Abstract
This paper traces the course of North-South dialogue in the space of ten years between the Stockholm Conference (held in June 1972) and the Law of the Sea Conference (held in April 1982), both under the aegis of the United Nations, to see if, and the extent to which, the spirit of accommodation shown at Stockholm enabling the two sides (which had initially taken diametrically opposed positions on the tangled relationship between development and environment) to hammer out a consensus had survived. The consensus at Stockholm centred round the principles and the code of conduct governing environmentally sound development and the international arrangements conducive to it – in other words, the sustainable husbanding of planetary resources and their equitable sharing so as to foster development in non-industrialized countries facing the acute problem of poverty and to prevent the degradation of environment by industrialized countries not prudent in the use of technology. The Law of the Sea conference was a negation of this spirit, and consensus failed to emerge. Intimation of this had been received earlier, when the then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, strongly criticized the Cocoyoc Declaration passed by a conference sponsored by the UN and organized jointly by UNEP (which had been set up following the Stockholm conference to implant Stockholm decisions) and UNCTAD in 1974. The article nevertheless sees several indications that the issue of an alternative development is still very much alive and is gaining increasing support.
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