Global Environmental Governance Forum
The Global Environmental Governance Forum: Reflecting on the Past, Moving into the Future is a joint initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the College of William and Mary, organized in cooperation with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), with financial support of the UN Foundation, UNEP and the governments of Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway.
The Forum will bring together the past, present, and future architects of the environmental governance system. This four-day conference will take place in Switzerland in the summer of 2009. We will gather those men and women that laid the foundation of our current architecture in Stockholm in 1972 in an effort to learn from their collective experience and wisdom as we devise blueprints for UN reform. The theme of the Forum is thus “Reflecting on the Past, Moving into the Future” and it seeks to seize a soon-to-be lost opportunity to connect generations of environmental thinkers and learn directly from the pathbreaking individuals whose ideas and aspirations formed the system as we know it.
The goals of the Forum are to: 1) understand the original vision for the international environmental governance system and recast it for the 21st century; 2) assess the current structures’ performance and the factors that defined their strengths and weaknesses; and 3) outline a forward-looking blueprint for a reconfigured environmental structure and create a momentum for change. We plan to use the results of the Forum to create a documentary, an interactive learning platform for professionals, researchers, and students, and an environmental governance course for diplomats in New York and Geneva.