ABSTRACT
The Johannesburg Summit will be the fourth environmental mega-conference organized by the United Nations since 1972. Environmental mega-conferences are substantially different to the many environmental and sustainability conferences that have been convened around the world to establish new cross-national policies, monitor the implementation of existing ones, and promote long-term strategic thinking. Most of these smaller conferences 1 focus on a specific regional problem such as acid rain, a particular polluting substance or substances (e.g. those that are ozone depleting), or a specific ‘sectoral’ issue such as human health, food, or human population. Mega-conferences, on the other hand, try to tale a synoptic overview of the relationship between human society and the natural world. Consequently, they tend to be held much less frequently than other conferences, the main argument being that a long time-frame is needed to encompass the breadth and complexity of the issues under consideration. So, rather than tackle a discrete environmental problem, they seek to provide an opportunity to consider the whole trajectory of human development, over much longer time-frames than national or even regional environmental policy is normally developed. Environmental mega-conferences are also ‘big’ in many other respects. They are self-consciously high-profile events, attracting world leaders and their deputies rather than just environment ministers and their specialist advisers. They excite global media interest, attract thousands of representatives of civil society, and are normally preceded by many years of careful planning and debate at the national and sub-national level.
