The Rise of International Environmental Law, 1946–1993: Narrow Limits and Extensive Tasks

Abstract

Environmental lawyers have devoted little attention to their discipline’s past, and when they have done so, they have often narrated the past as showing that the field is becoming progressively more self-aware and sophisticated so as to reach its present stage of maturity. In this article, we trace a somewhat different course. We follow the emergence of the field from the 1950s to its eventual collapse into ‘sustainable development’. To do this, we examine the processes that created and shaped its boundaries in such a way that it gradually came to see itself as a specific type of professional project with a blueprint for international legal reform. We examine the way in which topics became included in and excluded from the field. And we focus especially on the diplomatic, professional and academic tensions that shaped the field and eventually led it from its early environmentalist orientation to its present-day efforts to engage with wider issues of social development and international justice.