This chapter focuses on the environmental diplomacy surrounding the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the “Brundtland Commission.” This process popularized the concept of sustainable development. The chapter begins by detailing the substantial changes seen in international environmental conditions through the mid-1980s, brought about largely by the Third World Debt crisis. These shifts created a rapidly deteriorating global environmental context and necessitated significant changes in institutional arrangements. The need for institutional change was a central finding of the important 1987 “Brundtland report,” titled Our Common Future. The Brundtland Commission highlighted a rapid deterioration in the world environment and underlined the need for major institutional change. Some actors sought to realize such change at the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, when the report and its call for action were presented to world leaders. Coordination was hindered, however, by divergent expectations and the absence of a Temporal Focal Point. While states were incentivized to cooperate rapidly to address problems in global environmental governance, the institutional status quo prevailed.

Through an exploration of the international career of Norway’s former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, this chapter examines the emergence of a style of internationalism that we might call “pragmatarianism.” As a political style it can be compared to the domestic political styles of Hofstadter’s (1964) account of the paranoid style in US domestic politics. The pragmatarian style, by contrast, belongs more properly on the political (social democratic) left. In place of treason as the favored enemy motif, one finds instead the moral vacillation and ignorance of mankind at large: waiting to be fixed by the technocrats and the doyens of market signaling. The chapter explores the emergence, achievements, and tensions within this political style through an examination of Brundtland’s leadership of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1983–1987) and the World Health Organisation (1998–2003). It concludes with some reflections on the relationship between pragmatism and utopianism in the ongoing development of the Nordic humanitarian brand more broadly.

The most dramatic environmental debate in Norway in the late 1970s was whether to build a hydroelectric dam at the Alta-Kautokeino River. It was a debate the Deep Ecologists lost with a Supreme Court verdict in 1982. The defeat meant an end to Deep Ecology as a movement and an intellectual endeavor in Norway as they became increasingly fundamentalist and thus politically irrelevant. However, at the same time they enjoyed their first international breakthrough in North America, thanks to the environmental organization Earth First! The end of the Cold War in 1989 also meant a turn towards global climatological perspectives. Propelled by the sentiment that capitalism had won over communism, Gro Harlem Brundtland would, as Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, frame the solution to climate change in cost–benefit terms, rather than in socialist terms. Climate change problems were to be solved by treading carbon dioxide equivalent quotas and by buying clean development mechanism certificates. Norway would be an active buyer in these markets, making sure Norway would look like a virtuous “pioneer country” to its own citizens and the world.