This chapter focuses on the environmental diplomacy surrounding the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the “Brundtland Commission.” This process popularized the concept of sustainable development. The chapter begins by detailing the substantial changes seen in international environmental conditions through the mid-1980s, brought about largely by the Third World Debt crisis. These shifts created a rapidly deteriorating global environmental context and necessitated significant changes in institutional arrangements. The need for institutional change was a central finding of the important 1987 “Brundtland report,” titled Our Common Future. The Brundtland Commission highlighted a rapid deterioration in the world environment and underlined the need for major institutional change. Some actors sought to realize such change at the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, when the report and its call for action were presented to world leaders. Coordination was hindered, however, by divergent expectations and the absence of a Temporal Focal Point. While states were incentivized to cooperate rapidly to address problems in global environmental governance, the institutional status quo prevailed.

The most dramatic environmental debate in Norway in the late 1970s was whether to build a hydroelectric dam at the Alta-Kautokeino River. It was a debate the Deep Ecologists lost with a Supreme Court verdict in 1982. The defeat meant an end to Deep Ecology as a movement and an intellectual endeavor in Norway as they became increasingly fundamentalist and thus politically irrelevant. However, at the same time they enjoyed their first international breakthrough in North America, thanks to the environmental organization Earth First! The end of the Cold War in 1989 also meant a turn towards global climatological perspectives. Propelled by the sentiment that capitalism had won over communism, Gro Harlem Brundtland would, as Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, frame the solution to climate change in cost–benefit terms, rather than in socialist terms. Climate change problems were to be solved by treading carbon dioxide equivalent quotas and by buying clean development mechanism certificates. Norway would be an active buyer in these markets, making sure Norway would look like a virtuous “pioneer country” to its own citizens and the world.

In 1974 the Norwegian physicist and co-author of Limits to Growth (1972) coined the phrase “a sustainable society.” It was meant to capture his vision for a viable environmental future, while also open a new endless frontier for science with the larger goal of mobilizing Christian religion and respect for the almighty. It was an ecumenical hope in the coming of the Golden Age and the Kingdom of God that framed early understandings of environmental sustainability. In Norway, Randers directed the Resource Policy Group, an influential think tank that provided policy papers to the Labor Party and beyond. The notion of a “sustainable development” was adapted from them by the Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development leading up to the Our Common Future report from 1987.