Chair
- Jan Pronk, Former Minister for the Environment (Netherlands) and President of the International Institute for Environment and Development (United Kingdom)
Speaker
- Simon Upton, Chair of the OECD Round Table on Sustainable Development.
Discussants
- Mohamed El-Ashry, Former President, Global Environment Facility
- Dan Esty, Director, Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (USA).
Following the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the international environmental system was characterized by multilateralism, culminating in the Rio Conference in 1992. The system based on multilateral environmental agreements (MEA), which has developed over the last thirty years, appears to be blocked, making it inefficient and leaving it open to challenges regarding its legitimacy. A range of solutions was proposed, the disparity of which being largely due to the different objectives pursued by countries and non-state actors. Thus, the United States favours a national approach in the name of their sovereignty; the least developed countries are more concerned about the impacts of the implementation of the agreements and the related transfers; emerging countries are concerned about sharing responsibilities and costs and are challenging the rules, without always proposing new ones; and finally, the European Union favours a multilateral approach based on coordination through regulation. As for non-state actors, they engage in norm-development and cooperation processes based on a voluntary approach and the decentralization of responsibilities. Which regimes can enable the reconciliation of these divergent visions?
