North-South environmental negotiations, especially as exemplified at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), are increasingly adversarial and the reigning confrontational attitude among negotiators from both sides threatens to hinder the achievement of environmental treaties that re fair, wise, efficient, and stable.(1) An opportunity exists for the South to formulate a new strategy for international environmental negotiations-built around its own experience and around the principles of negotiation theory-that could better serve the realization of it environmental and developmental goals. This article addresses the issue from the perspective of the South.(2) The first (descriptive) part analyzes the South's experience in international environmental negotiations since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Conference) and seeks to understand the perceptions, fears, hopes, and interests that the South brought to,and took away from, these negotiations. The principal and unchanged interest of the South has remained development and a better quality of life for its people. It principal fear, that the North is using environmental issues as an excuse to pull up the development ladder behind it, has remained unalloyed through two decades of environmental diplomacy. Also unallayed is its growing frustration at its own failure to make any substantive gains toward its cherished goal of development. The second (predictive) section suggests that the New International Economic Order(NIE[co]O) movement of the 1970s is today being converted into a call for a New International Environmental Order (NIE[nv]O). and the South's positions, interests, fears and hopes in this emerging movement will remain exactly the same as during its predecessor. Therefore, it is important to view the two as points lying on the same continuum. The final (prescriptive) section proposes a strategy for the South that may make its experience in NIE(nv)O more fruitful than it was during NIE(co)O. The recommendation is for the South to rethink its negotiating strategy in light of negotiation theory. the strategy being proposed for the South can be most simply described as:''Stop feeling angry at the North and sorry fro yourself.'' This strategy recommends that the South should (1) focus on interest, no positions; (2) redefine the power balance; (3) be hard on the issues, not on people; (4) redefine the international environmental agenda;(5) organize itself, (6) develop its constituency;(7) clean up its own act; (8) remember that winning is not important, but good agreements are. In conclusion, the adoption of such a strategy would not only better serve the interests of the South, but would lead to a more productive international environmental negotiation regime and thereby would also better for the North. The only fundamentally unsolved problem in this unsteady interregnum between imperial ages that may be dying and a planetary society that struggles to be born is whether the rich and fortunate are imaginative enough, and the resentful and underprivileged poor patient enough to begin to establish a true foundation of better sharing, fuller cooperation, and joint planetary work. In short, no problem is insoluble in the creation of a balanced and conserving planet, save humanity itself. Can jit reach in time the vision of joint survival? Can its inescapable physical interdependence-the chief new insight of our century-induce that vision? we do not know. we have the duty to hope.(3)
