The Common Heritage of Mankind and Global Environmental Governance

Abstract

"The paper explores the growing significance of the Common Heritage of Mankind (CHM) principle in present-day international relations which had increasingly become preoccupied with the agenda of environmental diplomacy. It will briefly trace the history of the concept, formally taking off from the historic initiative in 1967 in the United Nations to declare the international seabed and its resources as the CHM. The implications of the CHM's embodiment in several international conventions, chiefly in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, are then correlated with recent moves to extend its application to other resources/environments of global concern: food, energy, atmosphere, outer space, and science and technology.

"In its conclusions, the paper will not only assert the importance of the emergent CHM practice in the world of this century. Also to be raised is the possibility of linkage between the CHM, as a legal and political expression, and other common property notions at the national and local/indigenous levels, and how both can be made to impact on each other in the policy process to overcome ecological crises."