If you look at the two international and domestic timelines, it is clear that the Swedish UN mission first raised the issue of the conference BEFORE acid rain took off as a national Swedish issue. Not by much (less than a year), but getting acid rain on the international agenda was NOT the main reason for proposing the UN conference (or even a reason at all). This has also been confirmed by personal interviews with the people who were at the Swedish UN mission at the time (Sverker Åström and Lars-Göran Engfeldt). They came up with the conference idea more or less on their own and then sold the idea to the Swedish government/PM without being concerned by acid rain. As diplomats from a "neutral" country, they were much more interested in bridging Cold War political gaps within the UN and start dealing with the environment broadly as a means to do that, than tackle acid rain specifically. Of course, once the conference came around, Sweden happily used it to talk about acid rain...

Henrik

On 2/13/2013 9:46 AM, Radoslav Dimitrov wrote:
I read somewhere that Sweden had an ulterior motive to organize the conference. After the conference began, they put the acid rain issue on the table. The issue had not been on the official agenda, and delegates from other countries (UK, for instance) felt somewhat ambushed into pre-negotiations. Would be interested to hear confirmations or refutation - anyone?

Radoslav S. Dimitrov, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Western Ontario
Social Science Centre
London, Ontario
Canada N6A 5C2
Tel. +1(519) 661-2111 ext. 85023
Fax +1(519) 661-3904
Email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>

On 2013-02-13, at 6:53 AM, Kirsten Worm wrote:

Dear gep-eds,

This year I am once more teaching global environmental politics at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Science. Inspite of reading several textbook on the Stockholm-Rio process including the excellent 5th edition of Chasek, Downie and Brown:
Global Environmental Politics, one question remains:

Who were the lead countries behind the Stockholm conference in 1972. Chasek et al. mentions that the conference was supported by the US,
but was the US lead state? I wonder about that.

Does anyone have an answer?

Maybe someone out there with even more grey hair than mine even attended the conference?

Thank you in advance.

Kirsten Worm, M.A.; Ph.D
University of Copenhagen
Department of Political Science


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