The Introduction sets the context for the book and outlines the importance of its focus on sustainable development in international law. It offers background details and speaks to the inspiration for this book. These motivations derive from my professional experiences and research on international and environmental law in Africa and elsewhere. These experiences shaped my reflections on the history, the present state, and the future of the legal dimensions of the concept of sustainable development within international law.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the state of United Nations environmental cooperation between 1963 and 1972, focusing extensively on the 1972 “Stockholm conference.” It shows how a gradual deterioration of the global environment since the Industrial Revolution produced growing incentives to increase the level of international cooperation in global environmental politics. These incentives lay unrealized for more than a decade, however, until momentum gathered in the lead-up to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The Stockholm conference, which became a landmark event, produced substantial institutional change, including a Declaration, Action Plan, and ultimately the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The conference, which was originally planned as a largely technical affair, gathered a momentum that was unanticipated by all when it was initially proposed. This momentum is explained by the emergence of a Temporal Focal Point triggered by a series of visible environmental incidents that highlighted long-standing institutional suboptimality. The Stockholm Temporal Focal Point was crystallized by an entrepreneurial conference secretariat led by Maurice Strong.

Chapter 5 examines the rebuilding of the global environmental movement after the Second World War. Environmental protection did not become one of the core objectives of the newly created United Nations. It was not until the ‘environmental revolution’ of the 1960s, which transformed environmentalism from an elite concern into a mass movement with wider electoral consequences for governments, that international society began to accept environmental stewardship as a new primary institution. Within a short space of time, from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, leading industrialised economies established environmental protection first as a comprehensive domestic duty of the state and then as a general responsibility for international society. The 1972 Stockholm conference, the first UN conference on the environment, became the equivalent of a ‘constitutional moment’ in the greening of the international normative order. This chapter traces the process through which world society actors successfully transmitted environmentalism into international society, with leading powers such as the United States providing critical leadership along the way.

In a verse reflecting the (colonial) attitudes of his time, Kipling once wrote, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West; and never the twain shall meet’.Although written in 1889, the underlying sentiment might equally describe the bipolar geopolitics prevalent at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, by the time of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to suppress intended liberal reforms, to many, the ideological chasm between the Eastern and Western blocs appeared insurmountable. Notwithstanding these divisions, key political leaders (particularly in Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union) sought strategies to promote greater stability and predictability in international affairs. To this end, they pursued more cooperative East–West relations, recognising that collaboration on environmental issues might help to defuse Cold War tensions. The apparently non-political nature, and seeming objectivity, of environmental issues contributed to their becoming, by 1975, a central pillar of détente between the East and the West.