Seminar Series: ‘Sustainable Development or the Right to a Healthy Environment?? – after ‘development’, at the limits of humanity and in the endtimes of human rights’ by Su-Ming Khoo

This paper assesses the possibilities of the so-called ‘environmental rights revolution’ (Boyd 2012; Knox 2012) in a context that is theoretically ‘post-development’, market-friendly and characterized by human rights backlashes (Vinjamuri 2017). Human rights talk is ‘everywhere’, and yet human rights-based approaches remain elusive in practical terms, failing to become specifically embedded in an actionable ‘somewhere’ (Brolan et al 2015). Rhetorical ubiquity in the absence of clear substantiation, and critiques of human rights failures lead sceptics to call for the end of the human rights project, ‘with a big H’ (Hopgood 2014). Do such arguments also herald a premature demise for ‘third generation’ solidarity rights such as the right to a healthy environment, the right to development, minority protections and the right to peace? This paper continues to argue for the post-1990 project of recovering rights indivisibility, reuniting the three ‘generations’ of rights that were historically fragmented, hierarchically ordered and traded-off.

A growing societal realization about the ‘overview effect’ (White 2014) and emerging threats to the ‘safe operating space for humanity (Rockstrom et al 2009; Steffen et al 2015) emphasises the boundedness of humanity, its interdependency with its nonhuman determinants and the requirement for collective awareness and action. The rights-based approach emphasises ‘framework principles’, not entailing the creation of novel rights or obligations (Knox 2018, compare Shelton 2010). I argue that a renewed urgency regarding environmental principles must be supplemented and extended with a new attention to neglected solidarity rights, mandating transboundary and inter-generational care, accountability, obligations and resource transfers. Yet rights-based approaches to ‘development’ continue to present difficult obstacles for a genuinely inclusive, universalistic and redistributive approach – ie a solidaristic approach to a healthy environment as they encompass often-conflicting objectives of resource control, ‘human’ and ‘peoples’ development priorities from above AND below (Atapattu 2002; Handl 2012) and minority rights that include indigenous rights (Gearty 2002;; Ksentini 1994; Kulchyski 2013).  In concluding, I point to the contributions of natural and social science in renewing the justice frame for sustainability.