In June 1972, 114 nations gathered in Stockholm for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. A landmark event, it was the first major international conference dealing with the subject of ‘the environment’. In the fifty years since, the international architecture for dealing with environmental problems has expanded, with a range of intergovernmental organisations, a library of international environmental treaties, and regular international conferences trying to address problems.
Mr. A.I. McCutchan (left) and Mr. S.W. Gentle, of Australia, are seen at a meeting of the Second Committee held on 12 June 1972.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Stockholm Conference in 2022, Dr Alessandro Antonello (CASPR Associate), Associate Professor Cassandra Star (CASPR Director), Associate Professor Ruth Morgan (ANU Centre for Environmental History), and Dr Emily O’Gorman (Macquarie University), are convening an interdisciplinary conference to explore Australia’s part in global environmental governance between 1972 and the present. We aim to explore the history and politics of Australian engagements with various aspects of global environmental governance, including international conferences, international organisations and multilateral forums, environmental norms and concepts, civil society and environmentalism, justice and human rights, science and knowledge.
We are excited to have two world-leading scholars of environmental governance as keynote speakers: Professor Sverker Sörlin, an environmental historian at KTH Stockholm and currently chief investigator on a major European Research Council grant on the history of global environmental governance; and Professor Susan Park, an international relations scholar at the University of Sydney and a leading voice on global environmental governance, especially on the subject of multilateral banks and finance.
The conference will convene in Adelaide between 11 and 13 April 2022. For further details on the conference, the range of papers being sought, and details about proposal submissions, see the Call for Papers. Paper proposals are due by 15 October 2021.
For further details, please contact Alessandro at alessandro.antonello@flinders.edu.au .
– Alessandro Antonello
