IISD and Pardee Center to Host Experts Meeting on Accountability and Governance

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future will host an experts meeting on Accountability in the Global Environmental Governance System on September 9, 2010, at Pardee House, Boston University, Boston.

The meeting seeks to bring together a select group of leading practitioners and scholars in a brainstorming session to examine how  the global environmental governance (GEG) system can be made more accountable and, especially, how the importance of this linkage can be highlighted for and give a genuine hearing at the forthcoming Rio+20 environmental summit, scheduled to be held in Brazil in 2012.

The IISD has been working on a series of activities on global environmental governance and in 2006 produced a major report on the subject called Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda which outlined, amongst other things, an emphasis on the accountability dimension of GEG. The Pardee Center has also been focusing on these issues, including at a panel discussion organized by the Pardee Center earlier this year at the United Nations as part of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UN CSD) meeting. More recently, the IISD’s Mark Halle and the Pardee Center’s Adil Najam collaborated to author a short paper – published by the Pardee Center in its Sustainable Development Insights series – titled Global Environmental Governance: The Challenge of Accountability (2010) as a ‘conversation starter’ on why these two issues should be linked, and how.

This experts meeting seeks to build on this ongoing ‘conversation’ and place the emphasis on accountability in GEG it in the context of the forthcoming Rio+20 conference. The meeting will be held back-to-back with the meeting of the Pardee Center Task Force on Governance for a Green Economy, which meets at Pardee House the following day (September 10) to discuss similar issues, and also in the context of the forthcoming Rio+10 deliberations.