Abstract
The place of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in international governance seems nowhere more securely established than in the field of environmental action.1 Within the United Nations system, NGOs have been recognized as essential contributors to environmental protection for well over a decade. The 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, urged governments ‘to recognise and extend NGOs’ right to know, and have access to information on the environment and natural resources; their right to be consulted and to participate in decision-making on activities likely to have a significant effect on the environment; and their right to legal remedies and redress when their health or environment may be seriously affected.’2 The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro confirmed by numbers alone that NGOs had taken their place beside states and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), in particular, those of the United Nations (UN) system, as rightful participants in environmental management. The Global Forum for NGOs held concurrently with the official Earth Summit drew representatives from some 7,000 organizations, outnumbering governments present by about one hundred to one.3 More important, the intense preparatory activity in the non-governmental sector leading up to and through the Rio conference showed that environmental NGOs had developed extensive skills in scientific and technical exchange, policy-making and policy-implementation, which supplemented their more traditional roles in campaigning, activism and ideological consciousness raising.4
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Notes
See Peter Sand, Lessons Learned in Global Environmental Governance (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 1990);
Kevin Stairs and Peter Taylor, ‘Non-governmental organizations and the legal protection of the oceans: a case study’, in Andrew Hurrell and Benedict Kingsbury (eds), The International Politics of the Environment (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 110–41;
and Laurence Susskind, Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 328.
See Marvin S. Soroos, ‘From Stockholm to Rio and beyond: the evolution of global environmental governance’, in Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft (eds), Environmental Policy in the 1990s, 3rd edn (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997).
Steven Yearley, Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization (London: Sage, 1996).
See A Stairs and A Taylor, ‘Non-governmental organizations’; and Jessica T. Mathews, ‘Power shift’, Foreign Affairs, 76 (1), 1997, pp. 50–66.
Andrew Jamison et al., The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
Peter Uvin, ‘Scaling up the grassroots and scaling down the summit: the relations between Third World nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations’, Third World Quarterly, 16 (3), 1995, pp. 495–512.
See Peter M. Haas, Saving the Mediterranean: The Politics of International Environmental Cooperation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Sand, Lessons Learned, p. 29.
Haas, Saving the Mediterranean; Stairs and Taylor, ‘Non-governmental organizations’. See also Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohand, and Marc A. Levy (eds), Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); and Susskind, Environmental Diplomacy.
See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
See Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1982);
Sheila Jasanoff, Risk Management and Political Culture (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1986); and Stairs and Taylor, ‘Non-governmental organizations’.
See Donald A. Schön and Martin Rein, Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
and Sharachchandra Lele and Richard Norgaard, ‘Sustainability and the scientist’s burden’, Conservation Biology, 10 (2), 1995, pp. 354–65.
See Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
See Brian Wynne, Risk Management and Hazardous Wastes: Implementation and the Dialectics of Credibility (Berlin: Springer, 1987);
and Wynne, ‘Misunderstood misunderstandings: social identities and the public uptake of science’, in Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne (eds), Misunderstanding Science? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
See Michael Thompson, M. Warburton, and T. Hatley Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale (London: Ethnographica, 1986), pp. 46–7.
See Ravi S. Rajan, ‘Rehabilitation and voluntarism in Bhopal’, Lokayan Bulletin, 6 (1/2), 1988, pp. 3–31;
and C. Sathyamala, ‘The medical profession and the Bhopal tragedy’, Lokayan Bulletin, 6 (1/2), 1988, pp. 33–56;
Sheila Jasanoff, Learning from Disaster: Risk Management After Bhopal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
See, for example, Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976).
See Richard E. Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy; New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 166.
See Dean E. Mann, ‘Environmental learning in a decentralized world’, Journal of International Affairs, 44, 1991, pp. 301–37;
Martin Jachtenfuchs and Michael Huber, ‘Institutional learning in the European Community: the response to the greenhouse effect’, in J. D. Liefferink, P. D. Lave and A. P. J. Nol (eds), European Integration and Environmental Policy (London: Belhaven Press, 1993);
Haas et al., Institutions for the Earth; and Peter M. Haas and Ernst B. Haas, ‘Learning to learn: improving international governance’, Global Governance, 1 (3), 1995, pp. 255–85.
See Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing things together’, in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990);
and Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Luther Gerlach, ‘Thinking globally, acting locally’, Evaluation Review, 15 (1), 1991, pp. 120–48.
See Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). This book, which has been described as a sociological manifesto for the German Green movement, sold hundreds of thousands copies when it was first published, showing that it had struck a deeply responsive chord among German citizens.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991).
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© 1998 Third World Quarterly and Academic Council on the United Nations System
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Jasanoff, S. (1998). NGOs and the Environment: from Knowledge to Action. In: Weiss, T.G. (eds) Beyond UN Subcontracting. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26263-2_10
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