THE RESPONSE OF INTERNATIONAL-ORGANIZATIONS TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGE - THE CASE OF THE UNITED-NATIONS INDUSTRIAL-DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION (UNIDO)

This article examines the effectiveness of UNIDO in addressing the challenges of environmental degradation and in helping developing countries promote sustainable development paths. The analysis suggests that the slow process of integrating environmental concerns in UNIDO's activities was affected both by internal organizational factors, such as the shared professional values in UNIDO's institutional culture and its organizational flexibility and responsiveness, and by factors relating to the external context, including financial constraints and inter-agency conflicts. In contrast to studies of successful persuasion of epistemic communities' in international negotiations, this article looks at the factors which have impeded the process of persuasion. At the theoretical level, it seeks to analyse the difficulties of changing the policy agenda in a specific international organization.