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Before UNEP: who was in charge of the global environment? The struggle for institutional responsibility 1968–72

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

Iris Borowy
Iris Borowy*
Affiliation:
Center for the History of Global Development, College of Liberal Arts, Shanghai University, China
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: borowyiris@i.shu.edu.cn
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Abstract

Many of the international technical agencies formed after 1945 addressed environmental topics within their specific fields of work. By the late 1960s, a growing awareness of pollution and an emerging environmental movement in Western countries led to a perceived need for more coordinated and institutionalized international cooperation on the environment. Before the landmark United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, and the subsequent creation of the UN Environment Programme, several organizations competed for recognition as principal reference organizations for environmental matters. This article analyses the combination of cooperation and rivalry, involving in particular the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE). Among other initiatives, the OECD became the first international organization to establish a permanent committee specifically dedicated to environmental issues and the ECE organized a Conference on Environmental Problems, held in Prague in 1971. Both called for a critical review of the dominant growth-centred economic model. Their analysis adds a neglected dimension to the origins of today’s international structure of environmental cooperation as well as to the long-term evolution of economic environmental thinking.

Keywords

environmentinternational organizationsNATOOECDUnited Nations
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 87 - 106
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this Journal for very helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.

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