Clearing the FOG speaks with two guests from the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts – Boston about the current direction that global governance is taking. Senior fellow Harris Gleckman authored a response to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Redesign Initiative which was released in 2010. In brief, the direction proposed by the WEF would give a stronger role to multinational corporations and reduce the role of the nation-state. Maria Ivanova, co-director of the Center for Governance and Sustainability, will discuss governance systems with respect to environmental issues around the world that function well and those that do not. The future of global governance is the major question of the century.
Listen here:
The Future of Global Governance with Harris Gleckman and Maria Ivanova by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud
Relevant articles and websites:
Stop the Fast Track to a Future of Global Corporate Rule by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
WEF Proposes a Public-Private United “Nations” by Harris Gleckman
Reader’s Guide to the WEF’s Global Redesign Initiative
Guests:
Harris Gleckman is a sociologist by training and his professional experience crosses the disciplines of international policy, economics, trade and environment. As Chief, Environment, at the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, Gleckman worked on multinational corporations and the environment and the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development. At UNCTAD, he worked in the Geneva office of the UN secretary-general and as an economic advisor to the G77 in New York during the run up to the 2005 Heads of State Summit and as Chief of the UNCTAD NY Office. His responsibilities in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs crossed between building linkages between the UN and the WTO, coordinating three days of high-level informal dialogues at the 2002 “Financing for Development Conference,” and directing outreach program to economic and trade ministries. Outside the United Nations, Gleckman has worked with the Institute for Environmental Security (The Hague, 2005-2008) on global policy coherence as it impacts on the climate change process; with the Commission on Environmental Cooperation (Montreal, 1995-97); and with the UNFCCC (Bonn and Copenhagen, 2009) on the relationship between macro-economic developments and climate change. He is the director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting, based in Chappaqua, NY and Portland, ME.
Maria Ivanova is an international relations and environmental policy scholar specializing in governance and sustainability. Her research and policy work focus on global environmental governance and the performance of international environmental institutions. She has worked on issues such as financing for the environment, US foreign environmental policy, and sustainability on campuses and in organizations. Her career, marked by teaching excellence and policy leadership, has bridged academia and policy. Her academic work has been recognized for bringing analytical rigor and innovative input to the international negotiations on reforming the UN system for environment. She has worked closely with national governments and UN agencies in providing an academic perspective into their political positions about international environmental governance.
Ivanova served as a coordinating lead author of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-5), the flagship UN environmental assessment in 2012. She has numerous publications, has produced three short documentaries on global environmental governance, is the editor of the Governance and Sustainability Issue Brief Series, and serves on the editorial board of Global Environmental Politics. She co-leads (with Robyn Hannigan, dean of the School for the Environment) a National Science Foundation project on Coasts and Communities, which trains doctoral students as environmental problem solvers and focuses on the complex interactions of natural and human systems in urban and urbanizing coastal areas across Massachusetts Bay and the Horn of Africa.
Ivanova is a faculty associate in the Governance, Environment and Markets Initiative at Yale University. From 2005 to 2010, she was on the faculty at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Previously, she worked at the Environment Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris and at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in Stockholm. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Ecologic Institute in Berlin, is the recipient of the 2007 Professor of the Year Award, the 2010 Mary Lyon Award from Mount Holyoke College, and the 2010 Goddess Artemis Award from the Euro-American Women’s Council. In 2013, she was appointed to the U.N. Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board.
Ivanova holds a PhD (with distinction) and two master’s degrees, in international relations and environmental management, from Yale University.
For more information on her research and publications, please visit Maria Ivanova’s Scholarworks page.