LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD - UNCLOS-III AND LESSONS FOR GLOBAL COMMONSLAW

The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) provides valuable lessons for future formulation of law to govern glo bal commons, areas that lie beyond the limits of national jurisdiction and to which all peoples have free and open access. Although endowed with the advantage of a certain degree of scientific certainty about t he need for regulation of the ocean environment, UNCLOS III fell victi m to a North-South schism that impaired the search for consensus on im portant issues and undermined the final product of the negotiations. A n examination of the UNCLOS III experience suggests that agreements th at exclude specially affected states are unlikely to succeed, and poin ts to a variety of advantages and disadvantages that come from linking several issues under one negotiating framework. The consensus approac h to negotiation used at the Conference tends to expand the time and e ffort needed to reach a successful outcome, which can lead the negotia tions themselves to be outstripped by technological or political devel opments. Finally the UNCLOS III experience underscores the importance of global ideological and philosophical differences on the allocation of resources and environmental responsibility. Given these lessons, al ternatives to the ''parliamentary diplomacy'' strategy used at UNCLOS III are suggested, including a framework-plus-protocols approach, inte rnational coordination of national plans, regional arrangements, and s trictly unilateral actions. While the comprehensive parliamentary dipl omacy approach is useful because it recognizes the interconnectedness of ecosystems, in many situations one of the other approaches may incr ease the chance for a successful outcome. Whichever method is chosen, there is an emerging global recognition of the need for some action to be taken by the world community in combatting the destruction of the world's commons areas, which may be a positive sign for the future of environmental negotiations of this sort.