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Beyond UNCED: Revenues and Reforms

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Environment, Security and UN Reform

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Abstract

This chapter will first examine both the current limitations and future opportunities for the reform of ODA, the financial basis of UN operations, and alternative sources of revenues to finance sustainable development. It will secondly address the agenda of UN structural reform, that goes beyond the Agenda 21-derived possibilities raised at UNCED and described in the preceding chapter.

The secretariat of the Conference has estimated the average annual costs (1993–2000) of implementing in developing countries the activities in Agenda 21 to be over $600 billion, including about $125 billion on grant or concessional terms from the international community

Agenda 21, Chapter 33.18

External indebtedness has emerged as a main factor in the economic stalemate in the developing countries.

Agenda 21, Chapter 2.24

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Notes

  1. For a balanced view of the UN’s problems, see D. Williams, The Specialized Agencies and the United Nations; The System in Crisis (Hurst and Co., 1987), especially Chapter V. Also J. Harrod and N. Schrijver (eds), The UN Under Attack (Aldershot: Gower, 1988). See also the compendious end-of-the-decade survey contained in M. Karns and K. Mingst (eds), The United States and the Multilateral Institutions (London: Unwin-Hyman, 1990).

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  2. Paul Taylor, ‘Reforming the System: Getting the Money to Talk’, in P. Taylor and A. J. Groom, (eds), International Institutions at Work (Pinter, 1988), pp. 226–34.

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  6. This summary is made in a Canadian ‘non-paper’ titled Ideas of Some Delegations on Institutional Arrangements for Consideration by the UNCED Preparatory Committee, Canadian Delegation, Geneva, August 1991, mimeo.

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  13. Washington Weekly Report, XIX-30, 7 October 1993.

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  14. Washington Weekly Report, XIX-31, 15 October 1993.

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  24. Ibid., p. 177.

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  47. The Herald, Glasgow, 5 July 1993.

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  49. Ibid., p. 7.

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  51. US General Accounting Office, Developing Country Debt; Debt Swops for Development and Nature Provide Little Debt Relief, United States General Accounting Office, GAO/NSAID-92–14, December 1991, p. 9.

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  52. Ibid., p. 11.

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  53. Ibid., p. 13.

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  54. These and many other cases are well summarised by Caroline Thomas, The Environment in International Relations, RIIA, 1992, pp. 124–35. See M. F. Imber, ‘Environmental security; a task for the UN system’, Review of International Studies 17, (1991), pp. 201–12. On freshwater questions, see Malin Falkenmark, ‘Fresh water as a factor in strategic policy action’, in Arthur Westing (ed), Global Resources and International Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 85–114.

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  55. The literature on environmental security is well discussed by Thomas, op. cit., 1992, pp. 115–54.

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  56. These remarks and comparisons are contained in the report prepared by the Secretary-General at the invitation of the Security Council, which places a discussion of new peacekeeping activities in a wider post-Cold War context. See Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Agenda for Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992), pp. 6–7.

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  57. Adapted from tables in D. Deudney, ‘The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security’, in Millennium, 19, 1990, pp. 464–6.

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  58. J. Womack, D. Jones and D. Roos, The Machine that Changed the World (Rawson, 1990).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St Andrews, UK

    Mark F. Imber (Lecturer in International Relations)

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© 1994 Mark F. Imber

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Imber, M.F. (1994). Beyond UNCED: Revenues and Reforms. In: Environment, Security and UN Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375833_6

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