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aid more generally.
23
That, according to Bohlen, was “the whole concept of
sustainable development.”
24
If the overall quantity of financial resources allocated for sustainable
development presented a problem for the developing world, so too did the
distribution of those resources. In retooling existing aid to meet the objec-
tives of Agenda 21, the State Department proposed a new form of oversight
for the domestic economic affairs of developing nations. This presented a
problem of sovereignty, as the United States and the United Nations— still
dominated by the industrialized world— leveraged capital in order to estab-
lish priorities over which local populations had little say.
The Bush administration's support for the Global Environmental Facil-
ity (GEF) as the primary funding mechanism for implementing UNCED
conclusions compounded this problem of sovereignty. Established in 1991
as a joint venture between the World Bank, UNEP, and the U.N. Develop-
ment Programme, the GEF focused on funding programs dealing with cli-
mate change, ozone depletion, biodiversity loss, and problems of the ocean
environment. The GEF continued to target the developing world, but the
“global” problems it proposed to address through sustainable development
practices in the developing world were, to a large extent, the problems of
greatest interest to the developed world, and those for which industrialized
nations bore the largest historical responsibility. Thus, under the banner of
the “global,” the GEF would sacrifice funding for local sustainability mea-
sures— those mandated by Agenda 21, which often had major local-level
benefits— in favor of programs that ultimately served the environmental
interests of the developed world. Not surprisingly, developing nations
cried foul.
25
Bohlen was not insensitive to developing-world complaints, but the
Bush administration's approach to UNCED— and to sustainable devel-
opment more broadly— reflected limitations imposed by a tangled web of
domestic politics, American foreign policy, and international relations.
U.S. participation in and contribution to the United Nations and its pro-
grams had been a topic of controversy since the founding of that organiza-
tion in San Francisco in the fall of 1945. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
U.S. funding for U.N. programs, especially those that did not involve
security, became a lightning-rod for criticism, especially from a subsection
of American conservatives. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Carter
administration's more cooperative “one world” approach to the United
