Agenda
Symposium ‘The Montreal Moment’ (RIAS and Utrecht University)
The Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) and Utrecht University are now welcoming papers for the jointly organized symposium ‘The Montreal Moment: Ozone Depletion and the Rise of International Environmental Governance’, which will be held in Middelburg from 5-6 June 2025.
After years of campaigning and confrontation, in 1985 twenty countries signed the Vienna Convention, which established a framework for international regulations on ozone-depleting substances and paved the way for the Montreal Protocol. Finalized in 1987, this document represented a landmark multilateral environmental agreement, regulating the production and consumption of dangerous compounds and setting standards in international environmental governance that are still regarded as paramount.
The ways in which the Montreal Protocol was achieved, the discussions and negotiations it unleashed and entailed, the questions and issues it raised on multiple scales invite historians to further reflect on its origins and legacies vis-à-vis the contemporary rise and consolidation of a complex international environmental governance system. Was the Montreal Protocol an end point of a longer history of international efforts at managing the environment? Or was it the harbinger of new forms of multilateral cooperation? What does its trajectory reveal about similar attempts to regulate global environmental problems like climate change, soil erosion, or pollution? What was the role that non-state actors and nongovernmental organizations played in getting it signed? By converse, how did corporations react to its development and against its provisions? And how did governments position themselves in the broader debates around international environmental safeguard that the Montreal Protocol embodied? How was scientific evidence understood, conveyed, interpreted, and managed in this context? And finally, how did systemic and external variables such as economic volatility and industrial development impact on the international environmental politics of the 1970s and 1980s?
The organisers invite proposals that address (some of) these questions and that put the Montreal Protocol within the broader framework of environmental internationalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Local, national, regional, and transnational perspectives are mostly welcomed, as well as contributions that shed further light on the politics and diplomacy of the agreement.
Abstracts (300 words max.) accompanied by a short bio should be submitted via e-mail to the RIAS ultimately 15 December 2024.
