The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: Two Steps Forward and One Back, or Vice Versa

Abstract

This Article evaluates the significance of the Earth Summit to the continuing maturation of the law of sustainable development through scrutiny of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, one of the principal instruments adopted at UNCED. This Article attempts to establish the significance of the Rio meeting for the progressive evolution of international environmental law, most particularly through a comparison of the Rio Declaration with its predecessor, the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, which resulted from an earlier United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held twenty years before Rio. Through this analysis, both the 1992 Rio and 1972 Stockholm meetings can be placed in a larger context that reveals the dynamics of the ongoing development of principles of sustainability in international law.