergovernmental deliberations (Fomerand, 1996). Interestingly, the first intergovernmental environmental summit, the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, is cited as one factor behind the rise in NGOs (Fomerand, 1996). ...
... Some of the innovations at the time-most notably, parallel NGOs fora held alongside UN conferences-are now a routine element of intergovernmental deliberations (Fomerand, 1996). Interestingly, the first intergovernmental environmental summit, the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, is cited as one factor behind the rise in NGOs (Fomerand, 1996). On the contrary, other non-environmental inter-governmental bodies, such as the World Trade Organization, the IMF and the G-7 have no provisions for formal involvement of NGOs (Esty, 1998), indicating the incremental authority for NGOs in the environmental sectors. ...
As non-governmental organizations (NGOs) assume incrementally important roles in global environmental governance, literature regarding their functions also multiplies. Studies are available about their features, structural advantages or impacts. However, very few have sufficiently explained what makes them tick in the international system as non-state actors. In this article, we argue that NGOs’ important position in global governance lies in its authority. We build our analysis on sociological institutionalism and the principal–agent models, arguing that NGOs are independent and autonomous with both inherent authority and granted authority by sovereign states or inter-governmental organizations (IGOs). It is through this authority that NGOs could function independently and autonomously in global governance instead of being the affiliated or appendant actors of parties. To shed some new light on understanding NGOs in the international system from a theoretical perspective, we employ cases from environmental governance domain as evidence for illustration.
... Mitigation strategies have increased the potential for conflicts between companies, governments, international organisations (Death 2011;Fomerand, 1996;Hurrel and Sengupta 2012), and indigenous groups (Bank 2009). Governments have agreed at the time of the declarations and have proclaimed profound future transformations and radical measures, especially when the future has been longer than their electoral terms; however, they have often failed to initiate concrete mitigation strategies with measurable improvements (Khan and Roberts 2013). ...
... Governments have agreed at the time of the declarations and have proclaimed profound future transformations and radical measures, especially when the future has been longer than their electoral terms; however, they have often failed to initiate concrete mitigation strategies with measurable improvements (Khan and Roberts 2013). International organisations (such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC) have been criticised by different actors, particularly by researchers, for their roles as coordinators who bring the various actors together but keep the status quo in place (Death 2011;Fomerand 1996;Hurrel and Sengupta 2012), whereas the conflicts with the companies have been related to carbon leakage (Droege 2011). Companies have seen mitigation strategies as a distortion of the markets and a disadvantage in comparison with their competitors in other countries (carbon leakage), who have not been subject to the pressure of mitigation. ...
... While there is no standard format for these conferences, certain commonalties have emerged, which the UN Small Arms Conference appears to reflect (Fomerand, 1996). A typical conference involves the UN Secretariat (e.g. the UNDDA), a decision-making political body (e.g. the First Committee of the General Assembly), various UN agencies (including UNICEF and the UNDP), national focal points that promote activities related to the conference at the national level (e.g. ...
... One way of evaluating the extent to which the UN Small Arms Conference contributed to the development of a GPP framework is to look at its accomplishments in comparison to UN conferences on other global issues. Recent studies have produced lists of costs and benefits arising out of attempts made to resolve specific global problems through UN conferences (Fomerand, 1996;Schlecter, 2001). The activities italicized in the following section represent those aspects of such conferences that, where present, enhanced the development of a GPP framework, and are also discernible results of the UN Small Arms Conference. ...
... They found the processes of global conferences a fertile ground to achieve this because throughout the 1990s they became a new form of global governance. One of the main causes of the sudden increase in UN conferences was the need to deal with problems that cannot be treated purely from a national perspective (Fomerand 1996). For example, environmental issues traverse national or regional boundaries and, as a result, nations have to address them jointly. ...
... Their usefulness is questioned by raising issues related to expenses, concern of work duplication, diversion of attention from other serious issues, lack of tangible agreements, backtracking on previous agreements, pre-emption of more radical solutions resulting in compromise rather than commitment, and the imposition of a world order favouring values of a few powerful countries. Whereas the opposite point of view highlights that conferences mobilize national and local actors to take action on major global problems, set international standards for national policy where governments make commitments and report regularly to the UN, provide an opportunity to think globally, and finally have an explicitly normative function (Fomerand 1996; Schechter 2001). This debate shows that the effectiveness of conferences differs, depending on various factors ranging from the type of issues being addressed at the conference, to the reaction of government delegations to them, to the foreign policy context of the conference. ...
This literature review is part of a broader United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) project exploring the interactions between civil society and the international system of governance. More specifically, the project seeks to evaluate the impact of various United Nations (UN) summits on civil society at local, national and global levels. Under this project, UNRISD has commissioned research in several countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In this paper, Constanza Tabbush reviews the current literature on the role of civil society at UN conferences, provides a first attempt under the UNRISD project to discuss the key concepts involved, assesses the scope of the literature on civil society engagement, and identifies some of the gaps that might usefully be addressed by further analysis. Tabbush takes three different sets of literature into account (i) to discuss the theory of civil society; (ii) to evaluate the engagement of civil society at global conferences; and (iii) to consider the role of civil society in global governance. The 1990s saw the development of unprecedented links between global civil society and international conferences. As the conferences became an important feature in global governance, international activists came increasingly to see them as an opportunity to influence the global policy agenda. In turn, civil society was viewed by many international organizations as a valuable partner that would increase the latter’s legitimacy and constituency; thus the UN system itself further encouraged the participation of civil society in global conferences. Empirical studies that analyse the engagement of civil society with global conferences tend to overlook the transformations and new developments that civil society undergoes as it enters the world of international policy making. Studies are generally based on a unidirectional model that analyses the influence of civil society on the outcome of conferences but, although some indicators can be found, in general such studies do not consider the effects this participation can have on civil society itself. In this paper, therefore, Tabbush outlines some of the results of civil society involvement in global governance for developments within civil society. She proposes that future research be based on a model centred on the interaction or reciprocal effects of civil society and UN conferences. This review also highlights the need for a systematic inclusion of theoretical considerations in empirical studies of this field. This could provide more solid grounding for the study of the consequences of civil society participation in UN conferences. The range of meanings of the term civil society should be recognized in order to challenge the assumption that participation is always beneficial. Tabbush considers different ways of conceptualizing state and non-state actors, as well as some key debates on civil society theory, and looks into the policy implications and empirical effects these can have on the ways civil society participates in global conferences.
... 7. Slaughter et al. 1998. 8. Barnett and Finemore 1999Dimitrov 2005;Fomerand 1996. 9. Bernstein 2001. ...
This special issue introduces readers to collaborative event ethnography (CEE), a method developed to support the ethnographic study of large global environmental meetings. CEE was applied by a group of seventeen researchers at the Tenth Conference of the Parties (COP10) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to study the politics of biodiversity conservation. In this introduction, we describe our interests in global environmental meetings as sites where the politics of biodiversity conservation can be observed and as windows into broader governance networks. We specify the types of politics we attend to when observing such meetings and then describe the CBD, its COP, challenges meetings pose for ethnographic researchers, how CEE responds to these challenges generally, and the specifics of our research practices at COP10. Following a summary of the contributed papers, we conclude by reflecting on the evolution of CEE over time.
... An oft-heard criticism of mega-conferences is that they are little more than high-profile (and hugely expensive) talking shops which give the illusion that the world is changing when it is not. 24 Politicians arrive, make their preprepared speeches, and haggle over the wording of a formal communiqué, before emerging bleary-eyed just before dawn breaks. They may offer token amounts of new finance or sign a new environmental agreement, but most politicians use mega-conferences to make only very marginal changes to the status quo. ...
... Through the process leading up to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), environmental organizations began intense internal capacity building efforts to gain more sophisticated understanding of the international policymaking process (Conca, 1996 ). Some of the innovations at the time – most notably, parallel NGO fora held alongside UN conferences – are now a routine element of intergovernmental deliberations (Fomerand, 1996). ...
summary This chapter identifies five major roles that civil society might play in global environmental governance: (1) collecting, disseminating, and analyzing information; (2) providing input to agenda-setting and policy development processes; (3) performing operational functions; (4) assessing environmental conditions and monitoring compliance with environmental agreements; and (5) advocating environmental justice. Three case studies – the Crucible Group, TRAFFIC, and global ecosystem assessment processes – illustrate the success NGOs have had in stepping up to these roles. International decisionmaking processes seek legitimacy through the involvement of civil society, yet formal mechanisms for NGO participation within the UN system remain limited. Ad-hoc civil society participation should be replaced by a strengthened, more formalized institutional structure for engagement. The chapter offers concrete suggestions for such measures, including: • Wider use of the "commission" model for long-term, substantive involvement of civil society in global policymaking processes; • Assistance for the development of NGO networks; • Development of standards for civil society participation and engagement in international decisionmaking processes; • Creation of a comprehensive database of information and analysis at different geographic and political levels; • Involvement of a larger part of the public in issue spotting, assessment, and monitoring functions; • Support for knowledge-generating institutions in developing countries.
... International relations scholars argue that the UN system and multilateral conferences are important because they introduce new issues and ideas and provide fora for international policymaking [19,54,55]. More recent literature suggests that international organizations can teach norms to states, thereby influencing the behaviour of states and facilitating agreement and collective action [56][57][58][59][60]. This suggests that in judging the effectiveness of the UN system and the UN High-Level Summit, it is necessary to consider its contributions to establishing norms around appropriate state policies instead of focusing solely on immediate outcomes. ...
Skyrocketing food prices in 2007 and 2008 have produced social and political unrest in many developing countries and threaten to precipitate an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. This review looks at the present food crisis through the analytical lenses of international political economy and global governance. I argue that the study of the food crisis is enhanced by contextualizing the crisis within broader processes of globalization. The review is divided into three parts. The first section examines the magnitude of the current food crisis and clarifies what is meant by the term 'global food crisis'. The second section reviews the policy measures implemented in response to the crisis, focusing particularly on the multilateral level. The third section examines two vital elements of the multilateral response, emergency food aid and establishing an international agreement on biofuels, and identifies key obstacles to their efficacy.
... Viewed from the vantage point of the beginning of the twenty-first century, it may be difficult to believe that as late as the 1960s environmental degradation, population growth, urbanization, and women's rights were being discussed in specialized circles but were largely invisible on the radar screen of international development. This changed during the 1970s, and one clear reason was that the UN system launched a series of global conferences on emerging global challenges (Fomerand, 1996;Schechter, 2001;UN, 1997). The major goals of these conferences were to raise awareness of common problems, to promote a change in the dominant attitudes toward them, to define solutions, to generate commitment and to stimulate the establishment of programmes of action to confront the challenges. ...
This article begins to examine the history of economic and social ideas launched or nurtured by the United Nations (UN). In 1999, the United Nations Intellectual History Project was initiated, to analyse the UN as an intellectual actor, and to shed light on the role of the UN system in creating knowledge and in influencing international policy-making: this article is based on the first five books and the oral histories from that Project. The starting point is that ideas may be the most important legacy of the UN for human rights, economic and social development, as well as for peace and security. For the authors, this ‘intellectual history’ provides a way to explore the origins of particular ideas; trace their course within institutions, scholarship, and discourse; and in some cases evaluate the impact of ideas on policy and action.
... • Finally, a broader argument can now be made that mega-conferences can advance global agendas in significant ways, as they have done with energy. The energy case gives cause for more optimism than many scholars invest in these conferences (Fomerand, 1996;Haas, 2002;Seyfang and Jordan, 2002). However, a corollary to be investigated further, would be whether such impact is more likely to be noticeable on specific issues rather than on the general agenda as a whole. ...
This paper presents a framework for understanding energy issues in the context of sustainable development. It posits that there are three important ways in which energy is related to sustainable development: (a) energy as a source of environmental stress, (b) energy as a principal motor of macroeconomic growth and (c) energy as a prerequisite for meeting basic human needs. These three dimensions correspond to the three dimensions of the often-used triangle of sustainable development: environmental, economic, and social. Using this framework, the paper traces how successive environmental summits at Stockholm (1972), Rio de Janeiro (1992) and Johannesburg (2002) have dealt with energy issues. It identifies a slow, surprising and important evolution of how energy issues have been treated at these global discussions. Energy has received increasing prominence at these meetings and become more firmly rooted in the framework of sustainable development. Stockholm was primarily concerned with the environmental dimension, Rio de Janeiro focused on both the environmental and economic dimensions, and the major headway made at Johannesburg was the meaningful addition of the social dimension and the linking of energy issues to the UN's Millennium Development Goals.
... It was also viewed as an opportunity to catalyse the generation and diffusion of knowledge about drylands, and develop joint goals for the future, as well as increase participation in the fight against global desertification and contribute towards agenda-setting. Thus, it was hoped that it could engender positive collateral outcomes too, including further steps towards sustainable development (Fomerand, 1996; Seyfang, 2003) and objective L: " Long-term oriented implementation of the UNCCD " . The summary of IYDD events shown inTable 1 was synthesised using information available on the IYDD website (www.iydd.org) up until May 2007, and the web links therein. ...
During the United Nations General Assembly's 58th Ordinary Session in 2003, a decision was adopted declaring 2006 the International Year of Deserts and Desertification (IYDD). This paper critically reviews this International Year. It draws on the key outputs from IYDD events from across the globe to highlight the challenges and ways forward in both combating desertification and implementing the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The paper considers what the IYDD outputs mean for the current and historical controversies surrounding the desertification issue and presents an overall evaluation of the successes of IYDD for the different stakeholder groups within the desertification regime. It is concluded that while the International Year can be considered to have met the United Nations's four objectives: to address the long-term oriented implementation of the UNCCD; raise awareness of the implications of desertification; facilitate networking with all stakeholders; and disseminate information relating to the UNCCD, the real challenge lies in moving the IYDD outcomes away from the conferences, meetings and networks that contributed to their generation, towards a more concrete, tangible effort to conserve deserts and effectively monitor and control desertification and land degradation on the ground.
International organizations play an important, if imperfect, role in world politics, solving collective action problems in security, economic, environmental, and global health among others. While many believe that international organisations have formed critical pillars of global governance, sceptics contend that they reflect the power politics of the day and the interests of hegemonic powers. This volume examines whether international organizations contribute to or detract from peaceful change, acting as agents of both status quo and stasis. Providing a historical overview of international organizations, from the nineteenth century to the current day, a team of leading scholars offer an overview of how major theoretical approaches – Liberalism, Constructivism, Rationalism and Realism – have contributed to our understanding of the role played by international organizations in peaceful change. In particular, the roles of the United Nations General Assembly, UN Peacekeeping, UN Environment Program, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization and G20 are analysed.
Abstract
Why are some institutions without any policy powers or output? This study documents the efforts by governments to create empty international institutions whose mandates deprive them of any capacity for policy formulation or implementation. Examples include the United Nations Forum on Forests, the Copenhagen Accord on Climate Change, and the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. Research is based on participation in twenty-one rounds of negotiations over ten years and interviews with diplomats, policymakers and observers. The article introduces the concept of empty institutions, provides evidence from three empirical cases, theorizes their political functions, and discusses theoretical implications and policy ramifications. Empty institutions are deliberately designed not to deliver and serve two purposes. First, they are political tools for hiding failure at negotiations, by creating a public impression of policy progress. Second, empty institutions are “decoys” that distract public scrutiny and legitimize collective inaction, by filling the institutional space in a given issue area and by neutralizing pressures for genuine policy. Contrary to conventional academic wisdom, institutions can be raised as obstacles that pre-empt governance rather than facilitate it.
The scene: a Europe-wide conference of development researchers in the early 1990s. Not included among its many plenary sessions is the presentation by the head of the new United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Reports Office about the office's ambitions and first product: the Human Development Report 1990. He is allocated to a side venue, speaking simultaneously with other events at the end of a long day. As of 1990, no one has high expectations of the UN system as an intellectual powerhouse. It is a producer of hard to obtain publications of cautious and generally worded reportage and good in - tentions. It has been marginalized by the vastly better-funded Bretton Woods institutions. The audience at the presentation is still large, but rather sceptical. We have heard of the new office's creation of a Human Development Index that adds education and health aspects to per capita GNP in determining levels of development-but surely this remains a grossly reductionist and unnecessary indicator, an inadequate synthesis of life? The head of the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) is Mahbub ul Haq. He rouses and invigorates the hall, speaking with an energy, assurance, and freshness of insight guided by humor and a combination of practicality, acuity, and moral concern that make people think: Well, perhaps something of major importance can indeed come forth from the UN system. As it did.
Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Civil Society explores the growing power of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) by analyzing a microcosm of contemporary global state-society relations at UN World Conferences. The intense interactions between states and NGOs at conferences on the environment, human rights, women's issues, and other topics confirm the emergence of a new transnational democratic sphere of activity. Employing both regional and global case studies, the book charts noticeable growth in the ability of NGOs to build networks among themselves and effect change within UN processes. Using a multidimensional understanding of state sovereignty, the authors find that states use sovereignty to shelter not only material interests but also cultural identity in the face of external pressure. This book is unique in its analysis of NGO activities at the international level as well as the complexity of nation-states' responses to their new companions in global governance.
The concept of UN peacekeeping has had to evolve and change to meet the challenges of contemporary sources of conflict. From a practical, operational and legal perspective, Murphy examines the problems faced by UN peacekeeping operations. Three case studies (Lebanon, Somalia and Kosovo) are used to demonstrate the problems associated with the command and control of UN forces, the use of force and rules of engagement, and the implementation of international human rights and humanitarian law by such forces.
In the 21st century, the world is faced with threats of global scale that cannot be confronted without collective action. Although global government as such does not exist, formal and informal institutions, practices, and initiatives - together forming "global governance" - bring a greater measure of predictability, stability, and order to trans-border issues than might be expected. Yet, there are significant gaps between many current global problems and available solutions. Thomas G. Weiss and Ramesh Thakur analyze the UN's role in addressing such knowledge, normative, policy, institutional, and compliance lapses. The UN's relationship to these five global governance gaps is explored through case studies of some of the most burning problems of our age, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian crises, development aid, climate change, human rights, and HIV/AIDS.
Multilateral UN summits from Stockholm to Copenhagen have set the pace and direction for the global governance of sustainable development. The 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was a key moment in the evolution of sustainable development as a discourse and summitry as a technology of government. It firmly established multi-stakeholder partnerships, carbon-trading and communication strategies as primary techniques for dealing with environmental crises. It was also a significant event in terms of South African domestic politics, witnessing some of the largest protests since the end of Apartheid. Carl Death draws on Foucauldian governmentality literature to argue that the Johannesburg Summit was a key site for the refashioning of sustainable development as advanced liberal government; for the emergence of an exemplary logic of rule; and for the mutually interdependent relationship between 'mega-events' (summits, world cups, Olympic games) and 'mega-protests' understood as Foucauldian counter-conducts. Analysing detailed and original research on the WSSD, Death argues that summits work to make politically sustainable a global order which is manifestly unsustainable. Paradoxically however, they also provide opportunities for the status quo to be protested and resisted. This work will be of great interest to scholars of development studies, global governance and environmental politics.
For more than a century and a half, the most powerful national governments have created institutions of multilateral governance that promise to make a more inclusive world, a world serving women, working people, the colonized, the 'backward', the destitute, and the despised. This groundbreaking book is a study of that promise, and of the real impact of this world government. It discusses what systems global institutions have, and have not done to keep their promise, and examines whether the system will serve the world's least-advantaged, or marginalize them further. This book focuses on whether it is the 'economists and political philosophers of the rich', or the social movements of the disadvantaged that are most likely to influence the world's lawmakers, and the processes by which they will complete the next generation of multilateral institutions. An innovative study, this book is important reading for anyone with an interest in international political economy, global governance, development and the politics of north-south relations.
The aim of this book is to review central concepts in the study of environmental politics and to open up new questions, problems, and research agendas in the field.
The new edition of this accessible introduction to the important role of the United Nations Secretary-General continues to offer a keen insight into the United Nations – the Secretariat and its head, the Secretary-General, summing up the history, structure, strengths and weaknesses, and continuing operations of an ever-present global institution.
"The authors have cajoled, intrigued, or reassured their 73 'voices' into telling a fascinating story of the UN and its institutions, which is also a story of 73 individual lives, of women and men... with their own complicated histories of emigration and education, family relationships and professional choices, hopes and successes." -- from the Foreword by Emma Rothschild. "Far from being a distant bureaucracy, the UN is composed of individuals who are reshaped by vital experiences. UN Voices gives international civil servants human faces and shows how ideas drive the grand experiment. It is a fascinating book." -- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. UN Voices presents the human and moving stories of an extraordinary group of individuals who contributed to the economic and social record of the UN's life and activities. Drawing from extensive interviews, the book presents in their own words the experiences of 73 individuals from around the globe who have spent much of their professional lives engaged in United Nations affairs. We hear from secretaries-general and presidents, ministers and professors, social workers and field workers, as well as diplomats and executive heads of UN agencies. Among those interviewed are noted figures such as Kofi Annan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Alister McIntyre, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, and Kurt Waldheim, as well as many less well known UN professional men and women who have made significant contributions to the international struggle for a better world. Their personal accounts also engage their contributions in dealing with such events and issues as the UN's founding, decolonization, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, human rights, the environment, and September 11, 2001. © 2005 by United Nations Intellectual History Project. All rights reserved.
Counter-summits are important arenas of global environmental politics. Drawing upon Death’s analysis of summitry as a form of environmentality, the forum argues that these alternative venues are defined by counter-summitry, a set of practices that are performative, enact legitimacy, and communicate norms of responsible conduct. This forum analyzes counter-summitry at the People’s Summit in Rio de Janeiro, held in opposition to the UNDP’s 2012 Rio+20 summit. I explore the actions of La Via Campesina—one of the larger participating movements at the People’s Summit—analyzing this movement’s mobilizations at Rio+20 and the People’s Summit’s final outcome document. These function as a form of counter-summitry, influencing the production of environmental subjects. I conclude with several questions to help direct debate concerning the relationship between counter-summitry and global environmental politics.
The 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development Rio + 20 generated a wide range of mostly negative reactions. Even before the conference, there was widespread doubt about the possibility of success. As soon as the conference closed, analysts highlighted its failures and criticized the outcome document, The Future We Want. While it does not present a grand transformative vision, the outcome document does reaffirm past political commitments and addresses the multiple dimensions of sustainable development and the linkages among them. Indeed, Rio + 20 had subtle, yet significant impacts. Three main areas stand out: reform of international institutions, sustainable development goals, and participation as principle and practice. The global decisions in these domains and the unprecedented local engagement provide critical junctures likely to shape global environmental governance for the next two decades.
Contrary to what many believe these days, the UN has been, on many occasions and for many decades, ahead of the curve in the economic and social development field. It has lived up to important challenges, such as providing an international development framework and clarifying the terms of trade debate in the 1950s, coming up with an alternative development strategy during the 1970s, and putting environmental, population and gender questions on the map. True, during the 1980s the UN was on the defensive, as the initiative shifted to the World Bank and the IME not necessarily to the advantage of the developing countries. During the 1990s, however, the UN came back with a vengeance by launching the series of Human Development Reports and the Millennium Development Goals. The UN has been lagging behind in the tragic area of HIV/AIDS as well as in incorporating culture into the development equation.
Martha Nussbaum has provided a major service to the study and practice of international relations (IR) by articulating the moral claims made on states and international organizations by the fact of human capabilities. In return, something of what has been learned by scholars of IR can contribute to her project by considering the ways in which concrete international institutions (such as UNDP) have struggled with their international responsibilities, highlighting the role of egalitarian social movements in the establishment and reform of global level intergovernmental organizations, and searching for ways to embody Nussbaum's ‘Principles for Global Structure’ in the current agenda for reform of the United Nations' system.
States vary the content and subject matter of their claims to sovereignty. In an analysis of when states invoked sovereignty at recent UN World Conferences on the environment (1992), human rights (1993), and women (1995), the authors revise and extend Litfin's (1997) notion of bargains among components of sovereignty. At the conferences, states invoked sovereignty in debates over cultural and religious values, economics, and increased international accountability. The authors interpret the debates based on how four elements of sovereignty—autonomy, control, and legitimacy in the eyes of other states and nonstate actors—are traded by states through implicit or explicit bargaining. They identify patterns that vary by issue area. The authors argue that nongovernmental organizations as well as other states may legitimate or delegitimate states' sovereign claims. They find that countries of the global South made more sovereignty claims of all kinds than Northern states. And, sovereignty bargains may be struck more easily over power and economics than social values.
This paper submits that efforts to achieve sustainable development at global level call for, inter alia, institutional reform. It argues that there is no optimal institutional design, and that different schools of thought have different perspectives of the future. It briefly presents the history of institutional evolution in the area of sustainable development up to the latest developments in the context of the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development. This history sets the context for the rest of the discussions. It then presents a taxonomy of the various options suggested in the literature for improving the institutional structure of the United Nations in order to achieve sustainable development. This paper critically examines the feasibility of these options from the perspective of the different schools of thought in international relations theory. It argues that from the point of view of idealistic supranationalists, a hierarchic supranational environment and/or development organisation should be established to integrate and coordinate activities in the UN in order to promote sustainable development governance. It argues that from a realist/neo-realist and neo-liberal institutionalist approach, coordination, whether hierarchical or horizontal, is doomed to failure. From a historical materialist approach all efforts at institutional design are likely to lead to asymmetrical results reflecting global power relations. This paper concludes with a speculative argument that institutional design is not a question of the best architectural option, but calls for multiple pathways including strengthening of individual organisations, promoting the progressive development of the law of sustainable development, developing a high level advisory body to advise the Secretary General, promoting the concept of the decentralised network organisation and possibly finding ways to cluster regimes. The effectiveness of these multiple efforts are dependent on the support of civil society. In order for sustainable development to take the key concerns of developing countries into account, it is necessary that institutions are able to represent the variety of views of their members and that countries develop good policies domestically.
This article offers a descriptive analysis of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the involvement of civil society organizations in it. Theoretical and empirical literature on global civil society, a “third sector” distinct from government and business, makes it clear that its changing role in international governance processes raises important political issues. This article examines what WSIS tells us about how this dynamic is playing out in communication and information policy.
Global summits - such as the 2002 Johannesburg Summit and the 2009 Copenhagen COP15 - can be seen as theatrical techniques of environmental governmentality. Summits such as these, which do not produce new international agreements or strengthen environmental regimes, are commonly regarded as failures. However, they can also be viewed as moments of political theatre, performative enactments of legitimacy and authority, and sites for the communication of particular examples of responsible conduct. This political theatre is not a distraction from the real business of governing the global environment, but rather it is a primary technique of government at a distance. Summits function as 'exemplary centres' for a global audience, although their mobilisation of particular stages, scripts, casts and audiences remains open to subversion and conflict. The symbolic, theatrical and performative dimensions of summitry are rarely theorised, but their implications are profound, not only for responses to the ecological crisis, but for the nature and character of global politics and the potential for resistance and dissent.
Leadership is a matter that social scientists often are ambivalent about, but is important in knife-edge’ situations and when people choose direction within wide-open possibilities. ‘Good leaders’ need contexts that stimulate and discipline them, good ‘followers’/ collaborators, and ability to use good luck. The paper explores the work of Mahbub ul Haq, in relation to some ideas about factors that affect initiatives for social justice through new ideas: a) lessons he learnt from the failure of his Basic Needs work at the World Bank (concerning lack of institutional protection; lack of a comprehensive vision; lack of a bridge to the mainstreams of economic policy and development policy); b) his operation as a wordsmith, providing appealing labels for big ideas, including an accessible value basis; c) his exemplification of two fundamental reorientations: ‘joined-up thinking’, analysis not restricted within the boxes of ‘national economies’; and ‘joined-up feeling’, global sympathy, concern and commitment; and d) a series of concrete, visionary proposals (like the Human Development indices, the 20/20 principle and the MDGs), which converted old talk about ‘progressive realization’ of economic and social rights into practical agendas and tools to try to keep leaders accountable.
Information about current research work, seminars and conferences and items of Third World interest will be published in this section. Readers’ contributions are welcome.
The author reviews the successes and failures of the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo Egypt in September 1994. He suggests that the conference missed the opportunity to focus on the seriousness of global population trends by allowing itself to be diverted to consideration of such topics as the empowerment of women and reproductive health concerns. "The good news from Cairo is the promise of a significant infusion of money into the field; however a third of that is slated for womens reproductive health and HIV/AIDS-prevention programs. The conference was a resounding success for the advocates of womens reproductive health but a disappointment to many concerned about population growth. And the two are not synonymous." (EXCERPT)