Issues of pollution, excessive use of natural resources, nature protection and climate change transcend national boundaries. They tend to be of a regional or even global scope. In historical perspective, the European Union (EU) was relatively slow to take up environmental protection (beyond health and safety related issues) in the 1970s, followed by the formal introduction of this policy field into the EC treaty with the Single European Act only in 1986-7. In fact, other International Organizations (IOs) had addressed environmental issues much earlier starting with the League of Nations in inter-war Europe. After World War II the United Nations and its Economic Commission for Europe, the Council of Europe and the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and Development, the present-day OECD, addressed environmental issues such as water and air pollution by pooling scientific expertise, collecting comparative data, propagating and funding international scientific programmes and inducing greater media attention to the cross-border dimension of environmental protection. These IOs became norms entrepreneurs in environmental protection and crucial sites for the diffusion of ideas and policies to other IOs, to states and governments and probably, across world regions and regional integration organizations.

In a long-term perspective covering what might be called the global twentieth century, the UN Conference Man and the Environment in Stockholm in 1972 appears to be a turning point. From then onwards, environmental protection increasingly became the focus of policy-making at the transnational and international level, in the context of IOs, and was no longer confined to bilateral treaties, for example concerning river pollution. This is also when the European Communities developed their first Environmental Action Programmes and began to become involved in issues such as bird and habitat protection.

40 years later of the Stockholm event, it is time to reconsider those received wisdoms about international environmentalism: to what extent did Stockholm actually mark a turning point? Or, alternatively, is it not rather necessary to highlight the long structural continuities and path dependencies characteristic of IOs and their activities? In order to take stock of what we know about the role of IOs in environmentalism, the conference "Environmental Protection in the Global Twentieth Century: International Organizations, Networks and Diffusion of Ideas and Policies" brings together for the first time the growing number of researchers working in this emerging field.

Sponsored by the KFG "The Transformative Power of Europe", and organized by the KFG alumni Wolfram Kaiser (Portsmouth) and Jan-Henrik Meyer (Aarhus), fifteen scholars from Europe and North America have been invited to the conference at the Free University, to be held 25-27 October 2012.

Reaching back to the first half of the 20th century a number of papers will address the longer-term continuities and possible path dependencies, exploring conservation efforts and the diffusion of ideas well before the UN conference. Nevertheless, the conference will zoom in on Stockholm and examine the role of a variety of actors: on Brazil, speaking for the developing world, on the US as a most influential player, on the Holy See and NGOs. For the post-Stockholm period, several papers will address the emergence of new concerns within the framework of IOs such as climate change.

The papers cover IOs of very different geographical scope and degree of institutionalisation: from the International Labour Organisation to the OECD, from the rather surprising case of OPEC to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The contributions will explore the role of IOs as arenas for the exchange of ideas and mediators facilitating the diffusion of ideas with regard to a wide range of environmental problems: classical conservation issues such as national parks in South America, the protection of global commons such as the Southern Ocean Ecosystem, but also concerns about transnational river and transboundary air pollution. IO's contribution to the perception of the more recent risks of nuclear energy and climate change are covered, too. We do not perceive IOs as solitary, let alone unitary actors, but we discuss them as embedded within networks of experts, interest groups and NGOs, such as labour unions or the churches, as well as governments and other IOs.

The conference is generally open to the public, however, space is limited. If you are interested in attending, please register with us in advance by 15 October, sending an e-mail to: jhmeyer@gmx.de

For further information see our Conference Website at: http://www.transformeurope.eu