Creating and Ratifying an International Environmental ConventionDescription
"Beyond Uncommon Ground" is a role playing game which gives students a chance to explore how to get beyond competing interests, to find common ground in the struggle for a better more secure ecological environment. The simulation is made up of eight exercises, each pertaining to a particular chapter of Steel's text. Through these exercises, students will examine and propose refinements for UN international environmental conventions. They will then set up a model UN to renogotiate and develop implementation strategies for the Agenda 21 policies and conventions of the 1992 UN Earth Summit. Students will learn how to deal with competing interests in the formation and implementation of environmental policy, and learn how the scientific process applies to the formation of environmental policy.
Background
From Page 6 of the Steel Text:
In 1992 the United Nations organized an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Formally referred to as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), this event brought together representatives from 172 countries and more than 2,400 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Conference participants agreed on a set of goals for protecting the environment and for promoting sustainable development. The agreement concluded at this international conference is known as Agenda 21, which consists of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Statement of Forest Principles, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The conference also established several follow-up mechanisms, including the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Inter- agency Committee on Sustainable Development, and a high-level United Nations-funded Advisory Board on Sustainable Development.
The central message of the Earth Summit was that both the postindustrial and the developing countries share many environmental concerns in regard to land use, forest resources, biodiversity, water quality, marine and coastal environments, atmospheric conditions, and air quality in urban industrialized environments. Although all regions and nations of the world face a wide array of similar environmental problems, it is the case that highly diverse cultural, political, economic, and situational factors affect the approaches and policies that are pursued (or often not implemented) by governments to ameliorate their environmental problems. Differing regions and nations of the world find themselves in dissimilar socioeconomic and political situations, and these situations affect how they interact with their natural environment and influence what level of priority particular environmental issues are accorded (see Table 1.1).
As nations make progress in their development efforts, different sets of environmental and natural resource policy concerns tend to assume priority over time. Initially, prominence is most often assigned to issues associated with poverty, basic nutrition and shelter needs, and essential health care (see Tables 1.1 and 1.2). This has led many scholars and decision makers to argue for the pursuit of sustainable development practices; such practices are designed both to promote healthy environmental conditions and to meet the basic development needs of area populations. Sustainable development has been defined as a situation wherein "natural resources are available for day-to-day living, but also can be counted on for future generations" (Warner 1999, 265). Political scientist Sheldon Kamieniecki argues, however, that ". . . the pressure for economic development in less affluent nations poses the toughest challenge for the environmental movement in the 1990s and beyond" (1993, 13)
Procedure
The class should be split up into teams to tackle the different exercises below. All students could go through the exercises as the course progresses through the respective chapters, but it would be helpful to have "advance teams" studying and discussing the various exercises as they are all related to solving the problem of Agenda 21 compliance. The advance teams can offer their perspective to class discussions as the semester unfolds.
At some point a model UN should be formed to evaluate the progress of Agenda 21, and then renegotiate, and ratify the refined conventions. Then the working groups of the model UN should develop an implementation plan to further carry out the newly agreed upon goals.
Individual students whose classes are not participating in a model UN project can still use the exercises to stimulate thought about the issues raised in the text and class. They can still explore model UN's to give them ideas on how the whole process of international convention development and compliance fits together.
