From Stockholm to Rio and beyond: the impact of the environmental movement on the United Nations consultative arrangements for NGOs

Abstract

No account of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and popularly known as the Earth Summit, would be complete without coverage of the activity of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They generated debate with the government and in the media in many, perhaps most, countries. They took part in the preparatory work, wrote special reports, joined governmental delegations to Rio and ran a large forum in parallel to the official conference. UN officials have described the role of NGOs as having been ‘unprecedented‘, and that is the general view. It is less widely known that NGOs have been influential at UN conferences for decades and that they were in danger of having less access than normal to the Earth Summit. Far from the situation being ‘unprecedented’, the NGOs made such an impact at Rio because the weight of precedents made it impossible to restrict their numbers and their activities.