Prof. Adil Najam Speaks to UN Delegates at Intergovernmental Session

Prof. Adil Najam, the Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and a Boston University Professor of International Relations and of Geography and Environment, was one of the invited expert speakers at a plenary of the Intergovernmental Preparatory Meeting (IPM) for the Nineteenth Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), on March 3, 2011, at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

The IPM has focussed on the thematic agenda which includes (for this year) chemicals, transportation, hazardous wastes, mining and sustainable consumption and production. Within that, Prof. Najam was invited to address the delegates in the session on interlinkages and cross-cutting issues.

The session was chaired by CSD Vice Chair Andrew Goledzinowski (Australia). In his remarks and later in an active question and answer session, the Pardee Center Director invited delegates to take a long-term view of things and look not simply at what the inter-linkages were between these issues but to view them in the context of broader development, equity and poverty issues. He argued that to do so we will need to revisit the global governance structures we have created which tend to cut issues into smaller and smaller issues rather than dealing with the connections and interlinkages that are inherent in the quest for sustainable development.

Prof. Najam also introduced ideas from a 2009 Pardee Papre by Pardee Faculty Fellow Prof. Henrik Selin on Managing Hazardous Chemicals: Longer-Range Challenges. Referring to the recently released Pardee Center Task Force Report on ‘Governance for a Green Economy’, prof. Najam suggested that the forthcoming Rio+20 negotiations provide an important opportunity to revisit these governance issues and to move into a ‘consolidation’ phase of governance which begins linking key issues rather than slicing them into ever narrower bits and pieces.