An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global Environmental Governance

Ken Conca, the author of An Unfinished Foundation, acknowledges that his writing to date has been generally informed by three aspects: being sceptical about formal political processes, looking beyond the state for institutional politics, and believing that good things happen when marginalized actors can operate in political processes. He therefore asserts that this book is in many ways out of his ordinary scope, as he discusses the “most formal and conventional of international institutions, the United Nations” (page x). Nevertheless it is Conca’s very ability to think outside the box that may make this book useful.

Built upon “four mandate areas: peace and security, development, international law, and human rights” (page 7), Conca states that the UN’s core problem of environmental governance is that it stands upon only two of these four legs. He claims that with an unbalanced reliance and focus on development and international law to address environmental problems, the UN “fails to understand or act on environmental problems as matters of peace and international security, or as a core component of human rights” (page 6). This not only inhibits the UN’s efforts to address these problems, he argues, but concomitantly makes it harder to realize peace and human rights. In response to the UN’s skewed approach to environmental action, Conca urges for a conceptual revolution.

Comprised of six chapters, Conca leads us through the journey of how the UN has developed, specifically how the environmental aspect has evolved, and what opportunities exist for promoting better global environmental governance within it. In Chapter 1 he outlines three questions that are at the heart of his book: (1) How did we get to this point? (2) What are the consequences of basing UN environmental initiatives on only two of the four pillars in the UN Charter? (3) What can be done to allow the UN to make more effective progress on environmental challenges and incorporate the full scope of its mandate?

Following on, Chapter 2 traces how the environment emerged on the UN’s agenda. In particular it exposes “the differential development of environmental activities” across the UN’s four-part mandate and how they culminated in the dominance of the legal approach by 1992 (page 30).

In Chapter 3, Conca assesses the performance of the UN’s law-and-development paradigm of global environmental governance, and argues for a greater emphasis on peace and human rights as an important corrective. Building on this, Chapter 4 “examines the evolving relationship between human rights and the environment within the UN system” and explores the opportunities being made available through dynamic change in the UN human rights apparatus (page 120).

Chapter 5 then focuses on the relationship between environment and peace and security in the UN, After a brief outline of existing barriers, it discusses the opportunities to link peace and environment through a post-Cold War ‘environmental security’ agenda.

To conclude, Chapter 6 suggests that the UN approach to global environmental governance has arrived at a juncture of two roads: the first is a well-paved two-lane highway (of law and development); the second a less-defined dirt track (linking the environment also to areas of human rights and peace and security). Above all, to address current challenges of “political impasse, drift, and failed imagination” (page 217), Conca emphasizes that the UN needs to draw upon the full scope of its mandate.

Book note prepared by Hannah Keren Lee