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Stockholm: The founding of IIED
Maurice Strong
THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS
IIED began as the International Institute for Environmental Affairs, established on the initiative of Robert O Anderson who was its Chairman and principal source of funding. ‘Bob’ Anderson was a prominent figure in the oil and gas industry, and his company was involved in the extraction of oil from Alaska's Prudhoe Bay. The construction of the pipeline from Prudhoe Bay was much delayed, and made more costly, by the controversy surrounding environmental impacts on the sensitive Arctic terrain and wildlife. This experience impressed Anderson with the emerging importance of the environment and its impact on resource development, and his company began to accommodate environmental concerns in development plans.
Bob Anderson had long been interested in broader issues of public policy, and led the development of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. This became an influential cultural and policy forum, attracting thinkers and artists from around the world. After the controversy of the Alaska pipeline, Anderson began to incorporate environmental issues into the programme of the Aspen institute, and invited environmentalists to engage in dialogue with policy-makers and business leaders. This led to Anderson's decision to establish the International Institute for Environmental Affairs (IIEA), as an affiliate of the Aspen Institute, to focus specifically on international environmental issues. In this interest, as otherwise, Bob Anderson was ahead of his time; many of his contemporaries viewed his interest in the environment as either a response to a business imperative, or simply eccentric.
He recruited as President, Jack Raymond, an experienced New York Times journalist and public-relations expert with a real interest in environment but no professional background in the field. When I was appointed Secretary General of the UN Conference on the Human Environment in late 1970, Bob Anderson offered to put the IIEA at my service to assist in preparations for the Conference. I welcomed the assistance, and the Institute convened a number of sessions in New York, Washington and at Aspen which helped to build a constituency for the Conference in some influential circles in the business, policy and non-governmental communities in the USA.
LINKING ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
I met Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson) when she visited Ottawa in 1971 to see Prime Minister Lester Pearson whose Chief of Staff, Tom Kent was a friend of Barbara's and had worked with her at The Economist. At that time, Barbara was known as the world's most articulate and influential advocate for support of the developing world and relief from the poverty that afflicted the majority of its people. When I first met her in the living room of Tom Kent's home in Ottawa, I had just agreed to take on responsibility for managing preparations for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and was eager to have her advice. At that time, developing countries were deeply suspicious of the emerging environment issue as a ‘disease of the rich’ which could impose new constraints on their central priority of economic development. Indeed there was even a move on the part of developing countries at the United Nations to boycott the forthcoming Conference in Stockholm.
Although it was clear from my discussions with Barbara that she had not really focused a lot of her own attention on environmental issues, she was clearly aware of the developing-country concerns and very much shared them. We agreed that the agenda for the Conference as it had been initially formulated focused primarily on issues of concern to the more industrialized countries – air and water pollution, urban blight and despoliation of natural resources and recreational areas. Though the developing countries were also experiencing similar problems, they regarded them as marginal to their main preoccupation with economic development, and some said that they would welcome more pollution if it meant more development.
Barbara's immediate understanding and brilliant analysis of developing-country concerns impressed me immensely. I was completely captivated by the combination of her amazing intellectual energy with her personal charm, and before the end of our meeting asked her if she would be prepared to help and advise me in preparing for the Conference. To my great delight she accepted and thus began one of the most important relationships and valued friendships I have ever been privileged to enjoy. It was also key to the success of the Stockholm Conference.
When I took up my UN appointment full-time at the beginning of 1971, I moved to the temporary offices that had already been established for our Secretariat at UN Headquarters in New York. Barbara was at Columbia University and we began to see quite a bit of each other. At each meeting, I could see that both her knowledge of the issues and her interest in them had progressed amazingly to the point where she rapidly became our principal source of advice and inspiration. I thoroughly enjoyed our planning sessions, usually over dinner and a glass of the champagne she enjoyed so much. I always came away from these meetings thoroughly stimulated by new insights and ideas.
My first priority was to address the concerns of developing countries and I asked Barbara if she could help me to convene a small group of leading development experts to help us think through how the Conference process and agenda could be re-cast to accommodate developing country concerns. Of course she knew all the leading people in the field and none could say no to her. We met at my UN office with a small core group of those who were closest at hand –including Sri Lanka's Gamani Corea, Pakistan's Mahbub ul Haq, Uruguay's Enrique Iglesias and Colombia's Rodrigo Botero. After I explained the situation to them, Mahbub ul Haq launched a scathing attack on both the purposes and the agenda of the Conference, articulating brilliantly and caustically the position of developing countries that the environment was a problem for the rich and a threat to developing countries.
In responding, I said that, with my own deep commitment to development, I believed that the environment issue in which there was strong and growing interest in industrialized countries could provide a new rationale for increasing their support of developing countries because the state of their environment is critical to the health of the entire global environment. I suggested that we really did not have enough reliable knowledge and analysis to make the case and that if I was wrong in my premise then I had made a mistake in taking on this assignment. I invited him and the other participants to join in a rigorous process of examining this question which was so essential to the entire purpose and prospects of the Conference. Barbara, with her irresistible powers of persuasion, weighed in with strong support of my invitation and to my great relief Mahbub ul Haq joined with the others in accepting the challenge. He and Gamini Corea agreed to join Barbara Ward in leading the process and were soon joined by another eminent and creative guru, Ignacy Sachs, a noted Polish economist at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In subsequent meetings, we recruited other key people, including a young Australian investment banker, Jim Wolfenson, who had showed a real interest in the subject. We decided to organize a meeting of some 30 leading experts representative both of the major regions of the world and of the diversity of views which were emerging on the subject. Again it was Barbara's knowledge of and influence with these normally hard-to-get experts that enabled us to put together a stellar group for a meeting at a small motel in the village of Founex just outside Geneva to which, by that time, our Secretariat Headquarters had moved. Barbara Ward led and guided the preparations for this meeting to which a number of the main participants made important and in some cases highly provocative inputs.
The meeting itself was one of the best that I have ever experienced in terms of spirited intellectual discussion and creative interchange. The report of the meeting, prepared by Mahbub ul Haq and Gamani Corea with Barbara's oversight, articulated the main message resulting from the meeting that environment and development are indeed inextricably linked, and made specific proposals on how developing countries might best avoid the risks and realize the new opportunities that this could produce for them. Fundamental to its message was that the more industrialized countries bore principal responsibility for the damage done and the risks that had arisen to the Earth's environment, that they had been and are the main beneficiaries of the economic growth that had produced these problems, and had an obligation to bear the costs of dealing with them. This translated into the need for the more industrialized countries to provide ‘new and additional’ resources to developing countries to enable the latter to incorporate care for the environment into their development and to participate fully in global efforts to protect and improve the environment. This support was not to come from existing development assistance funds but advocated to be ‘new and additional’.
The Founex Report provided the basis for the proposals I made to our preparatory committee of governments to revamp the agenda for the Conference to address the issues of particular concern to developing countries, and explicitly recognize the relationship between environment and development. Although for the most part the more developed countries did not initially buy into the substantive basis for this change they accepted the broadened agenda as the political price of satisfying developing-country demands and ensuring their engagement in the process. And engage they did. Led by Brazil and India, developing countries built a strong case for acceptance by the more developed countries of primary responsibility for environmental deterioration and for meeting the costs of rectifying it – the theme which was to dominate the negotiations in Stockholm and in the many other international fora that followed.
ONLY ONE EARTH: EXTENDING THE RANGE OF INFLUENCE
Barbara Ward made these issues the focal point of her own speeches and writings. With her unsurpassed genius for articulating them persuasively, she presented them to our audiences within the larger context of the need to establish a much more fair, viable and secure world community in which the poor would share equitably and participate fully. Her messages were so central to the theme of our preparations for Stockholm, and she was so clearly its most powerful and influential messenger, that I asked her if she would write a book for the Conference. Its purpose would be to get this message out to the wider public whose interest we sought to engage and whose influence on political leaders would have a positive effect on the position they took at the Conference. Barbara was very open to the idea, despite her many other obligations.
She recognized that although she herself was from the ‘North’ she was widely seen as a champion of developing-country interest and we agreed that it might be useful to have as a co-author a scientist with impeccable credentials in areas related to the environment who would reinforce the credibility of the book with the public, professionals and politicians. I had been most impressed with a book I had read by a French Scientist, René Dubos, then at Rockefeller University in New York. After some enquiries, I arranged to meet with him in a small office adjoining his laboratory. He immediately impressed me with his quiet dignity and the penetrating quality of the questions he raised. When I told him why I had come to see him, he expressed genuine surprise at the proposal I was raising with him but by the end of our conversation expressed a clear, but noncommittal interest. Most importantly, he agreed to meet with Barbara Ward to discuss the matter.
I was sure he was the right person, but apprehensive about the personal chemistry between these two very different but strong personalities. To my great relief their first meeting could not have gone better. Both reported to me separately with a very positive impression each had of the other and their willingness to proceed with the project. This uniquely creative partnership produced the book Only One Earth, which, together with the Founex Report provided the intellectual underpinning for the Stockholm Conference and, indeed, remains one of the seminal books on the environment and its relationships to development. The contents and the credibility of the book were tested and enhanced by the participation of a galaxy of leading experts and policy-makers in reviewing drafts and making valuable suggestions. But final approval of the manuscript was the sole responsibility of Barbara Ward and René Dubos, and the book is an enduring tribute to their remarkable partnership.
THE ‘VOICE OF THE PEOPLE’ AT STOCKHOLM, 1972
When the Conference opened in Stockholm on the beautiful summer morning of 5 June 1972, Barbara Ward was by my side as my Senior Adviser. She occupied a small suite next to that which had been given to my wife and me in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm and we were able to consult constantly on the multiplicity of issues that arose continually. Although the protocol of the Conference would not enable her to sit on the podium with me, her presence and her influence were pervasive. She was especially active in inspiring and bringing a sense of focus and coherence into the activities of the motley assortment of representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and citizen groups who for the first time at a United Nations Conference had been encouraged to participate. Their activities and demonstrations enlivened the streets of Stockholm and the corridors of the Conference chambers. But the greatest concentration of activities, a mixture of serious dialogue with a variety of folk music, dances and rituals by indigenous people and demonstrations of various kinds, took place at the ‘Hog Farm’ on the outskirts of Stockholm which had been provided by the Swedes for that purpose. I took time out from the official Conference to visit it and this was for me one of the real highlights of the Stockholm experience.
This ‘people power’ had a major influence on both the spirit of the Conference and its results. It provided the basis for much of the extensive media coverage the Conference proceedings received, and clearly influenced the official delegates to take more positive positions on key issues than they had come prepared for. But it was Barbara Ward who was able to draw on this somewhat disorganized and disparate agglomeration of ideas and energies to articulate their central message in a way which both reflected the main concerns of the non-governmental community and spoke persuasively to the official delegations and the media. As it was then counter to United Nations rules to permit anyone not an official delegate to speak at the Plenary Session of the Conference, we contrived an arrangement which enabled her to do so through the simple act of suspending the official proceedings while she spoke and then resuming them. Her speech encapsulated brilliantly and cogently the case for bringing developing countries into a new and equitable environment and development partnership to build a more secure and sustainable future for the entire human community. While other delegates necessarily spoke from the positions of the governments they represented, Barbara was the authentic voice of the people. Her message clearly got to the delegates and had a major effect in elevating prospects for success in the difficult negotiations that followed.
Particularly fascinating was the synergy between Barbara and the other main star of the Conference, also a great lady, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India. Her official statement to the Conference which included the memorable assertion that ‘poverty is the greatest polluter’, complemented and reinforced Barbara's contribution. I was delighted but not at all surprised to find that they had a very high regard for each other. I could not help but remark in reflecting on Stockholm that how in this great intergovernmental event dominated by men, these two extraordinary women were the main stars.
The Stockholm Conference has to be seen as a major milestone, not because its results met all of our hopes and aspirations, but because it was able to surmount the many divisions and controversies to produce a broad consensus which put the environmental issue firmly on the international agenda. Following Stockholm there was a proliferation of activities by governments, multilateral institutions and NGOs.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF IIED
Shortly after the Conference I met with Bob Anderson in New York and he asked my advice about the future of the International Institute of Environmental Affairs. As he had given me notice of this question prior to the Conference, I had given it some thought. My response was that of course it could make an important contribution as a organization that had good sponsorship in the USA and had already established a positive reputation there. At the same time, I suggested that if he wanted it to be truly international, it should become a champion of the synergistic link between environment and development which had been affirmed at Stockholm. In the meantime, Barbara Ward had informed me that she was considering a move back to the UK but had not yet taken steps to explore any of the many opportunities that would await her there. Without having raised the matter with Barbara, I asked Bob Anderson if he might be interested in having Barbara Ward head the Institute, giving it a new name and mission to embrace the environment-development nexus and move the headquarters to London. He was not one to ponder his decisions for long and he acted with immediate enthusiasm to this prospect, asking me to sound out Barbara. She was clearly interested, as this would provide her with an institutional base from which to continue the leadership of the environment–development movement, a leadership she found universally acknowledged on her emergence from the Stockholm Conference.
At that time Bob and Barbara did not know each other and I arranged for the two of them to meet alone in New York. Bob, always quick to strike a deal when he knew it was good, met all Barbara's requirements. As a result, the International Institute of Environmental Affairs (IIEA) was reconstituted as the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), its headquarters moved to London with Barbara as its President and Bob as Chairman. I became an active member of the Board and was delighted but not at all surprised as Barbara put together a superb team of exceptional young people who, with her leadership, made IIED into one of the most effective and influential organizations in the field.
Barbara had a great talent for spotting and recruiting the best and brightest young people, among them some of the contributors to this book. Her star student at Columbia was a young Canadian, David Runnalls, in whom she had great confidence, a confidence that was fully justified by his subsequent contributions to the movement on environment and sustainable development. As I got to know David, it became clear that he had in important influence on Barbara's own thinking while at the same time subjecting her views to the kind of penetrating challenge that any genius needs but many find difficult to accept. I developed an immense respect for David and a close friendship which has continued as he has moved progressively into more important positions of policy influence and practical leadership in the movement.
I continued my own close relationship with the IIED throughout those early years and my friendship with Barbara became even closer as I spent precious time with her both in London and then at her country home. Her spirit and creative intellect continued to inspire all who worked with her even as her physical health deteriorated. Right to the last she was constantly preoccupied with how IIED could help to bring about the better world to which her own life had been so totally committed. After her death, IIED continued to be driven by her vision and the foundations she had laid for its work in leading the evolution of the environment–development movement to the broader concept of sustainable development. I leave it to other contributors to this book to chronicle the rest of this remarkable story. I can only say at this point that Barbara would be proud and pleased at how the IIED which in its present form is truly her creation has continued to work and build on her legacy.