Using the Full Mandate: Strengthening the Role of Peace and Human Rights in the UN’s Approach to Global Environmental Governance

May 29, 2015
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Ken Conca is professor of international relations in the School of International Service at American University. His teaching and research focus on global environmental governance, water politics and policy, and environment, conflict and peacebuilding. He is the author/editor of several books, including Governing Water, Environmental Peacemaking, Confronting Consumption, The Crisis of Global Environmental Governance, The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, and the forthcoming An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global Environmental Governance (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Effective responses to global environmental problems require a strong role for the United Nations. For all its flaws, the UN remains the only plausible forum for engaging broadly global challenges. It is the only venue in which a sufficiently wide range of voices may be heard as we seek to forge a robust consensus on difficult environmental problems. It has been the most important catalyst for negotiating international environmental agreements among nations, and the most important focal point for disseminating new ideas and practices for better environmental stewardship. Indeed, the most important environmental accomplishments of the past forty years—the rise of global environmental awareness, the birth of key ideas such as sustainability, and negotiation of several important treaties for environmental protection—all bear the UN stamp in one way or another.