ABSTRACT
One of the great ironies of the demonstrations at the World Trade Organizatio meeting in Seattle in late 1999 is that the massive protests against one form of globalization were facilitated by another dimension of the same process— the revolution in information and communications technologies. Reversing ecological decline in the early decades of the new century will require innovative partnerships between many different actors, including nongovernmental organizations (NGO), businesses, governments, and international organizations. In January 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an annual gathering of corporate titans and other members of the global elite. Officials and government representatives, for their part, sometimes grow frustrated with NGOs. Pressure is growing for the United Nations to take bold steps to formalize the growing importance of NGOs. Much of the NGO activity in international environmental policymaking dates to the June 1992 Earth Summit, which was a watershed for the democratization of global environmental governance.
