Andrea Schapper

Introduction: Human rights and climate change: mapping institutional inter-linkages

This special issue contributes empirical analyses to the evolving research programme on human rights and climate change within international relations (IR) scholarship. We aim to supplement the exi...

Negotiating by own standards? The use and validity of human rights norms in UN climate negotiations

Abstract Since its inception, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has been inclined to natural scientific and technocratic perceptions of climate change challenges and policy solutions. Furthermore, states have traditionally been depicted as the main subjects of international climate politics. Only in 2010, concrete references to human rights were incorporated into UN climate agreements. This has a double binding force: First, states thereby re-emphasize the principal validity of those standards that they have acknowledged—qua signature and/or ratification—as guiding their actions: the social and political rights that are captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two binding human rights covenants. Second, the incorporation of human rights norms into UN climate agreements officially and formally broadens the normative scope of negotiating and implementing these policies. However, after 2010, states have neither substantiated this engagement nor further built on it argumentatively. In contrast, human rights references are—again—mostly absent from states’ positioning in UNFCCC politics. In this article, we aim at explaining this empirical puzzle. In the first part, we elaborate our theoretical approach and carve out the functional, political and legal linkages between human rights and climate politics. Building upon participatory observation, expert interviews and analysis of primary and secondary documents, this will then be followed by explaining parties’ anew reluctance to further apply a human rights-based approach in climate politics.

Climate justice and human rights

Climate change as well as climate policies can have adverse effects on the human rights of certain population groups – and can exacerbate situations of injustice. As it stands today, the human rights regime is not set to sufficiently address these situations of climate injustice. In this article, I suggest a systematization of the normative climate justice literature that can be used as an analytical framework to evaluate current developments in human rights law and policy, and their potential to diminish inter-national, intra-societal and inter-generational climate injustice. I argue that further advancing procedural and substantive human rights obligations and corresponding enforcement mechanisms constitute one important way of establishing climate justice practices. Moreover, I suggest that the normative climate justice literature can be fruitfully used in International Relations to evaluate policy developments at the intersection between climate change and other policy fields.

Children's Rights Implementation as a Multi-Level Governance Process

In this article, I suggest to view children’s rights implementation as a multi-level governance process. I argue a multi-level framework usefully integrates earlier work on norm compliance from International Relations (IR) scholarship and on norm vernacularization brought forward in Anthropology. Governance concepts move a step forward because they horizontally and vertically broaden the state-centric IR literature. After developing this multi-level analytical framework, I introduce an in-depth case study on children’s rights implementation in Bangladesh. This case demonstrates that, particularly in weak states where capacities are lacking, multi-level activities are relevant for transporting global norms to the societal local rights-holders.