The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty by Maria Ivanova

Abstract

On the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Maria Ivanova offers the first “biography of UNEP” (6). The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution traces the organization’s inception back to the preparations for the 1972 Stockholm Conference and guides the reader through mandate evolutions and reform projects, including the reform process concluded at Rio+20 in 2012, which granted UNEP universal membership through the newly established UN Environment Assembly (UNEA). Ivanova assesses UNEP’s successes, such as the reversal of the depletion of the ozone layer, which she describes as its “greatest achievement” (93), and its failures, including its director’s disengagement from the lead-up process to the 1992 Rio Earth summit. The author begins by challenging the institutional deficiency theory, which argues that UNEP was deliberately designed as a weak institution. She offers alternative lenses to study UNEP’s performance and its limits as an anchor institution: capacity, connectivity, and credibility. Through the different chapters, she shows how politics, geography, and individuals shape these three dimensions, eventually affecting UNEP’s authority: UNEP is “in authority in the environmental field” but not “an authority” (201, emphasis original). Its institutional design, mandate transformations, location, and leadership jointly contributed to the uneven outputs of an organization “created to be a catalyst in the environmental field” (92) with “a big vision and modest resources” (91) but whose “identity and place within the UN system ... remain in flux” (139). Throughout the book, Ivanova shows a permanent tension between the political role induced by the coordination mission attributed to UNEP and the functionalist project, with UNEP being “pushed out of the political debate and forced to be more of a technical organization” (150). The political argument put forward by developing countries, and Kenya especially, to locate UNEP’s headquarters in Nairobi faced the functional mandate and efficiency logic defended by developed countries. The political ambitions of some executive directors were curbed by guardians of the status quo. Yet power dynamics are not systematically addressed in the book. Intergovernmental negotiations and funding politics are acutely discussed, but states’ authority over the organization’s path is not fully analyzed. This omission leaves some questions