Introduction / Methodological remarks.............................................................................1

This discussion paper is about the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) one of the multilateral agreements that came out of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. UNCCD is based on a conceptualization of international relations that transcends to a large extent the traditional notions of inter-governmental treaties. Such policy concepts are known under the framework of Global Governance as they allocate political action rather to the horizontal level implying multi-actor-networks and the civil society than to vertical or top-down processes. The paper first shows that inspired by the Brundtland Report and the emerging process of globalization Rio was the peak season for Global Governance concepts that found their way into treaties and triggered structural reform, thus shaping a different reality of multilateral cooperation. In a second step, the paper shows that the Convention to Combat Desertification is the most Global Governance oriented of all of UNCED’s outcomes. Its legally binding text contains a number of pertinent elements, ranging from a stringent cross-over of environment and development issues, via the ‚bottom-up approach‘, to a mix of policy tools such as mainstreamed national action programmes and partnership agreements.