Critic of U.N. Environmental Program Offers Plan for Its Reform
by Alan Bisbort - Environment Yale, Spring 2006
In 2002, Klaus Toepfer, then executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said, “The state of the environment tells us whether our policies and programs are effective.” The state of the world’s environment, by most measures, is in decline – climate change is intensifying, species are disappearing at an accelerated pace, fish stocks are dwindling, coral reefs are suffocating, and so on. Clearly, policies and programs are not working – at UNEP and elsewhere.
Maria Ivanova ’99, Ph.D. ’06, director of the Global Environmental Governance Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and an assistant professor at The College of William and Mary, has placed a wake-up call to the United Nations (U.N.) to apprise it of this disconnect from reality. Ivanova prepared an analysis in the form of a report called “Can the Anchor Hold? Rethinking the United Nations Environment Programme for the 21st Century,” which was officially released at the World Summit in New York in September 2005.
The full report is available at www.yale.edu/gegproject.
While stewardship of the global environment is a Herculean task to place on any institution’s shoulders, UNEP, Ivanova argues, is uniquely positioned to carry it. Created in 1972, it was meant to be “a central coordinating mechanism in the United Nations to provide political and conceptual leadership, to assess the state of the global environment and to contemplate methods of avoiding or reducing global environmental risk and of working out joint norms.”
UNEP is an “anchor institution” for the global environment. Anchor institutions, said Ivanova, have four roles: to oversee the monitoring, assessing and reporting on their particular issue; to set agendas for standards and guidelines; to develop institutional capacity to address existing and emerging problems; and to develop new ideas. Though they aren’t alone in working on global issues, anchors are the glue that holds such efforts together. On that score, UNEP, which began with such promise, has lost its grip.
“The key thing is that UNEP, created in 1972, has never been systematically reviewed externally,” said Ivanova. “We cannot know how to improve unless we know where we are and how we got there.”
The report grew out of an F&ES class that Ivanova co-taught in the Fall of 2004 with Gordon Geballe, Ph.D. ’81, associate dean for student and alumni affairs, and Mohamed El-Ashry, founder and former CEO of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a principal funding source for developing countries to implement environmentalprojects with global impacts. The class, “International Environmental Organizations: UNEP and Global Governance,” was the third in a series led by Geballe that takes students to an international conference of significance. (See “Yale Delegation Addresses World’s Environment Ministers,” Spring 2005) Past classes have gone to Durban, South Africa, for the Fifth World Parks Congress and Bangkok, Thailand, for the World Conservation Congress.
“This was probably one of the most challenging classes at F&ES, and it shows the school’s commitment to the global environment,” said Ivanova. “When we advertised the class, so many students showed up that they had to fill out applications, submit CVs and go through an interview. It was supposed to be a seminar class with 15 students, but everyone was so good, we accepted 26.
“The students knew going in that they would be taking two classes in one. One was to learn about global environmental governance, and the other was to perform an objective assessment of an organization located 7,000 miles away, something that had never been done before. It was difficult, and the students did an excellent job.”
Experts in the field concur with Ivanova’s assessment. Jakob Stroem, deputy director of the Department for Global Development in the Swedish Foreign Ministry, said, “[The report] argues effectively for a rational approach to strengthening UNEP. ... This represents the best available introduction to UNEP’s problems and possibilities.” Alex Shakow, former director of external affairs at the World Bank, said Ivanova and colleagues did a “terrific job.” And Calestous Juma, professor of the practice of international development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and former head of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said, “I like this report very much. Its diagnosis is to the point.”
Ivanova gives UNEP its due for having facilitated important multinational agreements like the Convention on Migratory Species, the Montreal Protocol and conventions on biological diversity, climate change, desertification and international trade in endangered species. She also praises its Global Environment Outlook, the scientific arm of UNEP, for identifying emerging issues, putting the issues in a broader perspective and raising awareness among policy makers.
But the organization itself has been in a state of suspension since the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. The El-Ashry-led GEF and the U.N.’s Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), based in Washington and New York, respectively, supplanted UNEP’s leading role.
“In practice, the GEF provided the resources for global environmental projects, and the CSD being in New York proved an attractive venue for environmental ministers and officials,” said Ivanova. “UNEP, at the time, did not have any forum in which to gather environmental ministers and encourage them to think collectively about the global environment.” That was one of the things Toepfer corrected when he was appointed to head UNEP by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1998. He created the Global Ministerial Environment Forum, which meets in a different venue every other year and attracts environmental officials from all over the world.
“Collaboration and coordination do not just happen,” the report states. “They have to be encouraged, facilitated and sustained.”
UNEP’s budget ($215 million, compared to $3.2 billion for the United Nations Development Programme) and status as a program, rather than a “specialized agency,” limit its status and influence within the U.N. hierarchy. Programs are subsidiaries of the General Assembly, whereas specialized agencies are separate, autonomous intergovernmental organizations with governing bodies independent of the U.N. Secretariat and the General Assembly. The World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and the International Labor Organization are examples of such independent agencies.
“UNEP was originally given a program status not to constrain it, but to make it flexible and integrative. Its creation, while taken for granted today, was less than certain in the 1970s. There was a general feeling among governments – even among the most vocal proponents of a new intergovernmental entity – that there was no need for the creation of a big agency in the field of the environment. UNEP was envisioned as a policy center that would influence and coordinate the activities of other U.N. agencies and grow into its mandate as new issues emerged on the global agenda,” said Ivanova. “It didn’t quite work out that way.” Setting agendas and managing the policy process constitute another shortcoming. UNEP has initiated global agreements involving stewardship of the global environment, but the report calls the program a “back-seat driver” on developing a plan to manage climate change.
Further evidence of a program adrift is found in a U.N.-initiated internal evaluation that cited low “staff morale and esprit de corps” and confusion among staff and stakeholders as to what UNEP’s role should be.
Despite the criticism, UNEP under Toepfer made progress. During his fouryear tenure, Toepfer expanded the program’s donor base to 100 countries – twice as many as in 1995. And the ability of the institution to stand up to scrutiny is an indication of a willingness to change. Likewise, Ivanova said that she would not have spent so much time and energy on the project if she did not think UNEP has the potential to become a major player in global environmental governance.
Ivanova said the installation of UNEP’s new executive director, Achim Steiner, who took over for Toepfer on June 15, 2006, and is the former Director General of the World Conservation Union, is an opportunity for the agency to re-imagine its role. “The Yale report would indeed be a good place for him to start,” said Ivanova. “This report would be a good place for a new leader to start.”
Maria Ivanova ’99, Ph.D. ’06, director of the Global Environmental Governance Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and an assistant professor at The College of William and Mary, has placed a wake-up call to the United Nations (U.N.) to apprise it of this disconnect from reality. Ivanova prepared an analysis in the form of a report called “Can the Anchor Hold? Rethinking the United Nations Environment Programme for the 21st Century,” which was officially released at the World Summit in New York in September 2005.
The full report is available at www.yale.edu/gegproject.
While stewardship of the global environment is a Herculean task to place on any institution’s shoulders, UNEP, Ivanova argues, is uniquely positioned to carry it. Created in 1972, it was meant to be “a central coordinating mechanism in the United Nations to provide political and conceptual leadership, to assess the state of the global environment and to contemplate methods of avoiding or reducing global environmental risk and of working out joint norms.”
UNEP is an “anchor institution” for the global environment. Anchor institutions, said Ivanova, have four roles: to oversee the monitoring, assessing and reporting on their particular issue; to set agendas for standards and guidelines; to develop institutional capacity to address existing and emerging problems; and to develop new ideas. Though they aren’t alone in working on global issues, anchors are the glue that holds such efforts together. On that score, UNEP, which began with such promise, has lost its grip.
“The key thing is that UNEP, created in 1972, has never been systematically reviewed externally,” said Ivanova. “We cannot know how to improve unless we know where we are and how we got there.”
The report grew out of an F&ES class that Ivanova co-taught in the Fall of 2004 with Gordon Geballe, Ph.D. ’81, associate dean for student and alumni affairs, and Mohamed El-Ashry, founder and former CEO of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a principal funding source for developing countries to implement environmentalprojects with global impacts. The class, “International Environmental Organizations: UNEP and Global Governance,” was the third in a series led by Geballe that takes students to an international conference of significance. (See “Yale Delegation Addresses World’s Environment Ministers,” Spring 2005) Past classes have gone to Durban, South Africa, for the Fifth World Parks Congress and Bangkok, Thailand, for the World Conservation Congress.
“This was probably one of the most challenging classes at F&ES, and it shows the school’s commitment to the global environment,” said Ivanova. “When we advertised the class, so many students showed up that they had to fill out applications, submit CVs and go through an interview. It was supposed to be a seminar class with 15 students, but everyone was so good, we accepted 26.
“The students knew going in that they would be taking two classes in one. One was to learn about global environmental governance, and the other was to perform an objective assessment of an organization located 7,000 miles away, something that had never been done before. It was difficult, and the students did an excellent job.”
Experts in the field concur with Ivanova’s assessment. Jakob Stroem, deputy director of the Department for Global Development in the Swedish Foreign Ministry, said, “[The report] argues effectively for a rational approach to strengthening UNEP. ... This represents the best available introduction to UNEP’s problems and possibilities.” Alex Shakow, former director of external affairs at the World Bank, said Ivanova and colleagues did a “terrific job.” And Calestous Juma, professor of the practice of international development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and former head of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said, “I like this report very much. Its diagnosis is to the point.”
Ivanova gives UNEP its due for having facilitated important multinational agreements like the Convention on Migratory Species, the Montreal Protocol and conventions on biological diversity, climate change, desertification and international trade in endangered species. She also praises its Global Environment Outlook, the scientific arm of UNEP, for identifying emerging issues, putting the issues in a broader perspective and raising awareness among policy makers.
But the organization itself has been in a state of suspension since the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. The El-Ashry-led GEF and the U.N.’s Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), based in Washington and New York, respectively, supplanted UNEP’s leading role.
“In practice, the GEF provided the resources for global environmental projects, and the CSD being in New York proved an attractive venue for environmental ministers and officials,” said Ivanova. “UNEP, at the time, did not have any forum in which to gather environmental ministers and encourage them to think collectively about the global environment.” That was one of the things Toepfer corrected when he was appointed to head UNEP by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1998. He created the Global Ministerial Environment Forum, which meets in a different venue every other year and attracts environmental officials from all over the world.
“Collaboration and coordination do not just happen,” the report states. “They have to be encouraged, facilitated and sustained.”
UNEP’s budget ($215 million, compared to $3.2 billion for the United Nations Development Programme) and status as a program, rather than a “specialized agency,” limit its status and influence within the U.N. hierarchy. Programs are subsidiaries of the General Assembly, whereas specialized agencies are separate, autonomous intergovernmental organizations with governing bodies independent of the U.N. Secretariat and the General Assembly. The World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and the International Labor Organization are examples of such independent agencies.
“UNEP was originally given a program status not to constrain it, but to make it flexible and integrative. Its creation, while taken for granted today, was less than certain in the 1970s. There was a general feeling among governments – even among the most vocal proponents of a new intergovernmental entity – that there was no need for the creation of a big agency in the field of the environment. UNEP was envisioned as a policy center that would influence and coordinate the activities of other U.N. agencies and grow into its mandate as new issues emerged on the global agenda,” said Ivanova. “It didn’t quite work out that way.” Setting agendas and managing the policy process constitute another shortcoming. UNEP has initiated global agreements involving stewardship of the global environment, but the report calls the program a “back-seat driver” on developing a plan to manage climate change.
Further evidence of a program adrift is found in a U.N.-initiated internal evaluation that cited low “staff morale and esprit de corps” and confusion among staff and stakeholders as to what UNEP’s role should be.
Despite the criticism, UNEP under Toepfer made progress. During his fouryear tenure, Toepfer expanded the program’s donor base to 100 countries – twice as many as in 1995. And the ability of the institution to stand up to scrutiny is an indication of a willingness to change. Likewise, Ivanova said that she would not have spent so much time and energy on the project if she did not think UNEP has the potential to become a major player in global environmental governance.
Ivanova said the installation of UNEP’s new executive director, Achim Steiner, who took over for Toepfer on June 15, 2006, and is the former Director General of the World Conservation Union, is an opportunity for the agency to re-imagine its role. “The Yale report would indeed be a good place for him to start,” said Ivanova. “This report would be a good place for a new leader to start.”
