ABSTRACT
A year before the conference, Maurice Strong, the UNCED chair, appointed Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny to promote the international business community’s standpoints on environmental issues. Schmidheiny formed the Business Council on Sustainable Development (BCSD). Carothers describes the BCSD as a coalition of some fifty multinationals, including some of the worst polluters on the planet, whose ‘goals were predictable: “voluntary” rather than legislated reduction in toxic emissions, the right to corporate privacy and wholesale support for “free trade”’ (1993: 14-15).
