ABSTRACT

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), was held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, from which its more popular title, ‘the Rio Earth Summit’, was derived. The conference’s aim was to formulate a number of voluntary frameworks and legally binding conventions for nation states to catalyse more sustainable global development. Most commentators agree that UNCED fell far short of this goal. The individual interests of national governments and business lobbies dominated negotiations, with the result that UNCED’s prescription for confronting worldwide poverty and environmental degradation was based on the very policies that caused these problems in the first place (Thomas 1993). This chapter reviews the process of decision making as well as the outputs from Rio, and critically assesses their contribution to sustainable development discourse and policy.