World Environment Organization: Difference between revisions

There is a global agreement for a reform of the political environmental system- but what this reform should look like there Rechkemmer distinguishes about four theoretical attempts (cf. 2004, p. 21). In the following text the approaches will be characterized and the reform processes of the last few years will be presented.

The main idea of the global-governance-Approach is that environmental policy is no longer a question what could be answered by (national) policy itself or what is concentrated on one policy field. It highlights the rising importance of nongovernmental actors as players in filed of the global environmental policy: NGOs, transnational cooperation, trade unions and the epistemic community are the most prominent actors amongst them. Therefore a WEO must integrate and participate these other actors. In the reality of the reform-process this model does not play an important role- merely the scientific model of a World Environmental and Development Organization by Biermann and Simonis presented later in the text includes this approach.  

Since Rio 1992 there is the idea of the integration of social, economical and ecological attempts. Furthermore the worldwide power is situated in the economical entities like WTO, World Bank and IWF. Because of these two aspects the interest of this approach is to integrate the environmental policy into these other organizations- “greening WTO”. It is important to separate environmental issues no longer because it is already a cross-section-task. With a single environmental organization there would be a further separation of environmental issues, moreover it would be not as powerful as other economical organizations are. Therefore a systematic integration of environmental issues into these organizations is needed. As the Global-Governance-Approach the Mainstream-Approach does not play a considerable role in the reform-process either. It has been pushed only by several NGOs and academics over the past few years.

The aim of this approach is to strengthen and to consolidate the UNEP as an already existing “global player” in the field of the environment. Therefore different changes need to be made: the financial system should be changed from a trust-fund-principle to a core budget sum;  the personal capacities should be increased and a universal membership of all UN-members should be installed. To reach higher compliance and enforcement power UNEP’s ability to provide firm political guidance has to be improved by raising the profile of environmental concerns to ministerial levels. The cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) should be intensified and through a conversion of the inner organizational structures and management the assertiveness should increase (cf. Elliott, 2004, p. 105). This model could be colloquial called as “pimp UNEP”, represents the position of the UNEP itself and nations for example China and India – this approach has mainly characterized the reform-process of the last 10 years.  

In 1998 the Secretary-General appointed a Task Force on Environment and Human Settlements, chaired by UNEP Executive Director Klaus Töpfer because “the institutional fragmentation and loss of policy coherence […] had resulted in a loss of effectiveness in the world of the UN in the area of environment and human settlements” (cf. Elliott, 2004, p. 103). This conclusion was assumed by the General Assembly and a Global Ministerial Environmental Forum (GMEF) was tied to UNEP. The same resolution approved the Secretary-General’s proposal for an Environmental Management Group (EMG) (cf. Elliott, 2004, p. 104). Since then different working groups are acting, conferences were held, Plants of implementation were made and very often it the importance of strengthening UNEP was stressed- but nothing really happened. Still- this is approach is probably the most realistic proposal.