In areas of environmental interest to Australia, the period between 1990 and 1995 was an active one internationally. It saw Antarctica formally protected from mining or oil drilling; enhancement of global cooperation to protect the ozone layer; a substantial rise in international, including regional, interest in global climate change; and, despite (perhaps, given the adverse international reaction, because of) the renewal of nuclear testing, particularly by France in the Pacific, the development of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, on which Australia has put great emphasis. The five years also encompassed a second global environment conference, the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (the first, the UN Conference on the Human Environment, was held in Stockholm in 1972). The 1992 Rio conference can be seen in one sense as having been a valuable means of creating a greater awareness of the issues and increasing substantially the international machinery for dealing with co-operation in the environment field as well as spawning a variety of international conventions to which Australia adhered.

This chapter focuses on the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Rio “Earth Summit.” It shows how, despite incentives to address institutional dysfunction and mounting global environmental problems by institutionalizing sustainable development within the United Nations system, divergent expectations persisted until momentum built toward UNCED. The Rio conference, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm conference, emerged as a Temporal Focal Point in United Nations environmental politics. Convergent expectations triggered a significant increase in political and analytical investments in change processes from state and non-state actors, leading to a transformation of the informational and political context. These investments produced significant institutional change, including the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the institutionalization of the World Bank-operated Global Environment Facility. States also launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, a set of Forest Principles, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.