Adil Najam on “Global Environmental Governance”

Partner Video

August, 2008

This is a partner video from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). Further details on Prof. Najam’s related work with IISD can be found here.

There have been lots and lots of proposed schemes and solutions to the global environmental governance “problem.” These range from the reform of UNEP to the creation of a World or UN Environment Organization. They involve “clustering” some of the secretariats by specialty, or even merging some or all of them. The Danish Government approached IISD and asked if we could help make some sense out of this debate, to summarize the options and to make some recommendations for progress.

This collaboration led to the publishing of Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda, which identifies a number of practical steps that can foster a more efficient and effective environmental regime, making better use of the resources available and designed in a way that will be more helpful to the implementation of international environmental agreements for developing as well as developed countries. The objective of the publication was to:

(a) analyze past and current efforts at GEG reform;

(b) outline a practical overall direction for rationalized GEG in a bottom-up reform of the international environmental governance system; and

(c) propose a set of realistic and desirable steps to achieve meaningful reform.

Under the second phase of IISD’s GEG work we aim to advance the ideas that came out of GEG manuscript by disseminating these ideas widely and triggering conversations about them amongst relevant stakeholders, and developing a selected set of key ideas into more detailed and in-depth proposals, with a particular focus on practical implementability.

About the Speaker

Prof. Adil Najam is the Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee Professor of Global Public Policy at Boston University. He is also a Professor at Boston University’s Department of International Relations and also at the Department of Geography and Environment.