We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2022
The role of business and multinational corporations (MNCs) in early international environmental governance is not well understood. Typically, historians accord business growing influence after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, coincident with the rise of a market-oriented sustainable development paradigm. In this article, we highlight the considerable involvement of self-styled business actors in the formative 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and subsequent establishment of the UN Environment Programme. Tracing the interconnected networks of British economist Barbara Ward, Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Canadian oilman-turned-UNEP boss Maurice Strong, we identify business actors as key in the passage from ‘planetary’ to ‘global’ environmental rationales characteristic of environmental politics between the 1970s and 1990s. However, we also show that business was a sought-after (even if often ambiguous) partner in the 1970s’ moment of innovative ‘planetary’ environmental thinking and institution making. The contested status of MNCs in 1970s internationalism shaped this early business involvement in the history of environmental governance.
1 Robin, Libby, Warde, Paul and Sörlin, Sverker, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
2 Ivanova, Maria, The Untold Story of the World's Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Selcer, Perrin, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
3 Macekura, Stephen, The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
4 Bernstein, Steven, The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Borowy, Iris, Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (New York: Routledge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Felicity Scott has gone so far as to describe the global as ‘a biopolitical paradigm that extended certain states’ interests in regulating the health and productivity of populations and in managing their natural resources and milieu into an expanded, worldwide domain’. Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016), 223.
6 Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment; Macekura, Steven, Off Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
7 Clapp, Jennifer and Meckling, Jonas, ‘Business as a Global Actor’, in Falkner, Robert, ed., The Handbook of Global Climate and Environment Policy (Malden: Wiley, 2013), 286–303Google Scholar; Wright, Christopher and Nyberg, Daniel, Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
8 Levy, David and Newell, Peter, eds., The Business of Global Environmental Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Meckling, Jonas, Carbon Coalitions: Business, Climate Politics, and the Rise of Emissions Trading (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
9 For a recent critique, see Gabor, Daniela, ‘The Wall Street Consensus’, Development and Change, 52, 3 (2021), 429–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Bernstein, The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism, 15.
11 In what follows, we draw heavily upon the Maurice Strong Papers, Environmental Science and Public Policy Archive, Harvard University (hereafter ESPP MFS001).
12 For an overview of existing literature see Clapp and Meckling, ’Business as a Global Actor’; Les Gasser and Nazli Choucri, eds., The Business of Global Environmental Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Kate Macdonald ‘Private Sustainability Governance and Global Corporate Power’, in John Mikler and Karsten Ronit, eds., MNCs in Global Politics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2020), 97–115; John Mikler and Karsten Ronit, eds., MNCs in Global Politics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2020).
13 For example: Frederic Hanusch, Claus Leggewie and Erik Meyer, Planetar denken: Ein Einstieg (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2021); Michael Grubb, Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development (New York: Routledge, 2014); Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto Lopez-Morales, Planetary Gentrification (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016); Susan S. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
14 Mary Kaldor and Sabine Selchow, ‘Planetary Politics: Reviving the Spirit of the Concept “Global Civil Society”’, in Michael Hoelscher et al., eds., Charting Global Challenges: Civil Society, the Nonprofit Sector, and Culture (Berlin: Springer, forthcoming).
15 Dispesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
16 ‘General Assembly resolution 2581 (XXVI)’, United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, UN. General Assembly (24th sess: 1969), accessed https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/202662?ln=en#record-files-collapse-header.
17 See summary of relevant resolutions in UN General Assembly Resolution of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, 1972, American Society of International Law, accessed http://www.jstor.org/stable/20690898.
18 Cited in Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 120.
19 Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).
20 Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth. The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 11.
21 See Glenda Sluga, ‘Capitalists and Climate’, Humanity, 6 Nov. 2017, http://humanityjournal.org/blog/capitalists-and-climate/.
22 Ward and Dubos, Only One Earth, 191–220.
23 Ibid., 28, 46–47, 88, 174, 189, 220.
24 Ibid., 252.
25 Ibid., 114.
26 First Meeting ‘Uncorrected Minutes’, at the Meeting on Tuesday 13 June 1972, E134 Organizations file, 1921–1979, Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. However, Mead put more emphasis on accommodating national patriotism.
27 In 1965, backed by Fiat and other firms and banks, he had set up the private development bank ADELA in Latin America. ADELA was conceived as a ‘truly multinational’ organisation – although its connections to US incursions in the Dominican Republic drew the critical attention of observers of the ‘spectre’ of the multinational corporation; Robert Golub and Joe Townsend, ‘Malthus, Multinationals and the Club of Rome’, Social Studies of Science, 7, 2 (1977), 201–22.
28 Golub and Townsend, ‘Malthus, Multinationals and the Club of Rome’, 203.
29 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972).
30 Maurice Strong, interviewed in Willem Oltmans, On Growth (New York: Capricorn Books, 1974), 193.
31 Gunnar Myrdal, ‘Economics of an Improved Environment’, in Barbara Ward, ed., Who Speaks for Earth?: Seven Citizens of the World on Major Issues of the Global Environment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 82. Aurelio Peccei, ‘Human Settlements’, in Who Speaks for Earth?, 166.
32 Barbara Ward-Robert McNamara, 11 Nov. 1970, The Columbia Conference on International Development in response to the Pearson's Commission's Report Partners in Development, Robert S. McNamara Papers, Manuscript Division, Part I: Correspondence, 1964–1996, Box I:18, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
33 Robert Solow, ‘The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics’, American Economic Review, 64, 2 (1974), 1–14. On Mobile, see Macekura, Mismeasure of Progress, 115.
34 Ibid., 104.
35 See Sluga, ‘Capitalists and Climate’.
36 For a contemporary overview of this thinking, see: Richard Clinton, ‘Ecodevelopment’, World Affairs, 140, 2 (Fall 1977), 111–26.
37 On the ‘growth paradigm’, see Matthias Schmelzer, The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Growth Paradigm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For a summary of environmental ideas, see: Libby Robin, Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). On the history of anti-growth or de-growth thinking, see: Stephen J. Macekura, The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
38 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968); Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). For a perspective on the intellectual conflicts of some of these ideas, see, Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
39 Strong was a member of the Corporate Environment Study's Steering Group. See: Meeting of Steering Group, 4 Dec. 1970, ESPP MFS001, 34/340. On the history of scenario planning, see: Jenny Andersson ‘Ghost in a Shell: The Scenario Tool and the World Making of Royal Dutch Shell’, Business History Review, 94 (Winter 2020), 729–51.
40 Roger M. Troub, ‘The Stockholm Conference and Beyond: Its Implications for Multinational Enterprise’, paper presented at annual meeting of the Association for Education in International Business, 29 Dec. 1972, ESPP MFS001, 30/330.
41 Strong to Friebourg, July 1973, ESPP MFS001, 21/215; Correspondence, ESPP MFS001 53/518.
42 Preparations for Brookings Institute Bellagio Meeting on ‘New Means of Financing Environmental and other International Programs’, 26–29 Mar. 1977, ESPP MFS001, 50/481.
43 ‘International seminar on environmental management for industrialists’, Environmental Conservation, 1, 3 (1974), 200.
44 ‘Stockholm and beyond’, Attachment B, 6–9 Mar. 1972, E134 Organizations file, 1921–1979, Folder 4, Margaret Mead Papers, The Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
45 On the history of the ICC, Thomas David and Pierre Eichenberger, ‘Business and Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: a Corporatist View’, Diplomatica, 2, 1 (2020), 48–56.
46 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 34–7.
47 Glenda Sluga, working paper, ‘Climate and Capital: Barbara Ward, Margaret Mead and the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment’.
48 2 June 1972, YMCA Report, Margaret Mead Papers, E134 Organizations file, 1921–1979, Folder 5, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
49 Comments from Consultants, 3 folders, Barbara Ward Jackson, Box 1, Columbia University Libraries Manuscript Collections, New York.
50 Imperial Oil [Canada] Comments, office of its president, 24 Nov. 1971; p. 2 N.A. Iliff, C.B.E. London 19 Nov. 1971. Only One Earth Comments, Barbara Ward Jackson, Box 1, D31(1079) 5M, Columbia University Libraries Manuscript Collections, New York.
51 Macekura, The Mismeasure of Growth, 125–30.
52 Selcer, Origins, 229–31.
53 Barbara Ward, ‘The Cocoyoc Declaration’, International Organisation, 29, 3 (1975), 893–901.
54 Elsewhere, rival approaches to managing economic growth and environmental degradation were being developed, such as the OECD's ‘polluter pays principle’. This scheme, first articulated in 1972, was proposed as an alternative to the top-down environmental protection regulation national governments had been imposing on business since the 1960s. It aimed to internalise the environmental costs of production and minimise the government interventions that might distort unencumbered growth: Iris Borowy, ‘Negotiating Environment: The Making of the OECD Environment Committee and the Polluter Pays Principle, 1968–1972’, in Matthieu Leimgruber and Matthias Schmelzer, eds., The OECD and the International Political Economy Since 1948 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 311–34.
55 Financial Times, 3 Aug. 1973.
56 The Guardian, 20 Nov. 1973, 4.
57 Individual firms included Dupont, Amax and the American Paper Institute. See: ‘ICIE–Objective, Structure and Programme’, in Cochrane to Strong, 12 Nov. 1976, ESPP MFS00, 69/669.
58 Wolfgang Streeck, J.R. Grote, V. Schneider and J. Visser, eds., Governing Interests. Business Associations Facing Internationalization (London: Routledge, 2006); Pierre Eichenberger, Neil Rollings and Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, ‘The Brokers of Globalization: Towards a History of Business Associations in the International Arena’, Business History (forthcoming).
59 See: Letters, ESPP MFS001, 22/21.
60 ICIE Objectives, Structure and Program, Aug. 1976, ESPP MFS001, 69/669.
61 Geoffrey Jones, ‘Multinationals from the 1930s to the 1980s’, in Alfred D. Chandler and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 81–104; Vanessa Ogle, ‘Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money and the State, 1950s–1970s’, American Historical Review, 122, 5 (2017), 1431–58.
62 The five areas were: (1) the ‘outer limits’ to changes in the environment; (2) weather and climate modification; (3) environmental problems of specific industries; (4) ‘eco-development’; and (5) environmental law. UNEP, Report of the Governing Council on the work of its first session, 12–22 June 1973 (New York: UN, 1973), para 14. See also: UNEP, Action Plan for the Human Environment: Programme Development and priorities, report of the Executive Director, UNEP/GC/5, 2 Apr. 1973; UNEP, Introductory Report of the Executive director, UNEP/GC/2, 10 May 1973.
63 The Industry and Environment Office ceased to exist when its functions were absorbed by the UNEP Division of Technology, Industry and Economics in 1998.
64 M.L. de Rosen to M.F Strong and M. Tolba, 23 May 1974, ESPP MFS001, 22/26.
65 UNEP, Report of the Governing Council of the work of its second session, 11–22 Mar. 1974 (New York: UN, 1973), para 119.
66 UNEP, Environmental aspects of the Pulp and Paper Industry: seminar papers and documents (Paris: UNEP Industry Programme, 1975); UNEP, Environmental aspects of the Aluminium Industry (Paris: UNEP Industry Programme, 1977); UNEP, Residue utilization: management of agricultural and agro-industrial residues (Paris: UNEP Industry Programme, 1977); Environmental aspects of the motor vehicle and its use (Paris: UNEP Industry Programme, 1977); Environmental aspects of the Petroleum Industry (Paris: UNEP Industry Programme, 1978); Environmental aspects of the Iron and Steel Industry: workshop proceedings (Paris: UNEP Industry Programme, 1980).
67 UNEP, Environmental Aspects of the Pulp and Paper Industry, 2.
68 Ibid.
69 UNEP, Report of the Governing Council of the work of its seventh session, 18 Apr.–4 May 1979 (New York: UN, 1979), UNEP/GC.7/19, Decision 7/3 and UNEP/GC.7/7, para. 119.
70 For an early example and discussion of this process, see: UNEP, Environmental Guidelines for Pulp and Paper Industry: A Technical Review. UNEP Environmental Management Guidelines No. 4 (Paris: UNEP, 1977).
71 Linda Rinaldi, ‘First World Industry Conference on Environmental Management: A Giant Step toward Environmental Excellence’, Temple International and Comparative Law Journal, 1, 1 (1985), 13
72 John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environment Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), ch 6.
73 Stephen Macekura, Off Limits and Growth, 223–6; Bernstein, The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism, 57–58, 144–45, 191–6.
74 Ignacy Sachs, ‘Ecodevelopment – A new strategy for the rural areas of the third world’, Press Release, UNEP/7, 18 Dec., ESPP MFS001, 37/369. See also, Ignacy Sachs, Environment and Development – A New Rationale for Domestic Policy Formulation and International Cooperation Strategies (Ottawa: Canadian International Development Agency and Environment Canada, 1977).
75 Ignacy Sachs, ‘Eco-development: Meeting Human Needs’, India International Centre Quarterly, 4, 4 (1977), 337–50.
76 UNEP, Aluminium Industry and the Environment, Seminar Paper and Documents (Paris: UNEP Office of the Industry Programme, 1975), 6–7.
77 On the complex relationship between the NIEO and multinational corporations, see: Vanessa Ogle, ‘State Rights against Private Capital: The ‘New International Economic Order’ and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–1981’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, 5, 2 (2014), 211–34.
78 Khalil Hamdani and Lorraine Ruffing, United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations: Corporate Conduct and the Public Interest (New York: Routledge, 2015); Tagi Sagafi-nejad, UN and Transnational Corporations: From Code of Conduct to Global Compact (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
79 For example, Norbert Horn, ‘International Rules for Multinational Enterprises: The ICC, OECD, and ILO Initiatives’, American University Law Review, 30, 4 (Summer 1981), 923–40.
80 ICIE Objectives, Structure and Program, Aug. 1976, ESPP MFS001, 69/669.
81 See: UNEP, Proceedings of the UNEP/ESCAP/FAO Workshop on Agricultural and Agro-industrial Residue Utilization in the Asian and Pacific Region, Pattaya, Thailand, 10–14 Dec. 1979 (Paris: UNP Industry Programme, 1984).
82 UNEP, Report of Seventh Meeting of Governing Council, para 242, para 246; UNEP, Report of Eight Meeting of UNEP Governing Council, 16–29 Apr. (New York: UN, 1980), para 320.
83 Susan Strange, ‘States, Firms and Diplomacy’, International Affairs, 68, 1 (1992), 1–15.
84 This point has been recently made by Alison Frank Johnson in, ‘Europe without Borders: Environmental and Global History in a World after Continents’, Contemporary European History, 31, 3 (2021), 1–13.
