UNEP at 50

A little while back Environmental Politics carried a review by Katarina Eckerberg of The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty by Maria Ivanova (MIT Press, 2021). From the review:

UNEP’s mission was to assess the state of the environment and to inform, inspire, empower, and catalyse the UN system in environmental affairs. But why has progress been so slow? There is urgent need to critically assess what UNEP has achieved – and not – in the past 50 years, to investigate why it has yet not become sufficiently powerful in the struggle for a more sustainable world, and what can be done to improve this.

Maria Ivanova’s book helps to understand exactly those issues. It delivers profound knowledge about the functioning of international relations, politics, and administration in practice, by revealing how UNEP’s successes, crises, and turning points have been shaped by both politics, geography, and individuals within and beyond UNEP itself. The book addresses a concern at the core of international environmental politics, focusing on the history and performance of the world’s leading global environmental authority over 50 years.

Its theoretical contribution lies foremost in the thick narratives of the development of our major international environmental conventions – including reversing the depletion of the ozone layer, regional seas pollution, chemicals and waste, climate change, as well as tackling land degradation, and the loss of biodiversity and forests. By applying the concepts of capacity, connectivity, and credibility as elements of performance she guides us through both the empirical analysis and the potential ways forward. Capacity here refers to the people and resources, connectivity to infrastructure and representation, and credibility to authority and legitimacy of the institution.

*****

[Ivanova] discusses how the value-laden tensions between political agendas of environment and development continue to affect the propensity to proceed unitedly across East and West, North and South despite the urgency of coordinated and collective action. UNEP was originally created to serve as the leading global authority to set the global environmental agenda, and to inform, inspire and empower countries and the UN system to catalyse environmental cooperation. It was thus designed mainly to measure, envision, and craft a programme rather than carry it out. However, the analysis shows how UNEP has gradually moved towards a more operational role on the ground due to targeted technical and economic support. UNEP has been pushed in that direction by way of shrinking general support while increasing support from member states in line with donor priorities.

Still, UNEP has spurred concerted achievement on many issues, not least through its leadership in creating shared risk perception between scientists, governments, and citizens, with the ozone depletion issue in the Montreal Protocol as the most successfully implemented convention so far. UNEP has played a core role in environmental assessment and knowledge management, thus providing the scientific foundation for and societal rationale for political dialogue. Transportation technologies, however, have often prevented representatives from developing countries making their voices heard, something that might now be changing due to new communication technologies.