Global Policy Forum

By Ramesh Jaura

A new study has proposed the establishment of a World Environment and Development Organisation, integrating existing programmes and institutions of the United Nations.

The authors of the study, released this week by the Development and Peace Foundation (SEF) here, say such a specialised body could help governments, international agencies and NGOs to give greater priority to solving urgent global environment and development problems.

The policy paper formed the centrepiece Tuesday of a joint conference organised by the SEF and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), in Bad Honnef near Bonn.

While avoiding direct comment on the paper, UNDP administrator James Gustave Speth said the world body had already launched upon a process of making global development and environment policies more effective and coordinated.

As a result of far-reaching reforms announced by the U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan last year, a United Nations Development Group (UNDG) had been established. The UNDG comprises the executive heads of U.N. development agencies, funds and other entities, under the chairmanship of the UNDP administrator.

The objective, said Speth, was to achieve greater coordination and policy coherence among those bodies while maintaining their distinctive identities. At the same time, he said, a task force headed by U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister, was considering ways of strengthening global environment policy and programmes.

The policy paper was co-authored by Frank Biermann from the secretariat of the German Advisory Council On Global Change, in Bremerhaven, and Udo Simonis, a research professor specialising in environmental policy at the Science Centre in Berlin.

The SEF was set up 12 years ago by former West German chancellor Willy Brandt. Brandt is famous for his leadership of the North- South Commission and its historic work in promoting global understanding of the urgency of equity and justice in relations between developed and developing nations.

State secretary (deputy minister) at the German federal ministry of economic cooperation and development, Wighard Haerdtl, also refrained from commenting directly on the report's conclusions.

He did however point out that since the June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, environment and development had come to be recognised as two sides of the same coin. Sustainable development involved taking into consideration environmental considerations.

He regretted that the reform process under way in the United Nations was going at a slow pace. ''But this lies in part in the nature of things,'' he added.

Haerdtl welcomed the ongoing efforts within the framework of the UNDG. ''We would however welcomed if the U.N. secretary general's proposals had gone further and the (several) funds and programmes and been linked closer,'' he said. This would have resulted in greater efficiency, he said.

But the fact remains that there is no alternative to a global development and environment policy. And its objective had to be to make the world a better, safer and a more humane place for all the humankind.

The 20:20 initiative approved at the World Social Summit 1995 in Copenhagen, Denmark, played an equally important role in this, said Erfried Adam, coordinator of the German NGO Forum World Social Summit. Adam is a senior official at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, one of Germany's leading political foundations.

The NGO Forum, omprising some 40 non-governmental organisations in Germany, convened its annual conference on Jun. 19 in Bonn. The 20:20 initiative aims to see 20 percent of the donors' aid and 20 percent of state spending in the recipient nations, to be spent on sectors like primary education, basic health facilities, access to clean water, adequate food and modern methods of family planning.

Given the decline in official development assistance (ODA) among developed nations, the authors of the SEF policy paper argue that a new specialised agency to work for a better environment and sustainable development is essential.

At the very least, they say, the new body should integrate UNEP, the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development and the secretariats of conventions dealing, among others wth biodiversity, climate convention and desertification.

''It would need to be examined to what extent the United Nations Development Programme, with its project budget totalling just under one billion U.S. dollars, could be integrated into the World Environment and Development Organisation,'' they say.

They also stress the importance of close cooperation with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation.

The SEF policy paper suggests three cor functions to the new agency. Firstly it should persuade national governments, international organisations and non-state sectors to give the two issue greater priority. Secondly it advocates better use of existing global policymaking instruments to get new problems on the agenda and to negotiate detaled action agendas and deadlines for change.

Thirdly the proposed joint agency should seek to reinforce the poorer states' capacity to act, through improved international cooperation and support.

Co-author Simonis, suggests the new specialised agency could be financed in various ways. One way would be to get the developed nations to meet their own agreed objective and increase ODA to 0.7 percent of the value of their gross national product.

Another way, says Simonis, is that the developed nations transfer developing countries' public debt to the World Environment and Development Organisation, or provide the interest from these loans as ''knock-on-financing'' for the new body.

A third source of funding could be the levies on international air travel as first proposed by former U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who sought funds for peacekeeping operations, or on global financial transactions, as proposed by the Nobel Laureate James Tobin.

A levy on air travel could raise around 1.5 billion dollars a year, while a massive 205 billion dollars could be raised each year if a levy of 0.5 percent is made on all global financial transactions.

According to the SEF policy paper, the World Environment and Development Organisation would need to be established at a diplomatic conference which would determine its mandate, budget, financing and other procedural issues.

The founding treaty will then need to be ratified. Not all the states would have to join in, and in contrast to an amendment to the U.N. charter the permanent members of the Security Council would not have a veto power.