Maria Ivanova. 2021. The untold story of the world’s leading environmental institution: UNEP at fifty (Cambridge: MIT Press)

Excerpt

As the world nears the fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, a landmark event in global environmental governance, states are hurriedly planning “Stockholm + 50” and “UNEP@50” events to commemorate. Talk of a “global pact” on the environment, as well as more fundamental transformations to the structures of international environmental politics, pervade. As these discussions occur, however, there remains a significant historical knowledge deficit surrounding the actors and conditions that shaped the current cooperative architecture for the global environment. Maria Ivanova’s The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty seeks to address this gap, providing a detailed analysis of the origins of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). …