The death of Rio environmentalism

With the fading of post-Cold War optimism and the increasingly apparent inadequacy of responses to global environmental challenges, environmentalists around the world have begun to rethink the international strategies of the past few decades. Certainly, much has been accomplished to improve certain elements of international environmental governance. Multilateral agree-ments have proliferated; international institutions for trade and finance have begun to take more account of environmental considerations, either proac-tively or of necessity; many businesses around the world have begun to take the challenge of sustainability seriously. At the UN, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently appointed former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, former South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo, and former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos as special climate change envoys, to help build the ‘‘institutional framework within which a global solution to this global problem can be reached’’ (UN 2007). In Europe and Asia, many new ideas about institutionalizing sustainability have emerged and are being discussed (Ott 2005, IGES 2005, ADB 2005). In the United States, many cities and states have sought to assume policy leadership, as a way to counteract the Bush administration’s inaction and rollback on environmental matters.