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The United Nations University (UNU) is the academic arm of the United Nations (UN). It bridges the academic world and the UN system. Its goal is to develop sustainable solutions for current and future problems of humankind in all aspects of life. Through a problem-oriented and interdisciplinary approach it aims at applied research and education on a global scale. UNU was founded in 1973 and is an autonomous organ of the UN General Assembly. The University comprises headquarters Tokyo, Japan, and more than a dozen Institutes and Programmes worldwide.

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InterSecTions No. 4/2006 - Creeping Institutionalization by Bharat Desai

UNU-EHS is proud to present the new issue of InterSecTions, written by Professor Dr. Bharat H. Desai. He gives an excellent and thought provoking account of creeping institutionalization of the global environmental governance. His “story” is not only proving that environment is as much a legal as a security issue. It goes well beyond the fields of his legal expertise as he analyses the creeping institutionalization from the point of view of psychology of the state actors. The reader can follow page by page how the growing environmental awareness is being translated into multilateral actions, treaties including the “thickening web” of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and the “softness of hard law”.

Download the issue as a pdf file .

Many people, dedicated to environmental preservation and rehabilitation tend to be impatient with the pace of development and the results reached so far. Yet even for the most critical reader this essay of Prof. Desai must carry some “good news” about the well established and irreversible process at intergovernmental level, a “secret success story” of the UN System and its environmental programme UNEP. The accelerating rate of establishing and ratifying MEAs show both the will and the means to achieve some of our cherished environmental goals. The present issue of the InterSecTions series is the first one which was cosponsored by a partner of UNU-EHS, the International Human Dimension Programme of the Global Environmental Change Project (IHDP-GEC) of the International Science Council (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC).

Excerpt from the foreword by Janos J. Bogardi