Coalitions of the willing Main Page Content Big international
agreements seem to have hit a rut. This past June, "Rio + 20"
was a bust by most accounts. Nothing short of a global green
economy was its goal, but it ended as the latest failure in a
string of ambitious UN meetings including the Climate Change
Conference in Copenhagen, 2009; the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg, 2002; and several Conferences of
the Parties (COPs) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change. My students and I attended several of these meetings
because (naively) we believed history was in the making. We
thought the world was on a path to sustainability, and it was
only a matter of time. But I could feel frustration growing with
each successive event. The original Rio Earth Summit in 1992 had
detractors and disappointments, but optimism still prevailed. So
what changed? The world changed. Now it's "hot, flat and
crowded" in the words of Thomas Friedman, and much more
uncertain economically. The global eco