From Angela Cropper and Harold Mooney, co-chairs, Millennium Assessment Panel
In his letter about the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), Steve Lonergan says the original article was correct in its assertion that the assessment “had no direct link to the people in power” (14 May, p 28). Nothing could be further from the truth. The MA was first called for in 2000 by the UN secretary general in his Millennium Report to the General Assembly. Governments involved in four international conventions (covering biodiversity, desertification, wetlands and migratory species) took decisions supporting the creation of the assessment, requested specific information from it, and appointed representatives of the conventions to serve on the MA board.
The MA is unique among international assessments in that it has strong and formal ties to governments through these international conventions, but also involves the private sector, NGOs and indigenous groups in the governance of the process. In considering the strengths and weaknesses of this arrangement, the members of the MA board concluded in January 2005 that it was premature to state whether an exclusively intergovernmental process was preferable to a multi-stakeholder process with intergovernmental authorisation.
Based on the experience of the MA, at least one new global assessment – the International Agricultural Science and Technology Assessment – has been designed with a mix of intergovernmental and multi-stakeholder oversight.
Governments are not the only institutions taking decisions on environment and development issues, and indeed are sometimes not even the most important institutions in this regard. The UN can strengthen its own role by embracing processes that seek to involve all the key decision-makers, not just governments.
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Stanford, California, US, and Laventille, Trinidad and Tobago
