ABSTRACT
A great many international negotiations, conferences and institutions have sprung up around issues of sustainable development. Since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm, over 150 additional treaties on sustainable development issues have been negotiated and have entered into force. The majority of these have been driven by the advanced industrialised nations-the group of countries that have come to be known as the ‘North’ in multilateral negotiating contexts. While divisions between developed and developing countries (the ‘South’) have played a major role in the process of negotiating multilateral environmental agreements, and some environmental issues, such as the negotiations on desertification, have been driven by the South,1 most substantive environmental debates have focused primarily on positions articulated by developed countries. As a result, much of the actual negotiating energy has focused on differences between the Northern industrialised nations.2
