An organic linkage exists between the international environmental law-making process and the design of the architecture of international environmental governance (IEG). The prognosis of the global environmental problematique from the 1972 Stockholm Conference to the 2022 Stockholm+50 Meeting and beyond shows the workings of a marathon global environmental regulatory enterprise. Still, after more than 50 years, the nature, content, quality, and actual workings of the legal instruments are worrisome. In a state-centric global order, we need an honest introspection on the architecture of IEG. What will it take to overhaul the existing structures to secure our planetary future? Is it possible without a de novo entity? Can we revive and repurpose the UN Trusteeship Council with a new mandate for the environment and global commons? Within the limits of time and space, this chapter looks back in order to ideate and look ahead to secure a robust IEG architecture for our common planetary environmental future.

This chapter reveals that African inhabitants of the United Nations trust territories – pivotal sites for the emergence of international human rights law – used the newly implemented mechanism of petitioning the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly to claim their socio-economic rights by challenging their administering authorities’ policies on the use, ownership and distribution of land. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the UN’s formation, inhabitants of African trust territories sought legal counsel to reclaim, before the UN, lands that they viewed as misappropriated. Using contextualised analyses specific to the locales of land claims examined, this chapter considers the social, economic and cultural meanings of land that African claimants had in mind as they and their advocates presented arguments for its return to the UN in the 1940s and 1950s.