ABSTRACT
This whole effort of negotiation has been based on the notion of sustainable development, which became a household expression with the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987), chaired by the former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was later to become Director-General of WHO. The Brundtland Commission was not the fi rst to use the term, but its report “Our Common Future,” came at a favorable point in time: the relationship between economic growth and the environment had become an essential element of the discourse of development. There had been a confl ict brewing between these two concepts ever since the fi rst large UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm in 1972. At that time, Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, took the lead in stating that the main priority for developing countries was to combat poverty and deprivation. Environmental issues were seen as a distraction from this main objective, or worse, a way of the industrialized north to keep the developing countries down.
