ABSTRACT
From the perspective of the 1990s it seems extraordinary that the environment should have been so neglected by political economists. Who would have imagined, even five years ago, that a United Nations’ conference on the environment would attempt to set the agenda for development into the next century? The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 illustrated more effectively than anything else, the enormous rift that has appeared between North and South. Not only is the agenda of the North different from that of the South, as I have argued elsewhere (Redclift 1992a, b) but the language, the discourse, is different This chapter was conceived as a contribution to the new discourse on development and the environment which is being constructed in the developing world, in the wake of the 1992 Earth Summit It consists of an exploration of the divergence between North and South in terms of the limited northern perspective represented by ‘environmental managerialism’.
