Co-Opting Co-Optation: Beyond the “Human” in Human Rights in Climate Justice

• In Event: Possibilities for Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World

Abstract

In the calculus of IR, it is challenging for states who want to participate on the global stage to avoid participation in climate change and environmental discussions. From these negotiations, the climate justice movement emerged as a way to combat the framing of global climate environmental issues as a collective action problem where the terms were set and defined by the North. In contrast, climate justice movements emerge from the South to challenge the assumption that everyone shares the same burden and the same responsibility in the new climate change order. However, the question of climate justice is not only the material accountability of states toward environmental concerns, but also a question of what options and tools are framed as available in these negotiations. In particular, the question of legal frames is of interest as a site of dispute between the North and the South. Thus, through climate justice discourses, we can analyze how the post-colonial subject attempts to reassert their subjectivity in a formal context of agreement negotiations. The discourse of human rights is the dominant way such claims to justice are laid in normative documents such as climate justice declarations.
Critical literature suggests ‘climate justice’ is in danger of being coopted and repurposed to serve not as a site of resistance but rather as a tool to reframe dissonance of the post-colonial subject into the fold of the neoliberal paradigm – resistance is justified and acceptable, as long as it operates along certain logics which do not disrupt the ability of the market to function. Consequently, by examining the specific usage by climate justice of legality allows for unpacking of what discourses become privileged by invoking a human rights discourse and which ones become disempowered.
This paper argues that the types of legal tools that actors have at their disposal is disempowering due to the legal frameworks that are used in international agreement formations privileging the corporate body in opposition to the natural. The issue here is not necessarily to what extent the wishes of decolonialized subjects are present in the outcome of the agreement (which can have structural and institutional forces embedded within it which condition such outcomes), but rather, what avenues the decolonized subjects feel are possible as ways to engage in the debate at all, and how the concept of climate justice is wielded as a way to manifest these desires. This leads to the broader question of whether concepts like climate justice can carry their challenge to the dominant frames of the North in discourses of liberal law employed in global agreements negotiations. Therefore, climate justice becomes not only a battleground for the frame of possibilities for the South/decolonized subject, but also for the ability to define what ‘rights’ mean in this context.
Following the theoretical limitations to legality as a neutral tool as laid out by Anna Grear, the paper examines climate justice declarations as sights of resistance, where liberal legal subjectivities are invoked and highlights the limitations of appealing to ‘human rights’ as a consequence. While invoking a ‘rights’ discourse may be empowering superficially, the biased nature of law towards privileging the corporate form at the cost of nature weakens such appeals. Further, the anthropocentrism present in the ‘human’ further troubles the picture by recreating the divisions of modernity. Ultimately, given that legal frameworks are one form of redress for decolonized states to advocate for their needs and rights, their goal should be to extend these rights to a greater scope which includes the rights of nature – movements which have broadened the definition of rights to extend legal protection in a co-optation of its own to a greater plurality of actors. Consequently, this research argues that the pluralism embedded within the discourse of ‘rights’ is a source of the problem but a potentially of empowerment as well, if wielded strategically.

Author

• Tomas Hatala, Concordia University