ABSTRACT
A world environment organization (WEO) has been proposed by analysts and policy-makers alike to remedy existing problems of international environmental governance. Despite significant progress in the past decades, sustainable development has not been realized. International environmental problems such as the loss of biological diversity, climate change or the dispersion of persistent hazardous chemicals remain largely unresolved (UNEP 2002). The creation of a full-fledged international organization is expected to strengthen international environmental governance, as did the establishment of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) for the liberalization of international trade (Runge 2001; Charnovitz 2002). A WEO could provide a common roof for a number of the existing multilateral environmental agreements and form a new 'gravity centre of international environmental policy-making'.1
