Negotiating a Role for the Private Sector in International Environmental Agreements: Evolving Times and North-South Divisions.

This paper traces the international community's evolving expectations for the private sector's involvement in implementing sustainable development goals, focusing on the positions taken by negotiators from the North and South to encourage or discourage this involvement. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was signed in 1992, refers to actors other than governmental Parties in only one case. The 1994 UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), by contrast, contains repeated instructions for non-State actors, commencing with a preambular reference to the "special role of non-governmental organizations and other major groups" in efforts to combat desertification and mitigate the effects of drought. By 2002, the international community, through the World Summit on Sustainable Development, was actively encouraging the development of "partnerships" between private sector, government and non-governmental entities to implement sustainable development objectives. This paper reviews this evolution through a review of the negotiations regarding the private sector in the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. It then analyzes the negotiations to examine why these talks have unfolded as they have and to identify possible changes to move the talks forward. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]