Prof. Najam Speaks on Governance at the United Nations Headquarters

Prof. Adil Najam, the Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and Professor of International Relations and of Geography and Environment at Boston University, spoke at a special panel on Global Governance for Environment and Sustainable Development held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, on 8 April, 2010. The panel was hosted by Ms. Chantal Jouanno, the Minister of Ecology for the government of France and moderated by Ambassador Claude Heller, the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations.

The presentation was attended by a packed room on national delegates, including a large number of ambassadors. The topic of global governance in the context of sustainable development has taken on a new salience in the context of recent climate change negotiations and the upcoming Rio+20 conference planned for 2012.

Prof. Najam spoke about this context in his presentation which focussed on why we need a better governance architecture for global development, and that environmental issues should fit within this framework. He argued that we need to put development at the center of environmental policy and we need to move towards creating a meaningful framework for sustainable development governance.

In doing so, Prof. Najam built on the findings of the recent Pardee Center paper on the Rio+20 discussions – authored with Pardee Center Research Fellow Miquel Munoz for the Sustainable Development Insights series.