The Hanns Seidel Foundation in Jakarta hosted the first Scenario Planning Workshop on Asia Europe Strategies for the Earth Summit 2012 in Jogyakarta from 17 to 18 July 2011. This event which was a cooperation project with ASEF, SIDA, IGES and UNEP aimed to conduct a brain storming on new institutional framework for UN organizations engaged of environmental protection and sustainable development. Actually there are about 40 different UN Organizations, whose scope of work comprises the management of programs on environment and sustainable development. This huge number of UN organizations causes overlapping sectors in the respective responsibilities and authorities of the organizations and also to a weakening of UNEP the existing UN environment organizations whose profile and working activities are in general more normative and less implementation oriented. For that reason UNEP is not in able to conduct projects and further implementation activities by its own financial means.

Related to that the scenario planning workshop focused on the consideration of different future options for the further development of UNEP as an institution and its impacts for implementation of environmental policies on a global scale. In general three different scenarios should be taken into consideration: the first option is related to the continuation of the insufficient role of UNEP that has no appropriate authority to conduct its tasks probably. The second option is an incremental increase in UNEP’s area of responsibility. The last alternative is a fundamental change of UNEP’s role through the creation of a general UN environmental organization combining all sectors of environmental protection and sustainable development under one authority.

These results could be also transferred to the subsequent UNDESA Conference in Solo which took place from 19 to 21 July 2011. This high level dialogue on the institutional framework for sustainable development featured more than 100 participants including 40 representatives of delegations of the UN member states. The scenarios presented at this conference are following:

To summarize, the high level dialogue in Solo served as a good platform to create new ideas and give new impulses to the institutional reform of the institutional framework of UN organizations engaged in the field of sustainable development. The final decision will be made at the Earth Summit Conference in Rio de Janeiro or Rio+20 Conference.