The New International Environmental Order: How the Global South Made International Environmental Governance in the 1970s and 1980s

This paper will use the New International Economic Order and the North-South Dialogue as a microcosm to assess how concerns over environmental damage and climate change emerged in the 1970s and were shaped by debates in the Global South over how to understand the connection between development and pollution. After the decolonization process of the 1960s, actors in the Global North became increasingly worried about the flora and fauna of recently independent territories. Would newly independent nations be able to manage the natural resources they had inherited from colonial governments? Governments in the Global North claimed overpopulation was causing environmental damage while farmers and producers in so-called developing countries were mismanaging nature. Leaders in the Global South, however, demanded compensation to rectify the damage done to nature by colonial exploitation.
Rather than seeing climate change, environmental degradation and existential risk as technical problems with technocratic solutions, the system of international environmental governance should rather be understood as a battle for environmental justice that was deeply shaped by ideologies that sprang from decolonization. The International Conference of the Parties on climate change, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) as well as the environmental initiatives of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are less a reflection of liberal internationalism and more a product of anticolonial arguments about the need to have moral and economic compensation for the ecological damage caused by colonialism. Phrases like a “common humanity” or “spaceship earth” were mobilized in the 1970s and 1980s to cover up social and economic inequalities even though it was actors from the Global South who set the pace at the UN Conferences on the Human Environment. Ideology, according to anticolonial thinkers.