“Empowering the Human Environment: Stockholm and the Rise of Global Environmental Governance”

Abstract

Since the modern understanding of ‘the environment’ emerged in earnest after World War II there has been a parallel rise of governance of this new phenomenon with its own rich and largely unwritten history. A landmark event was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, prepared over several years of scientific and diplomatic work in Stockholm and New York. Already then and even more in the following decade, Stockholm and Sweden assumed an oversize role in the shaping and developing of global environmental governance. This middle-sized city on the northern fringe of Europe has been lining up: ambitious politicians (such as Olof Palme, Alva Myrdal, Inga Thorsson, Anna Lindh), entrepreneurial, policy-influencing scientists (Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Bert Bolin, Gordon Goodman, Malin Falkenmark), significant journals (Tellus, Ambio), civic movements and activists (all the way up to Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future), institutional innovations (Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm Resilience Centre), key GEG related concepts (the Anthropocene, the Earth system, the Planetary Boundaries framework) and a string of important meetings from the pre-1972 SMIC meetings on climate change through to the Nobel environmental summit gatherings in 2011 and 2021. How can we assess and explain the relative weight of the contribution of a city in the rise of such a vast and complex phenomenon as GEG? Drawing on a book-length project, I will reflect on this question, which raises a number of theoretical and methodological questions. My analysis circles around a set of empowering properties, which I will argue Stockholm, and Sweden possessed that compensated for other shortcomings in relation to the usual top-level hierarchy of world cities and centers of world affairs, all with the prefix con-: convening power, contributory expertise, conceptualizing ingenuity, connecting inclusiveness emphasizing the human dimensions of the new human environment.

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. His most recent book, Ice Humanities: Living, Thinking and Working in a Melting World (with Klaus Dodds) will appear in July 2022 on Manchester University Press. A monograph (with Eric Paglia), The Human Environment: Stockholm and the Rise of Global Environmental Governance, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.