ESEH European Society for Environmental History Conference

Description

Stockholm 1972 - Beyond the Diplomats. Transnational Activism, Alternative Agendas, and the Construction of a Global Public Sphere The Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment of 1972 is probably the most-quoted event in the history of the emerging international environmental politics. It has routinely been described as a catalyst for the global breakthrough of environmental awareness, environmental policy and environmentalism. Surprisingly, the actual event has attracted relatively little attention from environmental historians so far. Existing analyses focus mainly on the diplomatic history of the event – the conflict between the developing world and the developed countries about the developmental implications of the new agenda. While the Conference has been considered part of the story of an emerging “global environmental movement” (McCormick 1995) as a first meeting place of NGOs and environmental groups, a more extensive analysis of the role NGOs actually played is lacking so far. This paper seeks to provide a first attempt at revisiting Stockholm beyond the closed rooms of the diplomats. It sets out to take a closer look at the Environmental Forum (Miljöforum) established on the margins of the UN Conference. Apart from its role as a meeting place facilitating the transnational exchange of ideas, which probably accounts for much of its long-term impact, the immediate role of the Environmental Forum was to engage with the conference itself. Thus the focus of this paper is to analyse how the environmentalists cooperated to challenge the official diplomatic agenda, which alternative agendas they advanced and promoted, and how they sought to establish an alternative transnational public sphere (notably by publishing the Stockholm Conference Eco), holding the diplomats and governments accountable. The findings of this paper will be relevant both for environmental historians, but also for “new” diplomatic historians. Moreover they shed light on the origins of what is by now a familiar phenomenon, i.e. the role of NGOs at international (environmental) conferences.

Period	30 Jun 2015
Event type	Conference
Location	Versailles, FranceShow on map