Hilary French is director of the Global Governance Project, which is part of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D. C. - based nonprofit research organisation that focuses on international environmental and development issues. French is the author of "Vanishing Borders: Protecting the Planet in the Age of Globalization " and a co-author of 10 of the Worldwatch Institute 's renowned "State of the World " reports. In the latest of these reports, she wrote a chapter entitled "Reshaping Global Governance. " A review of that book appears on Page 26. French is interviewed here by Bulletin Editor Pavel P. Antonov. How can countries with weak economies and unstable political systems take part in the process of making global policy for nature protection? You raise a very important question - how to implement treaties in countries where implementing any kind of law - whether it is a national law or provisions of international treaties - is difficult. That 's a big problem in many parts of the world, in particular many parts of the developing world. Some of the challenges we face in looking at how to make these environmental treaties work better turn out to be really closely related with questions of just making governance in general work better. … But there are some initiatives undertaken at the international level - aimed at capacity building - which basically means assisting the countries with developing national systems for implementing and enforcing environmental legislation. Could civil society involvement be the factor that would make nature protection efforts the world-over more effective? Yes, definitely. One of the successful legacies of the Rio World Summit 10 years ago was the globalisation of nongovernmental organisations that took place in Rio. It kind of paved the way for further efforts toward NGO collaboration in subsequent years. NGOs have been given a very powerful new tool - the World Wide Web and all the other benefits of the information age … made it much more possible for NGOs to co-operate internationally, to try to push for some of the kinds of policy changes that are so desperately needed. During Central and Eastern Europe 's transition period, NGOs had limited success in putting sustainable development at the top of the political agenda. What could they have done better? Certainly there are a lot of challenges to channeling NGO involvement effectively. Since you have a great diversity of groups that have quite different perspectives, agendas and priorities, it makes it very difficult to form a sustained common voice pressing for a common strategy. One challenge is to get the NGO community better organised so that it becomes a more powerful voice, so that it is not separated in many different directions that cannot mobilise the kind of political pressure that is desperately needed. There are some logistical challenges that NGOs face as well. Funding can be very difficult for NGOs to obtain in any case, but particularly in times when the economy is in a fragile state, which we are in fact encountering in the US at the moment. Was the Sept. 11, attack a significant strike against the anti-globalism movement? Certainly the fact that the attacks were on the World Trade Center immediately raise in many people 's minds the question of whether there wasn 't some sort of commonality of the perspective between the environment protesters in the streets and the terrorists. To the credit of the anti-globalism movement, most of its leaders moved very quickly to distance themselves from the terrorist attack and to point out that this is a non-violent movement. But looking a little more broadly, there are some opportunities here: The events of Sept. 11 and the consecutive months have certainly helped to wake up the world to the need to deal with a number of pressing issues that are undermining international stability and security. . . . We can see that there are such great inequities between the haves and havenots for instance, and that environmental issues in many parts of the world are posing serious threats to the basic human needs of people. If your air is too polluted to breath and your water is too polluted to drink - this is a lack of basic human rights. . . . With the opportunity posed by the Johannesburg summit, we may be able to make it clearer that these problems urgently need to be addressed.

Photo: Courtesy of Worldwatch Institute HILARY FRENCH: Governance,NGOs are key.