What does Comparative Historical Sociology Offer for Understanding Human Rights and Global Environmental Change?

• In Event: 382 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Can Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World? (5) Climate Change

Abstract

ABSTRACT:

Climate change is a major moral and policy challenge facing humanity. Benefits from production and consumption processes that contribute to global environmental change are shared unequally, while risks and uncertainties fall disproportionately on societies’ most vulnerable. This reality has fueled efforts to invoke human rights as an important baseline for addressing environmental challenges. Legal adjudication of both social rights and environmental protection has increased in recent years. Legal strategies seem to offer leverage that “development” alone has lacked, yet significant gaps remain in understanding how (and whether) law and rights transform the social and environmental reality faced by marginalized populations.

Water and sanitation sectors, which are strongly influenced by changing weather patterns, have seen a rise in both of these types of litigation (human rights claims and environmental cases), sometimes with conflicting outcomes. This paper assesses the usefulness of comparative historical sociology for illuminating these potentially conflicting socio-legal questions in three water-stressed urban areas: São Paulo, Brazil; Delhi, India; and Johannesburg, South Africa. The empirical analysis examines the role of legal and non-legal mechanisms for realizing human rights and sustainability goals. Interviews with legal actors (lawyers, judges), public administrators, and activists, as well as legal and policy research, reveal the extent to which—and effectiveness with which—courts, lawyers, and law influence public policy. The comparative analysis highlights how similar mechanisms operate in different temporal and spatial contexts, revealing possibilities and constraints for just and sustainable climate policy.

Author

• LaDawn Haglund, Arizona State University