The rationale for institutional environmental integration
Where global or international policies have taken the form of rules or norms, like formal agreements, they are also institutions. As pointed out on the Environmental Integration page, interpretations, policies, and institutions overlap, as interpretation is an inevitable facet of policy, and policies often take the form of rules or norms that guide or channel behaviour. The rationale for analysing environmental integration efforts in these realms is to determine whether and to what extent they are complementary or mutually supportive. Approaches to environmental integration often differ in the degree of emphasis on only one or two of these dimensions, thus limiting their effectiveness. Here, the focus is on global environmental integration efforts in the institutional realm. Again, we will look at the internal and external dimensions. In the institutional sphere, the internal dimension relates to the creation of overarching institutions (rules and organisations) that coherently advance environmental integration across all institutions that significantly impact the environment. The external dimension relates to the greening of what are commonly regarded as non-environmental institutions, for instance, the organisations and rules that guide decision-making and policy-making in economics, energy, transport, industry, agriculture, and science and technology. Given the crucial role and importance of institutions in guiding, channelling, or even prescribing behaviour and practices, and the relative durability of institutions, environmental integration in the institutional realm is arguably the most important, yet also the most difficult to achieve.
At the global level, on the internal dimension, this difficulty is most apparent in the absence of a global environmental organisation with the task of advancing environmental integration in coherent and complementary ways across all other international institutions and all nation-states.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Since its establishment at the Stockholm Conference in 1972, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has arguably been the world’s central agency for environmental policy development and coordination. However, formally, the UNEP is not a standalone or specialist organisation like the World Trade Organisation or the World Health Organisation, but a “programme” operating under the direction of a Governing Council elected by the General Assembly. The UNEP’s primary functions include collecting and disseminating environmental data and information, reporting on environmental trends, acting as a catalyst for global environmental policy development, and playing a coordinating role within the UN system regarding the environmental dimension of sustainable development. It has virtually no operational implementation responsibilities, in contrast to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which has a significant on-the-ground presence in many low-income countries.
In practice, however, the UNEP has primarily functioned as an agenda-setting and policy initiation agency, but it has had considerable difficulty fulfilling its coordination role. It has played a crucial part in initiating and forming many multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), including those on protecting the ozone layer (the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol) and the Convention on Biological Diversity. It has also been relatively successful in its environmental monitoring and reporting role as reflected, for instance, in the publication of the Global Environmental Outlook series.[1] However, it has been much less effective in coordinating UN institutions and policies, even within what is commonly considered the environmental dimension of sustainable development.[2] This can be attributed to multiple other agencies with significant environmental responsibilities, creating “bureaucratic turf” issues and rivalry. Among these are the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with which the UNEP has had an uneasy relationship, and the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) which was created in 1992 to monitor progress made by countries in the implementation of Agenda 21, and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) that was set up to financially support low-income countries with tackling environmental issues and the implementation of environmental agreements. The UNEP’s Coordination efforts, through various mechanisms such as the Environmental Management Group and the Global Ministerial Environmental Forum, were also hampered by a lack of focus and consistency, ineffective leadership, and its weak mandate, status, and funding basis. Moreover, the growing number of MEAs, partly due to the UNEP’s initiatives, many of which have independent secretariats, further added to the coordination challenge. The location of the UNEP’s headquarters in Nairobi, remote from the UN’s more powerful organisations, also has not helped.[3]
Arguably, even more significant than the UNEP’s difficulty in effectively coordinating activities within the UN system on the environmental dimension of sustainable development are the enormous obstacles to what I have referred to as external environmental integration —the greening of non-environmental institutions within that system. To begin with, the UNEP’s coordination role was defined solely in terms of the environmental dimension, so formally it had no mandate or role in greening institutions like the WTO and the UNDP, and their role in promoting economic development, trade, and investment. As Ruggie has noted, the UN system has been built as a structure of largely independent organisational silos that pursue their own interests.[4] This applies even more to the Bretton Woods Institutions (the IMF and the World Bank), formally independent of the UN system.
Virtually all the most powerful and well-resourced international institutions, within and outside the UN system, have been created to promote economic growth and development. They have opposed more effective environmental coordination that may impinge on their mandates and power, which have remained untouched by the UNEP.[5] Whatever recognition these institutions (such as the World Bank and the WTO) have given to environmental matters has stemmed from their non-environmental mandates and interests, as well as concerns about upholding their legitimacy in the face of rising environmental pressures, critique, and demands. Their environmental integration efforts have been little more than ‘greenwashing’ exercises, occurring without guidance from the UNEP or any other overarching environmental institutional framework. Rather than adapting non-environmental institutions to environmental imperatives and goals, these efforts are usually undertaken under the slogan of “balancing” environmental, social, and economic concerns, and within institutional frameworks heavily tilted towards the latter.[6]
A World Environment Organisation (WEO)?
It is no wonder that many calls have been made to strengthen the UNEP or replace it with a more powerful organisation like the World Environment Organisation (WEO). Views differ on whether it is desirable, possible, or even necessary to create a new and more powerful global environmental organisation or whether the UNEP should and can be strengthened to make it more effective. While advocates of creating a new organisation emphasise the need for a powerful environmental institution as a counterweight to the WTO and other IOs that promote economic and development interests,[7] others argue that the UNEP can be made more effective by allocating it more (secure) resources and by beefing up its formal mandate.[8] Moreover, most analysts agree that the political reality makes it unlikely that the creation of a much stronger and independent environmental organisation will be supported by the major powers, and even by most low-income countries, which are afraid that strengthening environmental power will put more hurdles in place to their development. Changing the name of the UNEP to WEO does not address the underlying causes of the relative weakness of the world’s top environmental agencies, which lie in weak political support for strong international environmental policies on the part of most governments.[9]
Apart from identifying the political-economic obstacles to creating a more powerful global environmental organisation, one must carefully consider what role and powers such an agency would need to be equipped with to effectively advance environmental integration. As Ivanova rightly points out, this requires paying attention to “function before determining form”, and assessing what is needed for – and what stands in the way of – fulfilling these functions.[10] She argues that, in 1972, there were good reasons for giving the UNEP the institutional form that it got, based on its functions as an agenda-setter and initiator, a coordinator of environmental programmes and their implementation, and as a reviewer of the state of the environment and the effectiveness of programmes. It was deliberately designed to be a small and nimble agency, rather than a large bureaucratic organisation, combining the environmental roles and activities undertaken by other UN institutions. Hence, if the organisation’s original role is still valid, it seems more appropriate to strengthen the agency by addressing the root causes that have hampered it from playing that role effectively, rather than making it a standalone or specialist organisation. Ivanova identifies these main factors as insufficient funding and the location of the UNEP headquarters (in Nairobi), which affected the organisation’s ability to effectively fulfil its functions.
There is much to be said for not creating a big, standalone, specialist environment agency with heavy (on-the-ground) implementation responsibilities. Given the virtually all-encompassing nature of the environment and the multitude of environmental issues, such an organisation could easily become a bureaucratic monster that would be virtually impossible to manage. Equally problematic is the presumption that it would somehow know best how to implement policies and programmes on the ground, notwithstanding the enormous contextual differences between countries, regions, and localities. Rather than getting bogged down in implementation and operational matters, it would be more appropriate for a global environmental organisation to focus on institutional and policy frameworks that guide and oversee the integration of global environmental imperatives. The foremost priority at the global level is to green the dominant non-environmental institutions (rules and organisations), notably those in the financial-economic, trade, investment and development areas, and the policy paradigms with which they are intertwined. For a global environmental organisation to fulfil this task, more is needed than simply allocating more funding to the UNEP and relocating it to New York or Geneva. Such a task goes beyond awareness-raising, communication, persuasion, and coordination. As noted above, most International Organisations regard demands for environmental protection as a nuisance or threat. These organisations, euphemistically stated, are rather unenthusiastic about being coordinated by a global environmental agency, let alone having their mandates subordinated to environmental imperatives. Breaking through these barriers requires more than creating a specialist IO focused on coordinating the environmental dimension of sustainable development. It will require building a much more powerful organisation than other environmental and non-environmental IOs. To be effective, it would need to be at the apex of the UN bureaucracy based on recognition of the lexical priority of environmental protection. It would make sense to label it the Global Sustainability Organisation, reflecting the broad nature of its task. Most environmental analysts appear to be blinded by political pragmatism in their thinking about institutional change at the global level. They are either unable or unwilling to state what is needed to address the environmental challenge more effectively at that level, perhaps out of fear of being accused of political naivety or idealism. However, the reality of environmental failure requires abandoning the practice of wrapping ideas into political reality packaging. It demands spelling out the critical changes needed to bring the root causes of environmental destruction under control.
References
[1] Ivanova, Maria (2009), “UNEP as Anchor Organisation for the Global Environment”, in F. Biermann and B. Siebenhüner (eds.), International Organisations in Global Environmental Governance. New York: Routledge, 152-173; Najam, Adil (2003), “The Case against a New International Environmental Organisation”, Governance, Vol . 9, 367-384.
[2] Ivanova, Maria, “UNEP as Anchor Organization for the Global Environment”; Tarakofsky, Richard G. (2005), “Strengthening International Environmental Governance by Strengthening UNEP”, in B. Chambers and J. F. Green (eds.), Reforming International Environmental Governance: From Institutional Limits to Innovative Reforms. Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press, 66-92.
[3] Chambers, Bradnee (2005), “From Environmental to Sustainable Development Governance: Thirty Years of Coordination within the United Nations”, in B. Chambers and J. Green (eds.), Reforming International Environmental Governance: From Institutional Limits to Innovative Reforms, 13-39; Ivanova, Maria, “UNEP as Anchor Organisation for the Global Environment”; Bauer, Steffen (2013), “Strengthening the United Nations”, in The Handbook of Global Climate and Environment Policy. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 320-338.
[4] Ruggie, John Gerard (2003), “The United Nations and Globalization: Patterns and Limits of Institutional Adaptation”, Global Governance, Vol. 9, No.3, pp.301-320.
[5] Henry, Reg (1996), “Adapting United Nations Agencies for Agenda 21: Programme Coordination and Organisational Reform”, Environmental Politics, Vol . 5, No.1, 1-24; Bauer, Steffen, “Strengthening the United Nations”.
[6] Guilhot, Nicolas (2000), “Repackaging the World Bank. Where Economics Meets Politics”, Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), October, 10-11; Rich, Bruce (1994), Mortgaging the Earth. The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development. Boston: Beacon Press; Rich, Bruce (2013), Foreclosing the Future. The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction. Washington, DC: Island Press; Eckersley, Robyn (2004), “The Big Chill: The WTO and Multilateral Environmental Agreements”, Global Environmental Politics, Vol.4, No.2, pp.24-50; Zelli, Fariborz (2007), “The World Trade Organization: Free Trade and Its Environmental Impacts”, in K. V. Thai, et al. (eds.), Handbook of Globalization and the Environment. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 177-216; Sampson, Gary P. (2005), “The World Trade Organization and Global Environmental Governance”, in W. B. Chambers and J. Green (eds.), Reforming International Environmental Governance: From Institutional Limits to Innovative Reforms. Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press,124-149.
[7] Biermann, Frank (2000), “The Case for a World Environment Organization”, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Vol.42, No.9, 22-31; Chambers, Bradnee, “From Environmental to Sustainable Development Governance: Thirty Years of Coordination within the United Nations”; Charnovitz, Steve (2005), “A World Environment Organization”, in W. B. Chambers and J. F. Green (eds.), Reforming International Environmental Governance: From Institutional Limits to Innovative Reforms. Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press, 93-123.
[8] Najam, Adil (2003), “The Case against a New International Environmental Organisation”, Governance, Vol.9, pp.367-384; Young, Oran R. (2008), “The Architecture of Global Environmental Governance: Bringing Science to Bear on Policy”, Global Environmental Politics, Vol.8, No.1, 14-32.
[9] Najam, Adil (2003), “The Case against a New International Environmental Organisation”.
[10] Ivanova, Maria, “UNEP as Anchor Organization for the Global Environment”; Ivanova, Maria (2012), “Institutional Design and UNEP Reform: Historical Insights on Form, Function and Financing”, International Affairs, Vol. 88, No.3, 565-584.