Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Nations system. They have accredited the widest range of nonstate
actors, including local and regional organizations; they have structured
dialogs, which are designed to bring this diversity of participants into
conversation with each other; and they have partnership fairs that
encourage and feature cross-sectoral cooperation. The breadth of sus-
tainable development has produced an impressive array of working
models, such as beach and hotel certifi cation programs, multistakeholder
reviews of voluntary industry initiatives, indigenous people's tribunals,
and agricultural subsidy reviews, to name just a few. In recent years, I
have witnessed a narrowing of public participation at the CSD; however,
I suspect this narrowing is equally the result of NGOs and other nonstate
actors divesting from this institution, rather than from government
attempts to limit access. One outcome of understanding how institutions
compare in these regards would be for NGOs and social movement
groups to invest their scarce resources in the venue most amenable to
change. Given that many NGOs in the global South in particular lack
suffi cient resources to participate in numerous international meetings,
this strategy might increase the effectiveness of a group's interventions.
On the other hand, this comparison suggests that an effective movement-
wide strategy might be loosely designed to target each institution in ways
that emphasize the specifi c opportunities it affords. This approach is
already pursued by some NGOs active at the UNCSD, as illustrated by
the following comment made to me during a recent interview: “We look
at the CSD as the workshop where we create consensus on the language
of sustainable development. Once we have the language, then we can
lobby for the implementation of that language in other venues of the
United Nations, but without the language we cannot make progress on
environmental rights or environmental justice.”
This comment also highlights a possible division of labor that exists
not only between these specifi c institutions but between the broad cat-
egories of international institutions they represent. Generally speaking,
soft-law institutions like the UNCSD serve as centers for the negotiation
of global norms of appropriate nation-state behavior (Boli and Thomas
1997; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Emadi-Coffi n 2002); such norms
then fi nd specifi city and forcefulness in treaty organizations like the
UNFCCC. In fact, my interview participants confi rm that these two
organizations in particular are seen by some NGOs to work in tandem
in the climate policy arena: “Just now, groups are returning to CSD—
some who left after Jo'burg [Johannesburg]—because they are concerned
about climate change. They said, okay, let's give this another try and see
