In his engaging and practical book Development Without Destruction: The UN and Global Resource Management, Nico Schrijver shows how the UN developed into a hub for natural resource management by default, not by design. As this comprehensive contribution to the UN Intellectual History Project series recounts, the Charter of the United Nations does not discuss natural resources and does not enshrine environmental conservation. The apparent ‘default’ status of UN resource management efforts has provided critics of the UN with plenty of ammunition over the years. In this makeshift context, co-ordination failures and public relations slip-ups have occasionally undermined the environmental efforts of an alphabet soup of UN specialized agencies and programs.
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