That global environmental problems require global solutions is now an accepted maxim within much of the global environmental politics literature. To this end, the United Nations is an important actor, arena, and tool. As Ken Conca points out in An Unfinished Foundation, however, the UN’s approach to resolving global environmental problems has been inadequate because the organization has not used the full potential of its mission and mandate. The UN’s “grand strategy for global environmental governance,” Conca contends, “consists, essentially, of better law between nations and better development within them” (p. 6). What is missing is the integration of the other two elements of the UN Charter—namely, the UN’s mandate to promote peace and protect human rights. The central argument is that the United Nations would only be able to effectively address global environmental problems if it used its full, four-part mission.
Most investigations of global environmental governance have focused on the environmental problems, the actors engaged in their production and resolution, and the institutions created to govern collective behavior. The actors commonly discussed include nation-states, nongovernmental organizations, and multinational corporations. The focus on institutions ranges from sets of rules, norms, and decision-making procedures, to international treaties and organizations. In this context, the United Nations is often mentioned but rarely analyzed in depth, even in relation to the environmental work that it performs. This book is the first to connect the evolution of global environmental governance to the mission of the United Nations in its entirety and to explain the history, interconnections, and significance of the UN’s work across its mandate to the global environmental and sustainability agenda. Moreover, the book does so seamlessly, effortlessly, and compellingly.
Structured around an analysis of the four core missions of the United Nations—law, development, human rights, and peace—with each developed in one chapter, the book seeks to explain the current state of affairs and illustrate the consequences of basing UN environmental work on only two of the four pillars of the UN charter. In the final chapter, Conca offers specific suggestions for reform that would improve environmental governance. To this end, Unfinished Foundation walks the reader through a structured narrative about the reasons behind the choices to base the UN’s environmental work in law and development and to deemphasize the peace and human rights dimensions. It makes a compelling case for what should change, but falls short on explaining how and why that change might happen.
Understanding the United Nations is a precondition for understanding and appreciating the main arguments of the book. Conca succinctly and compellingly imparts knowledge about the UN system that allows the readers—college students as well as seasoned professionals—to grasp the breadth and depth of the United Nations and appreciate the enormity of its task. Familiarity with the nature of environmental problems is also a prerequisite for fully grasping the breadth of the arguments made. Conca introduces environmental issues such as pollution, chemicals management, and climate change, as well as some of their causes, such as regulatory races to the bottom and externalization of consumption. This is done through vivid descriptions of the limits of law and development in Sierra Leone and California, the search for a human rights norm in the cases of clean water and climate change, and the environmental causes and consequences of conflict in the Congo. Indeed, one important feature that sets Unfinished Foundation apart from many other comprehensive analyses of international environmental politics and the United Nations is the rich empirical evidence that brings the narrative to life.
Through systematic analysis, Conca identifies a number of root causes and barriers to “bringing the full force of the UN mandate to bear on environmental challenges” (p. 191). Countries’ resistance to change, their entrenched political and economic interests, perverse institutional incentives, ideational contestation, and the path dependence of existing norms and practices are some of the obstacles. Globalization and its transnational production-consumption chain, violent conflict, political instability, and failing states feature among the deeper, tougher problems.
The book’s core contention is that the relationship between conflict, environment, and human rights is circular. War destroys the environment as well as human rights, and the absences of environmental services and social structure make peace harder to attain. To this end, Conca contends that linking peace and environment would emphasize the causal connection between environmental degradation and conflict, incorporate political priorities into environmental governance, and enable integrative strategies for peace building. Linking human rights and environment would enable access to processes in regulatory domains, allow for claims against governments, create a normative force, and link distant parts of transnational supply chains. These approaches would empower marginalized communities and keep environmental efforts honest.
Ultimately, the purpose of Unfinished Foundation is to explain how the United Nations learns, so as to guide it toward a better model and different outcomes in environmental governance. The book offers a set of normative, institutional, and operational recommendations, including the acknowledgment of a human right to the environment and a responsibility-to-protect norm for the environment, redefining the role of the Security Council, and integrating peace and rights into the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and other UN initiatives.
Some of these proposals are bold and ambitious. It is unclear, however, how governments would overcome the deep structural problems and institutional path dependencies that Conca identifies as core obstacles to progress to date. What would need to change in the human rights organs, the development machinery, and the peace- and security-related UN bodies for this agenda to be considered, adopted, and implemented? What core features of this proposal would make governments and UN institutions overcome the existing “political drift, impasse, and failed imagination” (p. 215) that have plagued the system to date?
These recommendations nevertheless provide a useful point of departure for a discussion among scholars and policy-makers on how to jumpstart enduring, expanding, and, hopefully, effective UN reform