Global Environmental Governance in the Context of Sustainable Development

Today, globalizing environmental issues have become a vital threat to all humanity, in other words; they have reacheda crisis level. In line with this awareness, since the second half of the twentieth century, the international communityhas been in search of ways to deal with environmental issues. In this context, the concept of sustainable development,which emerged as a new paradigm for addressing environmental issues and bringing environmental, economic andsocial values on common ground, has long been at the heart of the world agenda. For the implementation ofsustainable development, a participatory and multi-actor governance approach has been adopted as a new governingpattern. In this context, environmental governance has emerged as a concept developed by referring to the conceptsof sustainable development and governance in tackling environmental problems. The way the present study handlesthe subject is shaped within the scope of this approach. The United Nations recognizes that environmental governanceis applicable at the local, national, regional and global levels. In this context, the study is focused on globalenvironmental governance. Within this framework, a range of international meetings held mainly under the leadershipof the United Nations, as well as the final declarations published at the end of these events, were analyzed. Theperspective of the literature and relevant institutions on the subject was additionally taken as a reference.