These concerns were given a global political platform in 1972 when the UN Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. It was attended by representatives of 113 governments, and debates centred on the apparently conflicting priorities of economic development and the protection of the environment (Haas 2002: 79). Whilst environmental activists from Europe and North America were urging their politicians to protect and conserve ecosystems, representatives from developing countries were unwilling to accept environmental limits on their development. ‘Poverty is the worst form of pollution’, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi famously told the conference (Dresner 2002: 28). Despite these deep disagreements, the conference did agree that global environmental issues required some kind of global management, and the conference led to the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) based in Nairobi (Ivanova 2012). The apparent tension between environmental degradation and the need for economic growth and development, especially in the world’s poorest countries, was the subject of the World Commission on Environment and Development, which became known as the Brundtland Commission after its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norwegian Prime Minister and Minister for Environmental Affairs (Dresner 2002; Dryzek 2005; Sachs 1999). The 22-person Brundtland Commission was convened at the request of the UN Secretary-General in 1983. The commission spent four years travelling worldwide, hearing from scientists, communities, politicians, teachers, industrialists and many others. They produced their report, Our Common Future, in 1987. It became a landmark text for the concept of sustainable development, which it defined as ‘development which meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Brundtland 1987: 43). The stakes of environmental governance had never been clearer: as the title of the report indicated, this was about our common future. In terms of the evolution of global environmental governance, the Brundtland Report urged that ‘the unity of human needs requires a functioning multilateral system that respects the democratic principle of consent and accepts that not only the Earth but also the world is one’ (Brundtland 1987: 51-2). This made the case for a more coordinated system of global environmental governance. Although many countries had begun to enact environmental protections and regulations as a result of social movement pressures in the 1970s and 1980s, it was becoming obvious that many environmental issues – such as acid rain, declining fish stocks and climate change – were transboundary or global, and required coordinated action by many or all states. For this reason another global summit was needed. The Rio Earth Summit was held twenty years after Stockholm, and dwarfed it in size and public attention (Dresner 2002; Dryzek 2005; Haas 2002; Sachs 1999). Coming in 1992, just after the end of the Cold War and at a time of huge enthusiasm about the future of global cooperation and the ‘victory’ of liberal democracy, it seemed to be the best chance in a generation to secure substantive progress on building a coherent architecture of global environmental governance.