| The year 1992 will be a commemoration of two important anniversaries. First, there will be the five-hundredth year celebration of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World. This journey and successive voyages mark the emergence of a global system in a physical and scientific sense. The second event that will be celebrated will be the twentieth anniversary of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm. This conference has the distinction of raising a global environmental consciousness and reshaping of national environmental agendas.;This thesis will be an exploration of one of, if not the major, themes that emerged from the Stockholm: the concept of sustainable development. The hypothesis of this thesis is that there should be a paradigm shift from our current technocentric development orientation to one which is based upon sustainability in order to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the welfare of future generations. Arguments supporting this paradigm shift will be in two forms. First, there will be an analysis of the political, economical, social, and philosophical foundations of the concept of sustainability. International governmental organizations should be used as instruments of policy redirection that would enable their members to evolve towards patterns of sustainable development. Two environmental problems, deforestation in Southeast Asia and desertification in West Africa will be explored economically, socially, and politically. Then, by utilizing the historical approach a historical and legal analysis of the genesis and evolution of two regional international governmental organizations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Economic Community of West African (ECOWAS) and also their respective roles and influences with regards to environmental questions will be examined.;International governmental organizations have had an important role but mixed record in the developmental sphere thus far via the technocentric paradigm. It will be argued that these same international institutions can have a positive role in redirecting future global development within the confines of sustainability. |
