ABSTRACT
Whilst environmental problems have induced bilateral, transnational, and international cooperation since the early twentieth century, the postwar period witnessed the widespread recognition of the transnational character of environmental degradation amongst citizens and policy makers (Meyer and Kaiser 2017, 3–4). As Arturo Escobar notes, the concept of ‘global problems’, gaining currency during the 1970s, disseminated ‘a distinctive vision of the world as a [fragile] global system where all parts [were] interrelated, thus demanding management on a planetary scale’ (1996, 328). By 1972 the Club of Rome Limits to Growth report and the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm alerted states of the globe’s limited carrying capacity, advocated global cooperation to meet these challenges, and helped move the environment to the centre of international political debates. However, at a time when tense discussions on resource management and pollution control took place between the Global South and industrialized North, the Stockholm Conference shed light on the fragmented state of world politics around the issues of development and sustainability. The event’s association of sustainability with technological innovation marginalized from the debate the communities regarded as negating this process. On the other hand, delegates from developing countries condemned the conference as stemming from the developed countries’ desire to impose on the poor countries the costs of dealing with the environmental destruction in order to retain an economic edge over them, and advocated the right to choose their path towards development (Milton 1996; Kaiser and Meyer 2017). As this chapter will show, environmental politics also shaped international design discourse in the 1970s, revealing conflicting visions of the profession’s environmental responsibility within the ranks of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID).
