March 2012: The Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston has published a “Governance and Sustainability Issue Brief Series,” which seeks to provide analytical input to ongoing discussions on institutional reform for environmental governance and sustainable development.

The series addresses topics including: financing international environmental governance; overcoming fragmented governance; enhancing synergies among multilateral environmental agreements; reforming the architecture of the international environmental regime; and enhancing environmental governance for sustainable development.

The policy paper on “Financing International Environmental Governance: Lessons from the United Nations Environment Programme,” focuses on the relationship between institutional form and funding and suggests that a simple causal argument connecting the two could be misleading. It highlights other relevant factors, such as the institution’s mandate, size and location, and concludes by calling for a return to the original idea behind UNEP’s financial mechanism, the Environment Fund, which was to finance core programme work within the whole UN system, rather than just within UNEP itself.

The paper on “Enhancing Environmental Governance for Sustainable Development: Function-Oriented Options” focuses on two of the options for reform of the international environmental governance system that are being considered ahead of Rio+20: enhancing UNEP, or establishing a new specialized agency of the UN, such as a world environment organization or UN environment organization. It suggests some specific measures that could be considered when further refining these options, and highlights some of the risks and benefits associated with the options. [Publication: Governance and Sustainability Issue Brief Series]