On 3 October Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney, delivered a lecture, “Climate and Capitalists: Barbara Ward, Margaret Mead and the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment”, at the Institute’s International History Seminar and joint colloquium session with the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. Her research project seeks to trace the emergence of concerns for the environment, climate and human demography, and how these translated into networks and discourses of international governance.

Glenda Sluga unearths histories of the 1972 UN Human Environment Conference, which is remembered as the first example of the attempted global governance of environmental issues and climate change. She examines different contexts that seemed intertwined with the Conference and that reveal unexpected networks spreading across a range of international actors. By tracking these political, economic and intellectual networks, her aim is to reflect specifically on the role of prominent activists in these events, and on the growing influence of “businessmen” in the history of international thinking, and global governance, in the so-called “global 70s”.

Professor Sluga used archival methods to trace networks of actors through a focus on international communities such as the Ekistics Society and the Club of Rome, and on events such as the Delos Symposium of Ekistics and the 1972 Stockholm conference. In particular, she is interested in the involvement of writer and activist Barbara Ward. In following Ward through the archive, she also developed an interest in the role played by well-known and influential anthropologist Margaret Mead in these events and proceedings. She found it curious that both female environmental activists had a strong agenda of involving, inviting and working with various influential businessmen and entrepreneurs, and therefore she decided to find out what lay behind this agenda. Moreover, she tried to uncover the stimulus imparted by these business actors in driving and shaping the agenda for global environmental governance.

This research project helps us understand that international organisations such as the United Nations are not abstract concepts, but are realised through the active efforts and networks of individual actors that produce lasting outcomes. Moreover, the presence of big financial interests seems to have shaped the discourse and practice in certain ways that need to be further uncovered to gain deeper understanding of how the global system works. The particular time frame of the 1970s is also significant – as it emerged during the discussion with Graduate Institute professors and students. Not only did this decade outline a framework for discussing environmental issues internationally, but also, quite curiously, this was the time when the “transnational” turn in the social sciences began to take particular shape. Thus, as Professor Sluga suggests, perspectives offered by the study of networks, gender, business and non-official histories continue to be at the top of the research agenda.

The research project is part of a larger collaborative exercise by, among other partners, the University of Sydney, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Joint Center for History and Economics based at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference in 2022.

By Aditya Kiran Kakati , PhD Candidate in International History