Earth Summit north and south: Building a safe house in the winds of change

Abstract

Historically, northern governments prefer a model of international environmental regulation based on legally binding international Conventions, treating direct UN involvement warily. UNCED however saw a reshaping of old southern objections to international regulation in favour of a positive alternative strategy combining ‘soft law’, alternative and community based forms of action, the participation of nongovernment actors at national and international levels, and voluntary reporting. This is the strategy embodied in Agenda 21 and in the Commission on Sustainable Development, which monitors its implementation. At Rio, this strategy was particularly attractive to the South's middle sized newly industrializing powers, interested in using the UN to set limits to the competitive pressure of different northern based trading blocs. It was also acceptable to countries in Africa and small island states faced with a combination of economic threats and the prospect of climate change. At the Commission, however, governments and their new allies are finding the change harder to implement in practice than it was to agree in theory. The result is that the old model of negotiations designed to produce an ever increasing number of barely enforceable new international environmental agreements, has been rearing its head within the Commission, even as the existing Convention on Climate Change threatens to fail to provide an answer to the problems of reducing northern energy consumption.